Writing was invented in Mesopotamia a little more than 5,000 years ago. The earliest writing was done on clay tablets using cuneiform to write the Sumerian language. It remained in use for 3,000 years until being replaced by alphabetic scripts like our own.
Half a million cuneiform tablets have been excavated. 130,000 of them are owned by the British Museum. Many of them have been digitized by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, but only a small fraction has been translated.
Why is that? One reason is the complexity of the script. There were several hundred cuneiform signs. Some of them represented words, others sounds, and others were not pronounced but told the reader the category of the following word. Signs could have multiple meanings and had to interpreted based on context. Complicating things further, languages other than Sumerian also used cuneiform, including Hittite, Babylonian and Assyrian. As a result, it takes years of intense training to learn how to read cuneiform. There are probably a few hundred people who have the ability to read cuneiform without constantly referencing dictionaries, and less than one hundred who can read cuneiform from different regions and time periods. It’s one of the rarest scholarly skills in the world. The number of cuneiform-reading Assyrologists has been declining in recent decades and there is concern in the community of institutional knowledge being lost.
One way to reduce the backlog of hundreds of thousands of untranslated cuneiform tables may be AI. Here is an article from 2024 on this subject.
Here is a post examining the possibility of an even earlier writing system than cuneiform.
Nehaveigur 