The Cuneiform Writing System in Ancient Mesopotamia: Emergence and Evolution

The earliest known civilization developed along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now the country of Iraq. The development of successful agriculture, which relied on the region’s fertile soils and an irrigation system that took advantage of its consistent water supply, led to the development of the world’s first cities. The development of stable agriculture through irrigation meant people no longer had to follow changing sources of food. With this stability farmers in the region were able to domesticate animals such as goats, sheep, and cattle. They successfully grew crops of barley and other grains, from which they began to produce dietary staples and other products, such as bread and beer. As their agricultural practices became more successful, farmers were able to create surpluses. In order to ensure the crop yield, a system of canals was dug to divert water for agriculture and lessen the impact of annual floods. With these advances, a significant population of successful farmers, herders, and traders were able to move beyond subsistence agriculture. A series of successive kingdoms—Sumer, Akkadia (also spelled Accadia), Assyria, Babylonia—built cities with monumental architecture, in which trade and commerce were thriving, and even early forms of plumbing were invented for the ruling class.

The development of trade was one of several important factors in Mesopotamia that created a need for writing. The development of complex societies, with social hierarchies, private property, economies that supported tax-funded authorities, and trade, all combined to create a need for written records. The increasingly sophisticated system of writing that developed also helped the civilization develop further, facilitating the management of complex commercial, religious, political, and military systems.

The earliest known writing originated with the Sumerians about 5500 years ago. Writing was not invented for telling stories of the great conquests of kings or for important legal documents. Instead, the earliest known writing documented simple commercial transactions.

The evolution of writing occurred in stages. In its earliest form, commercial transactions were represented by tokens. A sale of four sheep was represented by four tokens designed to signify sheep. At first such tokens were made of stone. Later, they were created from clay. Tokens were stored as a record of transactions.

In the next stage of development, pictographs (simple pictures of an object) were drawn into wet clay, and these images replaced the tokens. Scribes no longer drew four sheep pictographs to represent four sheep. Instead, the numeral for four was written beside one sheep pictograph.

Through this process writing was becoming disentangled from direct depiction. More complicated number systems began to develop. The pictographic symbols were refined into the writing system known as cuneiform. The English word cuneiform comes from the Latin cuneus, meaning “wedge.” Using cuneiform, written symbols could be quickly made by highly trained scribes through the skillful use of the wedge-like end of a reed stylus. Eventually, writing became phonetic as well as representational. Once the writing system had moved from being pictographic to phonetic writing could communicate abstractions more effectively: names, words, and ideas. With cuneiform, writers could tell stories, relate histories, and support the rule of kings. Cuneiform was used to record literature such as the Epic of Gilgamesh—the oldest epic still known. Furthermore, cuneiform was used to communicate and formalize legal systems, most famously Hammurabi’s Code.

NCSS.D1.2.6-8. Explain points of agreement experts have about interpretations and applications of disciplinary concepts and ideas associated with a compelling question.
NCSS.D2.Geo.7.6-8. Explain how changes in transportation and communication technology influence the spatial connections among human settlements and affect the diffusion of ideas and cultural practices. 
NCSS.D2.His.1.6-8. Analyze connections among events and developments in broader historical contexts.
NCSS.D2.His.2.6-8. Classify series of historical events and developments as examples of change and/or continuity.
NCSS.D2.His.3.6-8. Use questions generated about individuals and groups to analyze why they, and the developments they shaped, are seen as historically significant.
NCSS.D3.3.6-8. Identify evidence that draws information from multiple sources to support claims, noting evidentiary limitations.

• For additional detailed information on the development of writing in Mesopotamia, read the Introduction to the Cuneiform Collection available through the EDSITEment resource Internet Public Library.
• Review all websites and materials students will view. Download photographs of artifacts students will be viewing offline. Download and prepare as necessary handouts from the downloadable PDF for this lesson.
• You may wish to consult the following EDSITEment lessons on ancient writing systems, designed for younger students, which contain elements that could be adapted for middle school:
  • Egyptian Symbols and Figures: Hieroglyphs
  • The Alphabet is Historic

Activity 1. Why the Fertile Crescent?

This Crash Course World History video on Mesopotamia provides a quick, but comprehensive background to get students ready to investigate the materials and activities provided below. 

