Cuneiform's Long Afterlife: One Script, Many Languages

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

No other writing system in history was borrowed by as many unrelated languages as cuneiform. Sumerian scribes built it; Akkadian scribes, speaking a Semitic language with almost nothing in common with Sumerian, adapted it within a few centuries, keeping many Sumerian logograms as learned shorthand while leaning on its syllabic signs for their own grammar. From Akkadian the script spread further still, into Babylonian and Assyrian, into Hittite and Hurrian and Urartian in Anatolia, into Elamite in southwestern Iran, and eventually into Old Persian, whose scribes stripped the system down to a much smaller, more alphabet-like set of signs. Each adaptation meant relearning which sounds and words the inherited signs should stand for, a genuinely awkward fit for languages cuneiform was never designed around. The wedge script's dominance did not last. Alphabetic writing, especially Aramaic, offered something cuneiform never could: a small, learnable sign inventory that did not require years of scribal training. By around the turn of the era, roughly three thousand years after the first proto-cuneiform accounting marks, the last cuneiform tablets, largely astronomical records, had been written. The script's final readers were rediscovered only in the nineteenth century.