“The writing used in Mesopotamia throughout history and known as ‘cuneiform’ was originally—as all primitive writings, past or present—a collection of small, simplified drawings, or pictograms. . . . [I]n all probability the first pictograms were engraved on wood or painted on skins or leaves, but such media must have disintegrated long ago in the humid subsoil of Iraq, and the only documents that have survived are written on clay. The process of writing was in itself very simple: the scribe took a lump of fine, well-washed clay and shaped it as a small, smooth cushion, a few centimetres square. Then, with the end of a reed stalk cut obliquely he drew lines dividing each face of the cushion into squares and filled each square with incised drawings. The ‘tablet’ was then either baked or left unbaked. Baked tablets are nearly as hard a stone; old unbaked tablets crumble into dust between the fingers, but if they are collected with care, allowed to dry slowly in the shade and hardened in an oven they become almost indestructible. It must be added . . . that a number of archaic inscriptions were engraved in stone, at first with a bronze point, then with a cold chisel.

In the course of time the Mesopotamian script gradually lost its pictographic character. The signs were laid down in horizontal lines rather than in squares or in vertical bands. They became smaller, more compact, more rigid, more ‘abstract’, finally bearing no resemblance to the objects they represented. The awkward curves disappeared and were replaced by straight lines, at first, of equal width, then—as the prismatic stylus was forced into the clay proir to being drawn on its surface—vaguely triangular or wedge-shaped. Towards the middle of the third millennium B.C. this evolution was completed and the true ‘cuneiform’ writing (from Latin cuneus: wedge, nail) was born. . . .”

—Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, third edition, 1992.