The life and death of the cuneiform script

The standard story of cuneiform's death is a single, tidy fact: the last known dated document, a text tracking the movement of stars, was written in 75 CE. This page gathers conjectures that treat that fact as far too tidy. The script itself carried three successive languages -- Sumerian first, then Akkadian, then a late, heavily logogram-based scholarly register -- across more than three thousand years, the longest continuous run any writing system has managed. Research into how languages actually die predicts that a system this durable should not simply stop working; it should retreat one domain at a time, vanishing from the marketplace long before it vanishes from temple ritual, a pattern the surviving dated tablets can genuinely be tested against.

The genre funnel tests whether cuneiform's use narrowed by genre in a predictable order as it declined, rather than shrinking evenly across all kinds of writing at once. The script's fingerprint asks whether the script's own sign inventory and frequency profile carry a detectable fingerprint of the very different languages it was built to write across its three-thousand-year run, outlasting the languages themselves.