“Over the course of at least six hundred years, Sumerian pictograms . . . evolved into phonetic symbols. These symbols, made in wet clay by a stylus with a wedge-shaped edge, had a distinctive shape, wider at the top than at the bottom of the incision. . . . [I]n 1700 an Old Persian scholar named Thomas Hyde gave the writing the name cuneiform, which we still use. The name, derived from the Latin for “wedge-shaped,” does nothing to recognize the importance of the script. Hyde thought the pretty signs on clay were some sort of decorative border.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.