Cuneiform Symbols

Cuneiform is not one alphabet but a way of writing: wedges pressed into wet clay with the cut end of a reed, which is where the name comes from (Latin cuneus, 'wedge'; the Oxford scholar Thomas Hyde coined the word in 1700). It began in the city of Uruk in southern Iraq at the end of the fourth millennium BC, first as pictures of the things being counted, and over about 3,300 years wrote Sumerian, Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian), Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Urartian and more. Early tablets were read in columns from the top; around 2300 BC the signs were turned a quarter turn and from then on ran left to right, which is how Unicode shows them.

A sign can do three jobs, often all three in one text. As a word sign (logogram) 𒀭 is dingir 'god' or an 'sky', 𒆠 is ki 'earth, place', 𒈗 lugal 'king' (literally 'big man', 𒇽 + 𒃲), 𒂗 en 'lord', 𒎏 nin 'lady', 𒂍 e2 'house' or 'temple', 𒌷 uru 'city', 𒆳 kur 'mountain' or 'foreign land', 𒌓 ud 'day' and the sun god Utu, 𒈹 the goddess Inanna. As a syllable the same sign writes a sound in any word: 𒀭 is an, 𒆠 is ki, 𒀀 is a. And as a silent determinative it tells you what kind of word follows or precedes: 𒀭 before a name marks a god (𒀭𒂗𒆤 Enlil, 𒀭𒈹 Inanna, 𒀭𒀫𒌓 Marduk), 𒆠 after a name marks a place (𒌷𒀕𒆠 Uruk, 𒋀𒀕𒆠 Ur, 𒆍𒀭𒊏𒆠 Babylon, 'gate of the god'), 𒄑 before a word means it is made of wood, 𒇽 that it is a person, 𒄷 after a name that it is a bird and 𒄩 a fish.

Most signs have several readings, and a reading can belong to several signs, so Assyriologists number the duplicates: 𒂍 is e2, 𒀉 is a2, 𒄑 giš, 𒊮 ša3, 𒀸 'one' is aš. Those subscript numbers are what the names on the sign pages mean. The Sumero-Akkadian repertoire of about 600 signs in daily use (roughly 1,500 in the earliest tablets) is why this page shows a selection of the best-known word signs grouped by meaning rather than all 922 characters of the Unicode block; each of those still has its own page here and the search finds it by name.

The cuneiform alphabet chart: how to write your name

What people search for as the 'cuneiform alphabet' is really a syllabary. The chart above lists the signs Akkadian scribes used for the simple syllables, a vowel alone (𒀀 a, 𒂊 e, 𒄿 i, 𒌑 u) or a consonant plus a vowel (𒁀 ba, 𒁉 bi, 𒁍 bu, 𒁕 da, 𒁲 di, 𒁺 du, 𒂵 ga, 𒄀 gi, 𒄖 gu, 𒅗 ka, 𒆠 ki, 𒆪 ku, 𒆷 la, 𒇷 li, 𒇻 lu, 𒈠 ma, 𒈨 me, 𒈪 mi, 𒈬 mu, 𒈾 na, 𒉈 ne, 𒉌 ni, 𒉡 nu, 𒉺 pa, 𒉿 pi, 𒊏 ra, 𒊑 ri, 𒊒 ru, 𒊓 sa, 𒋛 si, 𒋢 su, 𒊭 ša, 𒊺 še, 𒅆 ši, 𒋗 šu, 𒋫 ta, 𒋼 te, 𒋾 ti, 𒌅 tu, 𒍝 za, 𒍣 zi, 𒍪 zu, 𒄩 ḫa, 𒄭 ḫi, 𒄷 ḫu). Scribes also had signs for vowel-plus-consonant syllables such as 𒀊 ab, 𒅎 im, 𒌨 ur and 𒀜 ad, several of which appear in the meaning groups, and they did not distinguish e from i or b from p in many signs, so one sign served for both.

