Cuneiform is one of the world's oldest writing systems, invented by the ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) around 3400 BCE. The word comes from the Latin cuneus, meaning “wedge,” because writers pressed a wedge-shaped reed stylus into soft clay tablets to make the marks.

Instead of an alphabet with letters, cuneiform used hundreds of different symbols. Each symbol might represent a whole word, an idea, or a sound. Imagine having to memorize 600 different symbols just to read and write! Only specially trained scribes learned this complex system, making them powerful and respected members of society.

For nearly 3,000 years, cuneiform was used across the ancient Middle East to record everything from grocery lists and business deals to epic poems and mathematical calculations. The famous Epic of Gilgamesh, one of humanity's oldest stories, was written in cuneiform on clay tablets. After people stopped using cuneiform around 100 CE, no one could read it for centuries. Then, in the 1800s, archaeologists and scholars finally cracked the code, unlocking thousands of years of human history that had been hidden in those marks.

As an adjective, cuneiform describes writing made with these wedge-shaped marks, or anything related to this writing system.