The Cuneiform School

Cuneiform is Edubba’s flagship: the wedge-shaped writing pressed into clay that, across three millennia, served Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Elamite, Urartian, and other languages of the ancient Near East. Because it is not one tradition but many built on a shared writing system, this school is not a single course but a catalog — a foundations course on how cuneiform itself works, followed by literacy tracks for individual languages, and further courses for the wider cuneiform world and special topics. The aim throughout is genuine reading literacy: not trivia about the script, but the ability to look at a real tablet and read it.

Course catalog

• 101 · Foundations — open: complete, thirteen chapters live. Wedge and stylus, tablet and clay, sign anatomy and formation, how the system encodes language (logogramsa sign that writes a whole word by itself, syllabogramsa sign spelling one syllable rather than a whole word — ba, du, an; the workhorse of Akkadian spelling, determinativesa silent sign at the end (in cuneiform, often the front) of a word that classifies it — person, god, place, motion — never pronounced, polyvalencyone sign carrying several possible readings; context picks the right one), the arc from proto-cuneiform to the last dated tablet, and the decipherment story — with real Ur III royal inscriptions read in chapter 06. Prerequisite for everything below.
• 102 · Sumerian — open: complete, nineteen chapters live. A literacy track: 51 more signs in computed frequency order (77 in all), Sumerian grammar to the degree reading demands, and real readings from Fara-period name lists through proverbs, Šulgi’s royal hymn, and the opening of Gudea’s temple cylinders.
• 103 · Akkadian — complete: nineteen chapters. The same signs, a new language: Old Babylonian Akkadian read straight into the Codex Hammurapi — the prologue, laws read whole from murder to tooth-for-tooth, real letters, a Sippar loan contract, the king’s own invitation to read — and a Reference closing the course at three of every four signs on an Old Babylonian tablet.
• 2xx · The wider cuneiform world — planned. One course per adapted tradition:
  • Hittite — planned.
  • Elamite — planned.
  • Hurrian & Urartian — planned.
  • Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform — planned.
  • Old Persian — planned.
• 3xx · Special topics — planned.
  • Paleographyreading the age and origin of a text from the changing shapes of its signs across the millennia — reading actual sign forms by period — planned.
  • The first-millennium library world — Neo-Assyrian hands, colophonsa scribe's closing note on a tablet or manuscript — title, owner, date, the ancient equivalent of a title page at the end, Ashurbanipal — planned.
  • Origins and proto-cuneiform — planned.
  • Open questions of the field — planned.

Addenda — the school’s shelves

Outside the numbered sequence, two shelves — one per language. The Sumerian Addenda collect everything Sumerian: the writing primer (the scribe’s hand — the three wedges and the order the clay itself proves), the Sign Codex, drills, study decks, and the site’s working glossary of terms. The Akkadian Addenda hold the Akkadian side — one page per sign as Akkadian uses it, on its own frequency base, sharing only each sign’s keyword with the Sumerian shelf.

A note on where things stand

101, 102 and 103 are complete; everything below them is plan, not promise. Course numbers and scope for the later courses are still to be firmed up as curriculum design proceeds. If you’d like to see the wider project, go back to the map of writing; if you have thoughts, corrections, or requests for what should come first, they’re welcome on GitHub Issues.