To write a name, break it into syllables that each end in a vowel and pick a sign for each: Anna is 𒀀𒈾 a-na, Sara 𒊓𒊏 sa-ra, Tomas 𒌅𒈠𒀸 tu-ma-aš, Maria 𒈠𒊑𒀀 ma-ri-a, Lila 𒇷𒆷 li-la, Dana 𒁕𒈾 da-na. Where two consonants meet, split them across syllables with a vowel-consonant sign (𒆠𒅎 ki-im for Kim) or simply drop the second consonant as the scribes often did. There is no sign for o, so use u (𒇻 lu for 'lo'), none for v or w, so use b or the sign 𒉿 (pi, which also writes wa), and write c as k or s by its sound. A name in a legal text was usually preceded by a single vertical wedge 𒁹, the 'one' sign, as a person marker, so 𒁹𒀀𒈾 is the fully correct way to write Anna.

That is transliteration, not translation. Online 'cuneiform translators' and 'generators' do exactly this letter-for-sign swap, often with the wrong signs, so check against the chart; Hammurabi's name on his own stele is 𒄩𒄠𒈬𒊏𒁉 ḫa-am-mu-ra-bi, which is the pattern to copy. Real Sumerian and Akkadian words mix syllables with word signs, so 'king' is 𒈗 in one line and 𒊬𒊒𒌝 šar-ru-um spelled out in the next.

Cuneiform numbers: counting in sixties

Mesopotamian scribes counted in base sixty, and we still do whenever we read a clock or a compass: 60 minutes, 60 seconds, 360 degrees are their legacy. Within a 'digit' the system is simple: a vertical wedge 𒁹 is one and a corner wedge 𒌋 is ten, repeated as needed, so 𒐈 is 3, 𒐎 is 9, 𒌋𒌋𒁹𒁹𒁹 is 23 and 𒐐𒐎 is 59. The Unicode block gives each cluster from 2 to 9 and from 20 to 90 its own character (𒐀 to 𒐇 lying flat, 𒈫 to 𒐎 upright, 𒎙 𒌍 𒐏 𒐐 𒐑 𒐒 𒐓 𒐔 for the tens), which is why the table above is a neat nine-column grid.

In Sumerian the sixties have their own names and signs: 𒐕 geš 60 (a big vertical wedge), 𒐞 gešu 600, 𒊹 šar 3,600 (a circle, which is also the word for 'everything'), 𒐬 šaru 36,000 and 𒐲 šar-gal 216,000. Babylonian mathematicians went further and made the system positional, writing 2×3600 + 23×60 + 3 as 𒁹𒁹 𒌋𒌋𒁹𒁹𒁹 𒁹𒁹𒁹 and leaving a gap, later a placeholder sign, where a position was empty; they had no true zero. The same marks could mean 23, 23×60 or 23/60, and only the context told you which, which is also how fractions worked: 𒑚 is a third, 𒑛 two thirds, 𒑜 five sixths, 𒑠 a quarter and 𒑟 an eighth.

Measures had their own number signs, because the count changed with the thing counted: barley in 𒑏 to 𒑕 ban2 and 𒑣 𒑤 fractions of a gur, fields in 𒑘 𒑙 eše3 and 𒐴 to 𒐹 bur. Old Assyrian merchants and the Elamites of Iran had their own fraction shapes, 𒑡 𒑢 and 𒑥 𒑦, and the Elamites wrote 40 and 50 as 𒑧 𒑨. The punctuation signs 𒑰 𒑱 𒑲 𒑳 𒑴 are word dividers and colons from Assyrian letters and late glossaries.

