Cuneiform writing

Timeline

1. c. -1000–-800Ashur · AssyriaAt the start of the first millennium BCE, cuneiform in the Neo-Assyrian period was further simplified in form, with strokes becoming more abstract wedges and writing speed increasing. Imperial administration used two Akkadian variants, Neo-Assyrian and Standard Babylonian, and clay tablets became the main medium for tax, military, and diplomatic records.
2. c. -750–-600Nineveh · AssyriaNeo-Assyrian kings established large clay-tablet libraries at Nineveh and elsewhere, most famously the Library of Ashurbanipal, holding over twenty thousand items of myth, epic, divination, medicine, and administrative documents. Cuneiform reached its peak of textual accumulation here, while imperial administration also made extensive use of the Aramaic alphabet for everyday documents.
3. c. -650–-500Babylon · BabyloniaUnder the Neo-Babylonian kingdom and the subsequent Achaemenid rule, cuneiform in Babylonia remained widely used in administration and scholarship, but Aramaic's status as the imperial lingua franca kept rising. Cuneiform gradually shifted from everyday administration to astronomy, mathematics, and literary transmission, inherited by the later Babylonian scholarly tradition.