This first activity will introduce students to the part of the world where writing first developed- the area once called Mesopotamia, which was located in what is today the country of Iraq. The earliest cities known today arose in Mesopotamia, an area that is part of what is sometimes called the Fertile Crescent. What clues can we get from the geography of the region to explain why Mesopotamia became the “Cradle of Civilization”? Share with the students the British Museum’s introduction to Mesopotamia: Geography, available through the EDSITEment-reviewed resource The Oriental Institute: The University of Chicago. Then use the Geography: Explore feature to investigate a variety of maps of the region by choosing them from the pull down menu.

• View the modern political map of the area with the class. Ask the students:
  • With which of these cities are you familiar?
  • What do you notice about the locations of these modern cities?
• Next view the Ancient Cities map together. Ask the students:
  • Where were most of the cities located? Why there?
  • How does their location compare with that of the contemporary cities?
• Next, view the Terrain Map with the students and ask them to answer the following question:
  • Look to the northeast of Mesopotamia. Why is that area not as hospitable to agriculture? The southwest?
• Finally, view the Natural Resources Map with the class, and ask them to answer these questions:
  • Mesopotamia was agriculturally rich. Why did vibrant trade develop in the larger region shown on the map? One reason is that although the area was rich in agriculture, it was poor in many natural resources?
  • What elements in the terrain also enabled Mesopotamia to develop trade (pay particular attention to the rivers, relatively flat terrain)?

Activity 2. Mesopotamia Timeline

In this activity students will be introduced to the time period in which the first writing developed, and the major events which coincided with this development in ancient Mesopotamia. The National Geographic

includes images, maps, and timelines relevant to the start of this activity. 

Distribute the Timeline: Mesopotamia 4000-1000 BCE activity which is available as a PDF for this lesson, or you can do this as an online activity. Note that the timeline covers an extended period, not all of which will be covered in detail in this lesson. This activity will give students who have not had readings about the history of the Middle East, and specifically about Mesopotamia, the opportunity to gain some contextual understanding of the development of cuneiform writing. For students who have had the opportunity to learn about Mesopotamia this exercise will remind them of some of the major events in the history of the area.

Distribute the Timeline Labels handout, which is available as a PDF for this lesson. If practical you may wish to project the timeline onto a screen or redraw the timeline on the board.

As a class, look through the labels. Which do students hypothesize would appear earlier/later on the timeline?

Divide the class into small groups of three or four and assign each group one of the labels. Students can scan through the two summaries of key events in Mesopotamian history that are available on the EDSITEment web resource Metropolitan Museum of Art:

• Key Events 8000-2000 BCE
• Key Events 2000-1000 BCE

These timelines of key events can be used by students to determine where each label should be placed and to indicate when certain innovations became important.

Note: Cuneiform continued to be used in Mesopotamia well into the first millennium BCE, however, as this lesson is concentrating on the early development of the writing system the timeline in this activity will end before cuneiform writing ceased to be used.

Moving in chronological order, place the labels on the timeline. Each group should work together to provide any additional information about the development that was in the event summary. Challenge students to put together a simple narrative of developments in the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley based on the events in the timeline.

What developments in the civilization would have been facilitated by or even require a system of writing?

Activity 3. Jobs in Mesopotamia

In this activity students will begin to think about the development and urbanization of Mesopotamian civilization by thinking about the kinds of occupations that developed over time. Students will also begin to think about the relationship between the evolution of civilization in Mesopotamia and how writing enhanced its development.

Students have probably already studied in their classes about the shift of human societies from the nomadic pursuit of game and wild vegetation, to settled cultivation, and eventually towards settled villages, towns, and cities. As societies became, first, more settled as farmers, and then in certain places more urbanized as some populations became townsfolk, what kinds of new tasks and jobs would need to be done?

Ask students to return to their timeline worksheets. Based on what students learned from the timeline activity, what do they think are some jobs that probably existed in ancient Mesopotamia: Farmer? Trader? Ruler? Builder? Others? Divide the class into small groups and have each group work together to create a list of jobs they believe might have existed in ancient Mesopotamia. Ask each group to contribute one job to a running list that will be written on the board. You may wish to go around the room two or three times.

