A reed stylus
Cuneiform is not drawn. It is pressed. A scribe cut a reed to a sharp-cornered tip and pushed it into damp clay at a handful of angles, and every sign in the script is built from those few wedges. We know the tip only from the marks it left, because nobody has ever dug up the reed.
What it was
A length of the reed that grows along the Tigris and Euphrates, cut so the end had a straight edge and a sharp corner. Pressed in one way it left the long wedge; turned, it left the corner wedge. A trained hand did this very fast, and the whole Epic of Gilgamesh, eleven tablets of story and a twelfth tacked on, was written down this way, one press at a time.
Why none survives
Reed is plant matter, and in the damp, salty ground of southern Iraq it rots. The clay it pressed into was dried in the sun or fired, and clay lasts almost forever. So we have hundreds of thousands of tablets and not one of the reed pens.
Everything known about the reed stylus comes from four places: the shape of the wedges themselves, its name ("tablet reed"), carved pictures of scribes at work, and modern experiments by people cutting reeds and trying to match the marks. The picture on this card is a reconstruction of that kind.
- Cammarosano, 'The Cuneiform Stylus', Mesopotamia 49 (2014)
- Taylor, 'Tablets as Artefacts, Scribes as Artisans', in Radner & Robson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture (2011)
- George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (2003): the standard version, eleven tablets and an appended twelfth, and the scribe's label at the end of Nineveh's copy of Tablet XI, 'Tablet 11 ... of Gilgamesh' (via the electronic Babylonian Library)
- Borger, Mesopotamisches Zeichenlexikon, 2nd edition (2010), via the electronic Babylonian Library: the signs on the bench, the corner wedge (661), the vertical (748) and AN (10)
- King, First Steps in Assyrian (1898): the printed Neo-Assyrian (Ninevite) sign shapes the bench's wedges follow
- Picture: rendered from our own 3D model, the one on the workbench: a reconstruction, not a record of how it looked.