An alphabet written in wedges
A pupil in Babylonia wrote out the Aramaic alphabet using cuneiform, the old wedge script, sign by sign. The letters come in the same order as the Hebrew alphabet today. It is homework in a very old script, spelling out the new one that would replace it.
Based on the original, the British Museum, London.
Found: southern Iraq; the exact site was not recorded when it was registered in London in 1898.
What is on it
A clay tablet with the letters of the Aramaic alphabet, each one spelled out in cuneiform signs, in two columns. A third column lists the names of professions. It dates to about 500 BC, on the museum's reckoning.
The exercise is harder than it sounds. Cuneiform writes syllables, and an alphabet writes single consonants, so the pupil had to find a wedge-sign that came close to each letter's sound. For one letter, 'ayin, there was no suitable sign at all, and the pupil wrote out the letter's name instead.
Who was learning
Not everyone. Reading and writing in Mesopotamia were a trade taught to a few, mostly boys from families that already had scribes in them. This tablet is unusual evidence of those pupils working in two languages at once: Babylonian, which cuneiform had been built for, and Aramaic, which people increasingly spoke and wrote in ink on softer things that have not survived.
Where history touches the story
By this date the Epic of Gilgamesh had been copied in cuneiform for well over a thousand years. The script that carried it was already on its way out, and this tablet is a picture of that happening in a classroom.
- Cross & Huehnergard, 'The Alphabet on a Late Babylonian Cuneiform School Tablet', Orientalia 72 (2003)
- Picture: rendered from our own 3D model, the one on the workbench: a reconstruction, not a record of how it looked.