You can download a list of some occupations which were part of life in ancient Mesopotamia. This is not a comprehensive list, but it will give your class an idea of what life in ancient Mesopotamia was like. You can use this list as a point of comparison with the list that the class has compiled. Students may be surprised to discover which occupations were and were not part of life in ancient Mesopotamia. Ask students to think about the following questions:

• What are some jobs the students did not list?
• What are some jobs students wouldn’t expect to be on the list, such as factory worker?
• What jobs on the list no longer exist?
• Which jobs are unfamiliar to students?
• Were the students surprised to learn some of the listed jobs existed in ancient Mesopotamia?
• Which occupations do they think were the most common? Why?
• Which of the jobs on the list are part of an industry, trade, or profession with a need for record keeping? Explain your answers.

Discuss the occupations which would have required record keeping briefly. You may wish to discuss the role of the priestly class in ancient Mesopotamia, as elite, Mesopotamian priests had a far more expanded role in society than students may have experienced with members of the clergy today. The priests of ancient Mesopotamia were part of the ruling class, and much of the tax money that was collected went to the priests and the temples. Next, have students discuss the following questions. You may wish to have them work together in small groups.

• Would it have been possible to complete the tasks of these occupations without being able to write anything down? How?
• If there were no written records connected to these occupations how would that have affected the occupation?
• How might it have made it easier? How might it have made it harder?
• Do students think that the appearance of these occupations might have affected the development of writing? How?

Activity 4. Thinking About Writing

The above video is an excerpt from the film The Cyrus Cylinder and provides an overview of the origins of cuneiform. 

In addition to the historical basis for these activities, this lesson is also about the nature of written language, how it evolves and how it serves civilization.

Ask the students the purposes of writing in the world today. You may wish to have them discuss questions such as:

• Where is writing used as the primary communication device?
• What information does it convey?
• When is it used in addition to other forms of communication-like speaking?
• For what do they use written forms of communication?

Next, ask them to imagine that in an instant all knowledge of alphabetic writing disappeared. Only the drawing of simple pictures remained as the means of written communication. Have the class brainstorm: What would be some of the most essential things for which you would need signs? Which objects, concepts and ideas are the ones you would make sure were standardized and learned right away?

Review the list of essential signs that the class has compiled. Have students create a few of them and draw them on the board. See if a few volunteers can use these “standardized” signs to put together a message someone else in the class will actually understand. Discuss examples of messages relatively easy to communicate with pictographs and others that would be more difficult. Using the signs you’ve made up today, and assuming you had thousands more like them, could you write:

• Your name? (Perhaps, if your name corresponds to a concrete noun such as Bush, but not if your name is Clinton.
• Verbs like: walk, run, fly?
• Adjectives like: delicious, lovely, awesome?
• The words: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
• Any of the following titles of songs released in 2004? Which ones?
  • A Man and a Woman
  • Through the Wire
  • Sunshine
  • You Don’t Know My Name

Ask students to discuss the following questions:

• What does picture writing do well? Students may note that pictographs can represent nouns, small numbers, and some prepositions—“Two men on horseback.”
• What advantages does picture writing have? Students may note that even those without specialized knowledge could potentially understand it.
• What are its weaknesses? Students should note that pictographic images have a limited ability to communicate such things as abstractions, sounds and certain parts of speech.
• Can a pictograph convey what the word it is depicting sounds like?

Writing in ancient Mesopotamia arose from necessity—specifically, the need to keep records. Gradually, civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley became more urbanized. Eventually, a number of complex systems developed: political, military, religious, legal, and commercial. Writing developed as well, becoming essential to those systems.

Did writing enable those complex systems to arise or did complex systems create the need for a more sophisticated system of writing? Ask students to recall a time they started to do a task and then realized at some point that they should have been writing things down? For example, they might imagine organizing a collection of trading cards by writing down categories. Did writing change the way they approached the task? For example, they might think of deciding to make lists of the cards by category. They could do the task without writing, but writing would better enable them to do it—now the cards are organized by category and there’s a list to check against to identify lost cards. Ask students to think about the following questions as they track the evolution of civilization and writing in ancient Mesopotamia:

• What kinds of tasks can be accomplished without writing?
• What kinds of tasks cannot be accomplished without writing?
• Could a country be ruled, an army trained, a religion organized, laws maintained, buildings built, products marketed, crops raised and sold without writing?
• How does writing enhance the ability to do those things?

