Cuneiform Clay Tablets

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Cuneiform is one of the earliest forms of writing. It was invented (discovered) in Ancient Mesopotamia. It's made by incribing little wedges in patterns on wet clay (cuneiform literally means wedge-writing). I kind of like the pattern of cuneiform as a design. I'd love to have my walls incribed with it someday! But, for now, I'll settle for making tablets every now and again.

BLANK TABLET

The blank tablet before anything has been written on it. It took a deceptive amount of work to get this far. The clay was old and needed to be kneaded a lot to become pliable. Then it was too wet to write on so I had to let it dry for a while.

TABLET AND TEXT

You can see the ready tablet here with the text I'm about to write. It's the Descent of Ishtar.

WRITING THE FIRST SIDE

Here you can see the first five lines of the text written on the obvserse of the tablet along with the stylus I'm using. Really, by ancient terms, my writing is large and clumsy. I'm still working on perfecting my technique. In modern terms you might say I write in 16 point font. Someof the ancient tablets are in 8 point! I've got a ways to go.

WRITING DETAIL

Here is a detail picture of me actually writing. Yeah, it's fuzzy. You try to write cuneiform on wet clay and take a digital photograph at the same time!

BACK NEARLY DONE

Here is the reverse of the tablet halfway done.