How it works
Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform wrote words and syllables with hundreds of signs, not letters. This page spells your name in the Ugaritic alphabet, 30 cuneiform letters. Some apps strip or block these characters, and screen readers may read them badly.
Read the full guide
Letters in, wedges out
Type a name. Each letter with an Ugaritic letter for its sound is swapped, and sh, th, kh, gh and dh get one sign each. The alphabet wrote consonants, and only three of its letters show a vowel, so e, o, c, f, j, v and x borrow a near sign, marked as a stand-in in the list. Press Copy the signs.
What this page can translate
Letters only. To translate cuneiform on a real tablet takes a scholar of its language, and this page reads nothing back. Under the tool are all 30 Ugaritic letters, in use from about 1400 to 1190 BCE, and the 36 sound signs of Old Persian cuneiform to copy.
- The alphabet has no capitals, so Tigris and TIGRIS come out the same.
- Empty boxes mean the device has no font for these blocks. The characters are still copied.
Questions and answers
Is there an English to Sumerian cuneiform translator?
Not a letter-for-letter one. Wikipedia records that Sumerian cuneiform had on the order of 1,000 signs for words and sounds, so English letters cannot be swapped into it one by one. This page uses the Ugaritic alphabet, which has 30 letters.
Can I get a cuneiform translation of my name?
You get a spelling, not a translation. The page swaps the letters of your name for Ugaritic letters and leaves the name itself as it is. A scribe of Ugarit would have spelled by sound.
What was the Ugaritic alphabet?
A consonantal alphabet of 30 letters, pressed into clay with a wedge-shaped stylus like other cuneiform. Wikipedia records that it mostly ran left to right and was first found in 1928 where ancient Ugarit stood, in Syria.
Why do I see empty boxes?
The characters arrived and the font did not. Ugaritic joined Unicode in version 4.0 and Old Persian in version 4.1, but a device shows them only if one of its fonts draws them. Whoever receives the text needs one too.