Activity 5. Barley and the Story of Writing

In this activity students will be introduced to the world’s first writing system—cuneiform—as they work through the British Museum's Mesopotamia site interactive online activity The Story of Writing, available through the EDSITEment resource The Oriental Institute: The University of Chicago.

Introduce the activity by asking students to think about our word “barley.” How many students know what barley is? How is it used? What does it look like in its natural state? You may wish to sketch barley on the board, or show a photograph of barley, such as this photograph.

Barley was a very important crop in ancient Mesopotamia. A pictograph, a pictorial representation of barley—presumably like the one you’ve drawn on the board -- is one of the signs we find on the oldest examples of writing from the region. The first Mesopotamian written representation of barley was a picture. Ask students to think about and discuss the following questions:

• What’s the relationship between the way our word “barley” looks and barley itself?
• What are the elements of our word for barley -- how do we know that the symbols which make up the word represent the grain?

Students should come to the idea that in the written word “barley” it is the phonetic representations of the sounds of the word as we say it that connect the written word to the concept. Barley in Mesopotamia was called “she.”

Next, navigate with the class, or have students navigate on their own, through The Story of Writing website. Each page contains information on the history and development of the cuneiform character for the word "barley" over time. Students should complete the quiz Treasure Hunt: Bowling for Barley.

When students have completed the answers to the treasure hunt have the class discuss the answers to each of the questions, which are available in the teacher’s rubric. Have students answer the following questions in class discussion. For larger classes you may wish to divide the class into small groups and have each group work on answering one of the following questions, which they should share with the rest of the class.

• How did writing evolve in ancient Mesopotamia? Students should note here the progression from representational picture, to symbol, to phonetic representation.
• Why do the students think that the ancient Mesopotamians decided to change the writing system from just pictures (pictographs) to the cuneiform shapes? Students might think some of the following questions in order to help them understand the process: Did the change allow the ancient Mesopotamians to include a greater or a lesser number of ideas and objects in their writing? Did the shift towards cuneiform allow scribes to write more quickly?
• How did the uses of writing expand over time? Remind students that the earliest written records were made to document buying and selling things like barley or domestic animals. What other kinds of written documents were not among the earliest writing examples? Students should think about the shift from the recording of simple economic transactions to personal letters and stories. What kinds of documents would have been developed later?
• How did the change from pictures (direct representation) to cuneiform (abstract representation) affect who could use the system? Students should ponder the idea that an abstract writing system would require learning the system of signs. They should think about our own writing system -- were they able to understand it before someone taught them how to read and write? Once the writing system had changed to cuneiform, who might have learned how to read and write?
• Who do you think would want the have a record of the buying and selling of barley? You may wish to remind students that these records were similar to receipts. Why do people make and keep receipts? This may help them to think about why people wanted to keep track of the buying and selling of barley.

Activity 6. Learning from Artifacts

In this activity students will be challenged to make hypotheses about civilization in ancient Mesopotamia. It will be helpful for students to return to the timelines they created in the second activity as a reference point while completing this exercise.

To help them understand the task they will be completing in this activity, begin by asking students to look at one contemporary object on which writing is found, such as a penny. They should imagine they are from the distant future. They know the English language, but they know little else about America in the 21st century. What hypotheses can they make from a penny? The members of this unknown civilization

1. could work metal
2. constructed buildings as shown on the reverse of the coin
3. wore facial hair
4. believed in a Supreme Being … and so forth

Cuneiform writing was understood before we knew much about civilization in Ancient Mesopotamia. How did that happen? In what is now Iran, there is an inscription carved high on a rock face with the same message in three different languages. One is in Persian (the language that is still used in Iran today) and another is Assyrian cuneiform from Mesopotamia. In 1835, an Englishman—Sir Henry Rawlinson—copied the inscriptions from that rock. Once he had translated the Persian, he was able to use the Persian as a key to decipher the cuneiform. As a result, people were able, for the first time, to read the writing on clay tablets found in the vicinity of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

Ask students to think about the previous lesson in which they learned about how the use of writing might have evolved in Mesopotamia. The first writing recorded agricultural transactions. What kinds of thoughts, ideas, actions, or things were easiest to put into pictures? What kinds of things did they believe were the most necessary to keep a record of? After thinking about both of these questions ask students to try to imagine why it is that agricultural transactions—the buying and selling of grains or livestock- were among the first written messages on earth.

