The Ancients How to Write Cuneiform with Dr. Irving Finkel
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Feb 8, 2026 
Dr Irving Finkel, Senior Assistant Keeper at the British Museum and cuneiform specialist, gives a lively tour of the world’s earliest script. He explains how pictographs on clay evolved into wedge-shaped signs. He traces who used cuneiform, why clay tablets survive, and how numbers and writing shaped ancient administration and learning.
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Cuneiform As The Oldest Known Script
- Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system, emerging over 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia.
- Its survival on clay tablets gives archaeology unparalleled access to ancient civic, religious, and literary life.
Writing Bridged Unrelated Languages
- The script first wrote Sumerian, a language isolate, and soon also recorded Akkadian, a Semitic tongue.
- Cuneiform therefore supported bilingual intellectual life early on, enabling cross-cultural literary exchange.
Persian Inscriptions Cracked Cuneiform
- Old Persian used a simplified, alphabet-like cuneiform of ~26–28 signs on royal inscriptions.
- Those trilingual royal inscriptions unlocked Babylonian and Elamite texts, like a cuneiform Rosetta Stone.
