How it began
The earliest tablets come mostly from Uruk, a city of ancient Mesopotamia in what is now southern Iraq, and Smarthistory notes that this form of writing may have been invented there. The Uruk IV tablets, dated by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative to about 3350 to 3200 BCE, are the first evidence of proto-cuneiform. They were the work of administrators, perhaps of large temple institutions, recording the allocation of rations and the movement and storage of goods.
Before it existed
Before writing, institutions in Mesopotamia and western Iran kept accounts with a token-based system that had been in use for millennia. During the 4th millennium BCE they also used clay bullae containing tokens and numerical tablets that carried only numeral signs. Proto-cuneiform arose directly from these accounting devices, and there is no sign of an earlier stage of the script.
How it works
At first a reed or stick was used to draw pictographs and abstract signs into moistened clay. Later scribes used a reed stylus cut to leave a wedge-shaped mark, which is why 19th-century scholars named the script after the Latin cuneus, wedge. Through the rebus principle, signs came to stand for sounds as well as things. Consistent phonetic writing appears after 2600 BCE, giving a system that combined word-signs with signs for vowels and syllables.
How it spread
The culture of Uruk influenced surrounding regions including Susiana, Syria and Turkey. Over its 3,000-year history cuneiform was used to write around 15 languages, among them Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Elamite, Hittite, Urartian and Old Persian.
What lasted
By the middle of the third millennium BCE cuneiform on clay tablets was used for economic, religious, political, literary and scholarly documents, including letters and works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. The latest known cuneiform text is an astronomical tablet from 75 CE. Decipherment began in the 18th century and opened ancient Mesopotamian life, trade and literature to modern study.