• Why was it so important to have a written record of agricultural transactions?
• Why do you think the first records recorded the sale of grains and livestock? Why not something else?
• Who would want to have this record?

Next, students should think about what kind of an effect this type of record keeping might have on the rest of society. If there is a record of who bought what kind of grain, how much they bought, and from whom, what else becomes possible?

• Who besides the seller and the buyer might want a record of these transactions?

For example, authorities expecting to take a portion of the revenue from taxes might be interested in having a record of the financial transactions which took place. Now instead of trying to guess how much they should tax someone they had a record of how much the transaction was worth. Having a written record of those transactions would make the collection of taxes both more exact and more efficient.

• What other records might have been useful for authorities to keep?
• Might they want to keep track of marriages? Births? Deaths? Land sales? Why?
• How else might rulers be able to use writing to legitimize and extend their power?

You may wish to begin by working through the model below. For beginning students you may wish to design an additional model in order to make the process explicit to your students. Next, divide the class into small groups of two or three and assign each group of students an artifact from ancient Mesopotamia from the list below. Each group will describe its artifact while showing a photograph of the object, such as the images listed below which are available below through the EDSITEment web resources The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Oriental Institute: The University of Chicago. Then, each group will present its hypotheses about what the object can tell us today about life in ancient Mesopotamia. Presentation to the class will proceed in chronological order, and should try to answer the following questions:

• What can be learned about civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley at the time of the artifact’s creation?
• What in the artifact itself supports their hypothesis?
• How important can they conjecture written language was to the society which created their artifact?

Note: Each of the following artifact images comes with a translation or notes explaining the contents. All of the pages online offer the opportunity to click for additional views of the artifact (usually a larger view) and/or information.

The following is a model for the process of this activity with the following artifact: Cuneiform Tablet (account of small cattle, ca. 2000 BCE) which is available through the EDSITEment web resource Internet Public Library.

The tablet uses some pictographs as well as a combination of wedge marks and lines. By investigating this tablet, we learn that:

• Sheep and goats were raised (“One sheep, Ur-Shara,” “one goat”).
• There was at least one forest in the area (“individual sheep from the Forest of the Great Canal” and the job of “forester” existed)
• At the time the tablet was written, canals had been built (The name “Great Canal” implies the existence of at least one lesser canal.)
• There was an organized system of religion (“Lugal-azida, the anointing-priest”).
• Fleece was taken from sheep and presumably used (“fleece plucked”).
• Careful records of livestock were made (“Total: 9 sheep”).
• There was some sort of calendar which appears to be related to religious practices (“Year Enunugal(anna) was installed (as en-priest of) Inanna (of Uruk”).

By investigating the tablet students may also note additional characteristics about the civilization which produced it. For example, the presence of an established calendar indicates the existence of a fairly sophisticated number system and understanding of astronomy. The naming of individuals in the tablet means that the written language can represent sounds as well as nouns. There are no verbs in the tablet, though the word “plucked,” used here as an adjective, is close.

You may wish to distribute to each group this graphic organizer for writing down the information they gather.

Group presentations should be conducted as if this were a convention of archaeologists trying to piece together a portrait of the evolution of life and writing in ancient Mesopotamia by combining the work of all the groups. Assign one artifact to from the following list to each group:

• Administrative tablet with cylinder seal impression of a male figure, hunting dogs, and boars (3100-2900 BCE) from Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Stele of Ushumgal (2900-2700 BCE) (a land transaction) from Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Cuneiform Receipt for Cattle (ca. 2000 BCE) from Science Museum of Minnesota through the Internet Public Library
• Cuneiform Voucher for Rations at a Way Station (ca. 2000 BCE) from Science Museum of Minnesota through the Internet Public Library
• Record of Delivery and Expenditure of Cattle (ca. 2000 BCE) from Science Museum of Minnesota through the Internet Public Library
• Inscribed Cone (ca. 1800 BCE) from Science Museum of Minnesota through the Internet Public Library
• Image of Tablet with Babylonian Flood Myth (ca. 1740 BCE) from Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Clay Tablet and Envelope (ca. 1450 BCE) from The Oriental Institute: The University of Chicago (the outcome of litigation between two men)

When each group has completed their investigation of the artifact, gathered their evidence, compiled, and presented their hypotheses, have the class discuss and debate the following questions:

• What picture of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia arises from the combined hypotheses of the groups?
• Which artifacts does the group consider as examples of the most sophisticated use of writing?
• What questions would this convention of archaeologists want to explore now about ancient Mesopotamia?

