(The following is a post by Muhannad Salhi, Arab World Area Specialist, Near East Section of the Library of Congress African and Middle Eastern Division. This is the 2nd installment of the three-part series centering on the Library of Congress Cuneiform Tablet Collection. Read the first part.)
Spanning the course of several millennia, cuneiform underwent a long and storied journey from a limited system of accounting to an evolved writing system that would dominate a fair part of the Ancient Near East and beyond. A journey, one should add, that mirrored the ever-changing travails and tribulations of the history of the region. Beginning with the Sumerians and ending with the Persians, cuneiform underwent numerous developments and evolutions throughout history to become the world’s first writing system.

The original inventors of the script—the Sumerians—were a people of obscure and seemingly unique ethnic and linguistic origins, living in a conglomeration of city-states and warring amongst themselves. This state of affairs naturally rendered them vulnerable, thus paving the way for their invasion by a Semitic people known as the Akkadians around the middle of the third millennium BCE. As a result, before any transformation in their writing system could occur, it was adopted by the Akkadians and adapted to convey their own wholly different language. While the Akkadians retained the Sumerian logograms and phonetic values, they pronounced the words and letters in ways that corresponded to their own language. Further, they extended these phonetic values well beyond the simple Sumerian inventory. The same logogram or combination of logograms could now be pronounced in a variety of ways; hence, a “word” could have different sounds and meanings from one language to another. Early Semitic cuneiform became known as “Old Akkadian” as can be seen, for example, in the inscriptions of Sargon of Akkad (the first ruler of the Akkadian empire, died ca. 2279 BCE).

Perhaps one of the Assyrians’ greatest contributions to ancient civilization was the library built by their last great king, Ashurbanipal (reigning from 668-627 BCE).
According to Robson:
“Ashurbanipal was one of the few Assyrian kings to have been trained in the scribal arts—by one Balasî, a senior royal scholar ” (Robson, “The Clay Tablet Book,” Eliot & Rose (eds) A Companion to the History of the Book [2007].
Ruthlessly ruling with an iron fist, from 669 to 631 BCE Ashurbanipal managed to expand his empire from its roots in Northern Iraq to Babylonia reaching Lower Egypt without having once fought in battle. As such, many historians have labeled him as a “sociopathic bookworm”. In an attempt to gather all manner of knowledge, Ashurbanipal dispatched his scholars to collect sources on all topics in a variety of languages. His library, considered the first surviving royal library in the world, is estimated to have contained between 20,000 to 30,000 clay tablets. According to John Lewis Clark:
“The tablets have been sorted under the following heads: History; Law; Science; Magic; Dogma; Legends: and it has been shewn (1) that there was a special functionary to take charge of them; (2) that they were arranged in series, with special precautions for keeping the tablets forming a particular series in their proper sequence; (3) that there was a general catalogue and probably a class-catalogue as well” (Clark, 1909)
Among the multitude of texts collected by his scholars were lexicographical texts listing words from Sumerian, Akkadian, and others in dictionary form, which would prove a great asset to future scholars of the language.

It is perhaps not without irony, that the first time cuneiform was used to write Old Persian would prove to be the key to unlocking the secrets of the script. The inscriptions at the Bisitun pass (in western Iran) in 521 BCE recorded Darius’ and his successor Xerxes’ accomplishments in three languages: Babylonian, Elamite and the newly invented Persian. The trilingual Bisitun inscriptions would thus prove to be the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone aiding future scholars abilities in deciphering the script.
Learn More:
- Hans J. Nissen and Peter Heine, “From Mesopotamia to Iraq : a concise history,” Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, c2009.
- Samuel Noah Kramer, “Cradle of civilization,” Alexandria, Va. : Time-Life Books, c1978.
- Samuel Noah Kramer, “History begins at Sumer : thirty-nine firsts in man’s recorded history,” Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.
- Dominique Charpin, “Reading and writing in Babylon,” Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2010.
- Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (eds.), “A companion to the history of the book,” Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub., 2007
- John Willis Clark, “The care of books,” Cambridge, University press, 1909
- Puhvel, Jaan, ”cuneiform”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 16 May. 2022
Comments
Language and Ritual
Thanks so much for the fascinating and beautifully illustrated post Muhannad! I would like to bring to the discussion a proto-historical paradigm recorded on a Mohenjo Daro, Indus Valley Civilization [2600-1900BCE] seal. The central figure, a meditating yogin, appears to have three faces, a large crown or horned headdress, body ornamentation in the form of a chest plate, arm bands and bracelets, seated on a sacrificial altar, supported by two horned animals, ibexes or mountain goats. Wild, undomesticated animals surround the figure: a rhinoceros, water buffalo, elephant and tiger. On the topmost region of the seal are several logographic symbols that may represent monosyllabic sounds/charms, in combination with astronomical depictions. The goat was associated with the Vedic Agni, God of Fire and purveyor of sacrifices; they were sacrificed to him, and symbolized the fire of procreation from which new, holy life was born. In short, we have a small, soapstone seal that within the space of a few centimeters depicts an ancient cosmological language and ontological stage, the jaba and jero of spiritual designations and contemporary religious belief lodged within it. We understand this seal as carved indices to a Shiva prototype and earliest record of language, and theatrical state ritual.