An aspiring linguist
Learning to read a dead script
She taught herself cuneiform, then started teaching everyone else.
Writing had to be invented, and she wanted to know how. She began pressing cuneiform signs into wet clay, working from the earliest forms, and found out fast that the clay is the difficult part: one tablet dried too quickly and split clean across the middle. She made more. By the end she was not the student in the room, she was running sessions teaching other students to cut and read the signs themselves. She has now handled the same material the first scribes used, and she knows precisely why so many of their tablets survive broken.
The finished tablet, four quarters of signs.
A tablet in progress, signs pressed into wet clay.
One that dried too fast and split across the middle.