How to Use cuneiform in a Sentence

cuneiform

noun
  • The cuneiform script is tiny, and crammed tightly to all four edges of the tablet.
    Robert MacFarlane, The New York Review of Books, 5 Oct. 2022
  • The cuneiform script revealed that the city was indeed Mardaman.
    James Rogers, Fox News, 17 May 2018
  • Its impact will be equal to the invention of the internet and cuneiform.
    Kian Bakhtiari, Forbes, 27 Feb. 2021
  • Elsewhere in the temple were clay tablets covered in cuneiform script.
    Elizabeth Winkler, The New Yorker, 19 Nov. 2022
  • The Sumerians, who first put stylus to stone more than 5,000 years ago, used the star symbol to denote a king or a god on cuneiform tablets.
    Cory Oldweiler, Star Tribune, 19 Feb. 2021
  • Pollinger pointed out one near the entrance that will hold the Gilgamesh dream tablet, a cuneiform tablet inscribed with a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
    Lizzie Wade, Science | AAAS, 16 Oct. 2017
  • Inside, the vessels contained more than 100 clay tablets with cuneiform script scrawled across the surface.
    Gabe Allen, Discover Magazine, 28 June 2022
  • On it, cuneiform text describes the opposite side, including details about the sizes of the fields.
    Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 16 Aug. 2021
  • Akkadian is a Semitic language, and it was written in a cuneiform script.
    Brigit Katz, Smithsonian, 7 Sep. 2017
  • The tablet on which this episode was recorded, along with thousands of other stones inscribed in cuneiform writing,...
    James Romm, WSJ, 3 Jan. 2020
  • The Imago Mundi is a simple clay tablet carved with cuneiform writing.
    Shannon Stirone, Longreads, 29 Oct. 2020
  • These soldiers’ symptoms were recorded not on paper charts, but on cuneiform tablets inscribed in Mesopotamia more than 3,000 years ago.
    Erin Blakemore, National Geographic, 16 June 2020
  • The narrative gallops on to Mesopotamia, Nineveh, clay tablets, cuneiform and Gilgamesh.
    John Sutherland, New York Times, 2 Jan. 2018
  • Paw prints of a dog that wandered onto the drying clay more than 2,000 years ago obscure part of the cuneiform inscription — a reminder that these ruins were once a living city.
    New York Times, 6 Feb. 2021
  • The shipping labels on these packages falsely described the cuneiform tablets as tile samples.
    Peggy McGlone, chicagotribune.com, 2 May 2018
  • Smith was a young working-class Londoner who had taught himself to read cuneiform during his lunch hours while employed as an engraver at a printing firm in the 1860s.
    Robert MacFarlane, The New York Review of Books, 5 Oct. 2022
  • However, the bone at the base of our big toe—called the medial cuneiform—has a connection for the big toe that is more curved and slightly more angled than what is found in humans today.
    Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 5 July 2018
  • Experts say the items—a fragment of a stone tablet inscribed with cuneiform characters and a prism used to teach children the cuneiform alphabet—are at least 4,000 years old.
    David Kindy, Smithsonian Magazine, 1 Feb. 2022
  • The recent return results from years of effort and includes thousands of cuneiform tablets, ancient seals, and other items.
    Lindsey McGinnis, The Christian Science Monitor, 2 Sep. 2021
  • Some of the earliest known writing—called cuneiform—has been uncovered at Ur, including seals that mention the city.
    Mahan Kalpa, National Geographic, 11 Mar. 2016
  • The other contains a description of the land—including marshy areas, a threshing floor and a nearby tower—in cuneiform script.
    Livia Gershon, Smithsonian Magazine, 5 Aug. 2021
  • In a stroke of luck, the writing on the beakers also turned out to overlap with other Elamite-language texts written in a different system, a version of the cuneiform used to record Akkadian.
    Josephine Quinn, The New York Review of Books, 29 Dec. 2022
  • The show includes more than 200 objects that conjure the texture of life in the ancient region, from sculptures of kings, demons and dogs to brilliant ceramics and cuneiform inscriptions.
    Peter Saenger, WSJ, 5 Mar. 2020
  • Pottery vessels, in which cuneiform tablets were stored, are standing in the corner of a room from the Middle Assyrian period.
    Denise Chow, NBC News, 2 June 2022
  • And there were 371 cylinder seals — small engraved stone cylinders that, when rolled on wet clay, create raised images that can include cuneiform writing or pictures.
    John Bacon, USA TODAY, 3 May 2018
  • Those artifacts are among a half-million or so cuneiform tablets in museum collections around the world and are of interest to scholars and researchers.
    Washington Post, 29 July 2021
  • The earliest surviving recipes, which give instructions for a series of meaty stews, are inscribed on cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia.
    Helen Zoe Veit, Smithsonian, 19 Sep. 2017
  • The troop-placement trenches, by contrast, dug to protect several hundred men in nuclear-warfare drills, look, from the sky, like the marks of a reed stylus on an ancient cuneiform tablet.
    Max Norman, The New Yorker, 7 Nov. 2019
  • Johns becomes a scribe incising clay, making his own abstract cuneiform tablets.
    Jerry Saltz, Vulture, 22 Sep. 2021
  • Green is creating a permanent, public home for his collection of handwritten scrolls, rare books and ancient cuneiform tablets the family has amassed over the decades.
    Forbes Wealth Team, Forbes, 13 Feb. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'cuneiform.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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