Cuneiform

3. City depicted as a rectangle in the center of the famous clay Map of the World.
6. Neighboring realm appearing alongside Assyria on the Babylonian Map of the World.
10. Neo-Assyrian king who assembled the oldest surviving royal library in the ancient world.
13. Elite class of literate Mesopotamian officials responsible for drafting and maintaining clay records.
16. Soft medium inscribed by scribes and baked or dried into permanent tablets.
17. Essential agricultural staple recorded alongside sheep and cattle entering temple storehouses.
18. Southern Mesopotamian homeland where writing first emerged around the late 4th millennium B.C.E.
19. Temple and palace officials whose need to record rations and goods spurred the invention of writing.
21. Plant stem cut into a stylus to impress wedge-shaped marks onto tablets.
22. Measured allocations of beer and grain distributed to temple workers.
23. Abstracted wedge-based characters that evolved from early literal pictographs.
25. Legendary epic whose eleventh tablet famously narrates a great Mesopotamian deluge.
26. Capital city where tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets from the royal library were excavated.

1. Flat, hand-held slab of clay that served as the primary canvas for Mesopotamian scribes.
2. Large religious institution that managed grain storage, livestock, and early recordkeeping.
4. Everyday dining vessel depicted on early pictographic tablets to signify eating.
5. Celestial body whose astronomical movements and omens were tracked on a Neo-Assyrian tablet.
7. Ancient Near Eastern script whose name translates to "wedge-shaped".
8. The earliest written signs that represented literal pictures of items.
9. Modern-day nation covering the southern region where the earliest writing developed.
11. Type of scout animal, like the raven or dove, released from Utnapishtim’s ark in the Flood story.
12. Ancient civilization credited with probably inventing the earliest writing around 3000 B.C.E.
14. Spoken language components that cuneiform symbols eventually evolved to represent, moving beyond pure pictographs.
15. Mountain peak where Utnapishtim's ark landed as the floodwaters began to calm.
17. SMITH British Museum assistant who translated the Flood Tablet in 1872 and undressed in excitement.
20. Carved stone cylinder rolled across damp clay to authenticate official documents.
24. Type of shaped impression stamped alongside early pictographs to record quantities.
27. Action represented on early tablets by an archaic sign showing a bowl tipped toward a schematic human head.