cuneiform in Podcasts

We should say that the name of that system that lasted for 3,000 years is cuneiform.

The following is a conversation with Irving Finkel, who is a scholar of ancient languages, curator at the British Museum for over 45 years, and is a much admired and respected world expert on cuneiform script, and more generally on ancient languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian, and also on ancient board games and Mesopotamian magic, medicine, literature, and culture.

In English, it gets its name from cuneus, which means wedge in Latin. you have these clay tablets in which people have impressed signs with a reed stylus that have these really characteristic wedge or triangular shape to them because of how they get impressed with the reed stylus. And so that is shared across 3,000 years of history. So over half of human written history is in cuneiform in a sense.