Cuneiform · used for about 3,000 years

Write your name in cuneiform

See your name the way a scribe in Nineveh might have pressed it into clay, sound by sound.

The short version

Cuneiform (say "KEW-nee-uh-form") means "wedge-shaped". Scribes cut a reed into a stylus, a pointed writing stick, and pressed it into soft, wet clay. Every press left a little wedge. Groups of wedges made a sign.

Here is the big surprise: cuneiform has no alphabet. Most signs stand for a whole syllable, a chunk of sound like ba, mi or ut, not a single letter.

So a scribe would not spell your name. They would listen to it, break it into sounds, and write one sign for each sound. That is exactly what this tool does.

Try it

Your first name

Letters only, up to 20. Nothing you type leaves this page.

Clay tablet

Type your name above and a scribe will write it here.

What changed, and why

Your name's sounds all fit Akkadian, so nothing needed changing.

How it works

The tool splits your name into the kinds of chunks Akkadian scribes used: a vowel on its own (V, like a), a consonant plus vowel (CV, like ba), or a vowel plus consonant (VC, like ab). Scribes liked CV best. When two consonants bumped together, they often added a helper vowel, so "Chloe" becomes ku-lu-e. Here are some of the signs it uses:

Example cuneiform signs and the sounds they stand for
Sign	Sound	Sign name	Type

Sign names are the official Unicode names. One sign can have several sounds: the PI sign is read pi or wa, and the BU sign is read bu or pu.

Dig deeper

A syllabary, not an alphabet

Cuneiform began at Uruk in c. 3350 to 3200 BCE as a way to keep accounts, using pictures for things like grain and sheep. Over centuries the pictures turned into wedge patterns, and many signs came to stand for sounds as well as words. A writing system made mostly of syllable signs is called a syllabary. Akkadian scribes used a working set of a few hundred signs, alongside "logograms", signs that stand for a whole word.

Homophones: many signs, one sound

Often several different signs had the same sound value. These are homophones. Scholars tell them apart with small numbers or accents: u, ú (u₂) and ù (u₃) are three different signs that all sound like "u". Scribes chose among them by habit, region and period. Going the other way, a single sign could have several readings (polyphony), so readers relied on context.

Determinatives: silent signs that sort words

Some signs were not read aloud at all. A determinative tells the reader what kind of word comes next. The star sign DINGIR 𒀭 was placed before the names of gods, so the god Ashur was written ^daš-šur. Other determinatives marked cities (KI, written after the name), men, wooden objects and countries.

How scholars write it in our alphabet

Turning cuneiform into Latin letters is called transliteration. By convention, Sumerian words are written in plain letters, Akkadian in italics, and logograms in CAPITALS. Signs in one word are joined with hyphens (šar-ru, "king"), and determinatives are raised (^d, ^m, ^ki). Special letters show sounds English lacks: š is "sh", ḫ is a throaty "kh", and ṣ and ṭ are "emphatic" s and t, similar to sounds in Arabic.

Sources: R. Borger, Mesopotamisches Zeichenlexikon (2nd ed., 2010); I. Finkel and J. Taylor, Cuneiform (British Museum Press, 2015); Unicode Character Database, Cuneiform block (Unicode License).