The oldest writing we can read is essentially a payslip — and the wages were beer. This is the story of cuneiform: how a Mesopotamian script pressed into clay tablets went unread for about eighteen hundred years, how it was finally deciphered, and what the Sumerian archives turned out to say. Some links below are paid links.
In May 1857 four men who each claimed to read the world’s oldest writing were sent the same text, told to translate it alone, and to seal the answer. The test was rigged. The examination paper had been lithographed under the supervision of one of the four contestants. The man who proposed the contest was another contestant’s protégé. The administrator had been seeing that same contestant’s work through the press for eleven years. And Edward Hincks — the one man alive who could genuinely have beaten him — received his copy so late he never finished it. Two of the four never finished at all. A rigged test, half the field missing. And it still worked.
Cuneiform is not a language. It is a way of pressing marks into mud, and about a dozen unrelated languages were written in it. One sign can carry more than twenty different sounds. Egypt had a Rosetta Stone — a known language in an unknown script. Cuneiform had no such gift. No key. No crib.
The way in ran through a schoolteacher nobody would publish, an Irish country rector working in the hours his parish left him, and an unnamed Kurdish boy on a rope a hundred metres up a cliff in western Iran. Nobody wrote down his name.
And what came pouring out was not prophecy. Eleanor Robson, Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at University College London, estimates about ninety-five per cent of surviving tablets record who owned what and who owed whom. Robert Englund’s averages for the archaic Uruk corpus: eighty-five per cent administrative, fifteen per cent word lists. British Museum object 140855 — a palm-sized slab from southern Iraq — records beer, handed out as rations. None of it is primitive: they ran about a dozen number systems at once and had already invented the fiscal year, twelve months of exactly thirty days.
Half a million tablets survive. More than two hundred and thirty thousand are catalogued — logged, not read. The machines have not solved it: on random sentences the best system produces something a scholar can use fewer than half the time, and a fifth of its attempts are invention. And in 2025, at Girsu, the British Museum excavated alongside Iraq’s own antiquities service and lifted more than two hundred tablets out of the ground. This time the tablets are not going to London.
CHAPTERS
0:00 The oldest writing we can read
0:13 The test, and who built it
1:07 A script, not a language
2:00 The schoolteacher nobody would print
2:46 The cliff, and the boy on the rope
3:38 The country rector who actually cracked it
4:39 What the tablets say
5:52 The schoolroom
6:45 Two objects the internet gets wrong
8:00 Whose tablets are they
9:14 Still being read
RECOMMENDED READING (paid links — as an Amazon Associate this channel earns from qualifying purchases; using them supports the channel at no extra cost to you):
• Cuneiform and how it was deciphered — https://www.amazon.com/s?k=cuneiform+decipherment+assyriology&tag=vanished-yt-20
• Ancient Mesopotamia and the Sumerians — https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ancient+mesopotamia+sumerian+history&tag=vanished-yt-20
• Clay tablets and early accounting — https://www.amazon.com/s?k=clay+tablets+cuneiform+archaic+bookkeeping&tag=vanished-yt-20
All visuals in this episode are original AI reconstructions created for this channel; this is an educational documentary. The research behind it was adversarially verified — 86 claims, five independent verifiers and two attackers — and where specialists genuinely disagree, the disagreement is the content. Sources include the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, Iraq (the journal of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq), the British Museum, and the published work of Eleanor Robson, Robert Englund and Edward Hincks.
#cuneiform #mesopotamia #ancienthistory
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