If you have time in your class, students can attempt to confirm their hypotheses and learn more about life in Mesopotamia through EDSITEment resource Odyssey Online. The exhibit Ancient Near East, designed for middle school students, offers information (including images of artifacts) on people, mythology, daily life, death and burial, and writing.

Using what they’ve learned about the symbols and their evolution, the students should be able to place the following artifacts in the chronological order of their creation. Here they are in chronological order. Present them to the students in random order.

• Administrative Tablet (3100-2900 BCE) from EDSITEment resource Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Note barley pictograph.)
• Record of Field to be Harvested (c. 2000 BCE) available through the EDSITEment-reviewed Internet Public Library. (Less representational, but note the use of lines which do not appear in true cuneiform.)
• Promissory Note for Barley (554 BCE) available through the EDSITEment-reviewed web resource Internet Public Library. (All cuneiform wedges.)

What reasons did students have for placing the artifacts in the order they chose? Have students write an explanation for why they placed the examples in the order they chose.

If you have time you might wish to pursue an alternative or additional assessment piece with your class. Each student should compose a brief essay of no more than one page explaining how writing was important to the development of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia. How would writing have been useful for record keeping, legal matters, passing on history and stories to future generations and other activities represented in the artifacts students analyzed? Why would picture writing be difficult to use for some of these purposes?

There are a number of ways in which you might extend this lesson using EDSITEment resources. If you have time you might try some of the following activities:

• Students can explore the intersection of the sciences and ancient history in the Humanities magazine article "Using Chemistry to Learn the Provenance of Clay Tablets," which describes how X-ray fluorescence devices and machine-learning algorithms provide archaeological information about an object without causing any damage to it.  
• This lesson has centered on cuneiform writing and its evolution. Mathematics also flourished and developed in ancient Mesopotamia. For example, ancient Mesopotamia is the place where the concept of value and the zero were invented. Students can learn more about cuneiform numerals and the Babylonian system of Base 60 with the online exhibit Sumerian and Babylonian Numerals from The School of Computing and IT, both links from the EDSITEment resource The Oriental Institute: The University of Chicago.
• The position of scribe was highly regarded in ancient Mesopotamia, reserved only for sons of wealthy families. Interested students can Explore the World of a Scribe, also available through the EDSITEment web resource The Oriental Institute: The University of Chicago.
• Budding archeologists can test their skill online using the Puzzle Challenge: Putting Artifacts Back Together, also available through the EDSITEment web resource The Oriental Institute: The University of Chicago.

Recommended Websites

• Internet Public Library
  • Science Museum of Minnesota
    • Cuneiform Receipt for Cattle (c. 2000 BCE)
    • Cuneiform Tablet (c. 2000 BCE)
    • Cuneiform Voucher for Rations at a Way Station (c. 2000 BCE)
    • Inscribed Cone (c. 1800 BCE)
    • Introduction to the Cuneiform Collection
    • Promissory Note for Barley 554 BCE
    • Record of Delivery and Expenditure of Cattle (c. 2000 BCE)
    • Record of Field to be Harvested
• Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Administrative Tablet (3100-2900 BCE)
  • Administrative Tablet with Notes
  • Cuneiform Prism with the Sumerian King List, (c. 1740 BCE)
  • Key Events, 2000-1000 BCE
  • Key Events, 8000-2000 BCE
  • Stele of Ushumgal (2900-2700 BCE)
  • Timeline of Art History
• Odyssey Online
  • Ancient Near East
• The Oriental Institute: The University of Chicago
  • Clay Tablet and Envelope (c. 1400 BCE)
  • Map of Ancient Mesopotamia
  • The Invention of Writing
  • The British Museum's "Mesopotamia"
    • Cuneiform Chart
    • Explore the World of a Scribe
    • Mesopotamian Geography: Explore
    • Mesopotamia: Geography Introduction
    • Mesopotamia Timelines
    • Puzzle Challenge: Putting Artifacts Back Together
    • The Story of Writing
  • Sumerian and Babylonian Numerals (Base 60)