Learn to read the world’s writing

Edubba (Sumerian é-dub-ba-a, “the tablet house” — the scribal school of ancient Mesopotamia) is a free, self-paced school of writing systems. Each school below teaches one scripting tradition through a catalog of progressive courses: from how the system works, through your first signs, to reading real tablets, inscriptions, and pages — drawn from the Nabu library and cited to the exact source.

No apps, no accounts, no scripts: plain pages you can read anywhere, at any pace, forever.

The schools

Cuneiform Sumerian, Akkadian, and the wedge-written world — 101 complete, 102 Sumerian open Egyptian hieroglyphs The writing of the Nile, from sacred carvings to Coptic — planned next Sinographs The characters of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, taught classical-first — 101 open

More schools are planned — the alphabet lineage, Devanagari and the Brahmic family, the syllabaries, runes and ogham, Maya glyphs, Hangul, and a school on the still-undeciphered scripts. They will open in waves; the concept holds the full roster.

The family tree of writing

Writing was invented from scratch only a handful of times. Almost every script you have ever seen descends from one of these inventions — by adoption, adaptation, or inspiration:

Mesopotamia — cuneiform (Sumerian), adapted for Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian and Urartian, Ugaritic, Old Persian — extinct, deciphered
Egypt — hieroglyphs, with cursive hieratic and demotic; alphabetic experiments in its shadow led to
- Proto-Sinaitic → Phoenician, ancestor of
  - Greek → Latin, Cyrillic, and most of Europe's scripts
  - Aramaic → Hebrew and Arabic scripts, and (most scholars hold) Brahmi → Devanagari and the scripts of South and Southeast Asia
  - runes and ogham, at the family's far northwestern edge
China — hanzi, continuously written for over three millennia; adopted and adapted as Japanese kanji (with the kana syllabaries) and historically across East Asia
Mesoamerica — Maya glyphs, the New World's fully-fledged writing, deciphered within living memory

A few scripts still guard their secrets — the Indus signs, Linear A, Rongorongo. A future school will be about exactly that: how decipherment works, and why these have not yielded yet.

Start here

The cuneiform school opens first: its foundations course teaches how wedges on clay became writing, and its literacy tracks lead into Sumerian and Akkadian. The other schools open in successive waves.

Corrections and suggestions are welcome in GitHub Issues — see also how these materials are written.