Cuneiform Text Generator: Wedge-Sign Cipher

From clay tablets to your clipboard

Cuneiform is one of the oldest known writing systems. Scribes in ancient Mesopotamia pressed the cut end of a reed into wet clay, leaving wedge-shaped marks, and the script served Sumerian, Akkadian and several other languages over thousands of years. Hundreds of its signs are now part of Unicode, so they can be copied and pasted like ordinary characters.

This page uses those signs as a cipher. Each Latin letter is replaced by the sign whose Sumerian reading begins with that letter: A becomes the sign read A, B becomes BA, D becomes DA, M becomes MA, and so on. Letters Sumerian lacks, such as C or Q, borrow a sign with a similar sound.

A cipher, not a translation

The output looks ancient, yet it is not Sumerian, and no specialist could read it as a sentence. 𒊓𒌋𒈠𒂊𒊏 simply spells S, U, M, E, R one sign at a time, using signs that were never meant to sit together. Think of it as a costume for your words rather than a history lesson.

Cuneiform has no capital letters, so upper and lower case look identical. It has no place for accents either, so accented letters lose their marks: “café” comes out as 𒆪𒀀𒁍𒂊. Digits, spaces and punctuation stay as typed.

Check it on another screen first

Cuneiform fonts are missing on many devices, and wherever they are missing each sign turns into an empty box. The signs are also wide and dense, so a long sentence becomes hard to scan. Keep it to a name, a single word or a short tag, and avoid it for anything a screen reader user needs to understand. For more historic-looking letters, try Bamum lookalike text or Canadian syllabics.

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