Sure, early writing might be little more than a bunch of stick figures carved into a slab of clay, but to Steve Tinney, it's the gateway to the ancient world.

Tinney is an Assyriology professor at Penn and the director of the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project. As part of the Penn Humanities Forum, which this year is themed "Word and Image," Tinney will address the relationship between pictures and words in ancient Mesopotamia. He'll analyze ancient Mesopotamian writings from their very first emergence as pictograms, to their metamorphosis into the partially syllabic cuneiform system, and finally to the Assyrians' development of their own graphical word games.

So just what kinds of word games were those Assyrians playing before the dawn of the mighty crossword? "Well, I don't want to give it all away," Tinney chuckles. "But there are one or two tricks they play with their signs." He talks about the Assyrian king who learned of Egyptian hieroglyphs and had his scribes invent a way of writing his own name using pictures instead of words. To hear the rest, of course, you'll have to listen to him tell the story next week.

Tinney will supplement the lecture with images and texts drawn from his two projects, the Cuneiform Digital Library and the online Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary. The dictionary features a large database of Sumerian words, pictures of their written forms and approximate English translations. It also links words to their appearance in ancient documented texts.

"Sumerian is a language which was used for about 2,000 years and it's a language in which we have at least 100,000 documents. It is intrinsically interesting because not only is it the world's oldest language, but it's a language that has no known relatives." Tinney hopes that the dictionary can help with the machine-assisted translation of about 40,000 small governmental texts. "But what I think is of greater importance," he said, "is that it will provide a gateway to the [early Mesopotamian] culture."