Ugaritic and Old Persian: the two cuneiform alphabets

Two peoples borrowed only the wedge, not the system. At Ugarit on the Syrian coast (Ras Shamra; the tablets were found in 1929 and read within a year by Hans Bauer, Édouard Dhorme and Charles Virolleaud) scribes of about 1400 to 1190 BC wrote their Semitic language with 30 consonant signs, a true alphabet of the abjad kind. Its school tablets list the letters in the order 𐎀 𐎁 𐎂 𐎃 𐎄 𐎅 𐎆 𐎇 𐎈 𐎉 𐎊 𐎋 𐎌 𐎍 𐎎 𐎏 𐎐 𐎑 𐎒 𐎓 𐎔 𐎕 𐎖 𐎗 𐎘 𐎙 𐎚 𐎛 𐎜 𐎝, ʾa b g ḫ d h w z ḥ ṭ y k š l m ḏ n ẓ s ʿ p ṣ q r ṯ ġ t ʾi ʾu s₂, the oldest known ABC: strip out the letters Phoenician did not need and you have the order of the Hebrew and Greek alphabets. Three signs stand for the glottal stop with a, i or u, 𐎀 𐎛 𐎜, and 𐎟 divides words. Ugaritic ran left to right, and its tablets gave us the Baal Cycle, 𐎁𐎓𐎍 bʿl, the myths of the storm god.

Old Persian cuneiform was made to order for Darius I about 520 BC, for the great inscription he carved on the cliff of Behistun in three languages, Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. It has 36 sound signs, three vowels 𐎠 a, 𐎡 i, 𐎢 u and consonants that carry an a unless another vowel follows (𐎣 ka but 𐎤 ku, 𐎭 da, 𐎮 di, 𐎯 du), eight word signs for Ahura Mazda 𐏈 𐏉 𐏊, king 𐏋, land 𐏌 𐏍, god 𐏎 and earth 𐏏, a slanted word divider 𐏐 and five number signs 𐏑 1, 𐏒 2, 𐏓 10, 𐏔 20 and 𐏕 100. Darius is 𐎭𐎠𐎼𐎹𐎺𐎢𐏁 Dārayavauš and 'king' spelled out is 𐎧𐏁𐎠𐎹𐎰𐎡𐎹 xšāyaθiya. The script died with the Achaemenid empire in 330 BC.

Old Persian is also why anyone can read the rest. In 1802 Georg Friedrich Grotefend guessed that the repeated word on the Persepolis inscriptions was 'king' and found the names of Darius and Xerxes; Henry Rawlinson, who copied the Behistun text hanging from the cliff in the 1830s and 1840s, Edward Hincks and Jules Oppert then used the Persian text as the key to the Babylonian one, and in 1857 the Royal Asiatic Society sent the same unpublished Assyrian inscription to four scholars, whose independent translations agreed closely enough to count cuneiform as deciphered.

How to type cuneiform: Unicode, fonts and why you see boxes

Tap any sign above to copy it. These are ordinary characters, so they paste into Discord, Instagram and TikTok bios, X, WhatsApp, Word and Google Docs. Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform entered Unicode in version 5.0 (2006) in two blocks, Cuneiform (U+12000 to U+123FF, now 922 signs after additions in versions 7.0 and 8.0) and Cuneiform Numbers and Punctuation (U+12400 to U+1247F, 116 characters); Early Dynastic Cuneiform (U+12480 to U+1254F, 196 archaic signs) followed in version 8.0 (2015). Ugaritic (U+10380 to U+1039F, 31 characters) has been there since version 4.0 (2003) and Old Persian (U+103A0 to U+103DF, 50 characters) since 4.1 (2005). Every one of these characters has its own page on this site; search by its name, for instance 'cuneiform sign lugal'.

Whether your reader sees wedges or empty boxes depends on their fonts. Windows 10 and 11 draw all three scripts with the built-in Segoe UI Historic, so cuneiform usually just works on a PC. Apple does not ship a cuneiform font as far as we can tell, and neither do most Android phones, so on a Mac, iPhone or Android screen the signs often show as boxes until a font is installed: Google's free Noto Sans Cuneiform covers the Sumero-Akkadian blocks, with Noto Sans Ugaritic and Noto Sans Old Persian for the alphabets. In Word on Windows type the hex code and press Alt+X: 1202D Alt+X gives 𒀭, 12217 gives 𒈗.

For serious work there are better tools than copy and paste: the Oracc and CDLI projects publish transliterated texts and sign lists online, and the ePSD (Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary) gives each sign's readings and words. If you are checking a tattoo or a gift, have the spelling confirmed sign by sign; a 'cuneiform translator' website produces letter-by-letter substitutions, and a sign copied from a decorative font may not be the one you think.