Four thousand years ago, Sumerian scribes trained in the eduba, the “tablet house.” Eduba lets you sit in on their lessons.
It teaches you to recognize cuneiform signs, read their Sumerian values and hear how they may have sounded. Every sign, phrase and divine name has a recorded pronunciation based on current scholarly reconstructions, with honest notes on what is known and what is a best guess.
Inside
- 88 sign readings, 10 phrases and 8 divine names, all with audio
- Spaced review that brings signs back just before you’d forget them
- A phrasebook with word-by-word breakdowns
- A short history of cuneiform, from about 3300 BCE to about 80 CE
Free, with no ads and no tracking. Your progress stays on your own device.
Get it: in any browser at eduba.conversations-with-ai.com. Android app coming soon to Google Play; it works fully offline.
How it was made
Eduba was built in about a week’s worth of conversation with Claude, Anthropic’s AI model: researching the signs and the scholarship, deciding how each sound should be said, writing and testing the code, and fixing layouts on real phones and tablets. The voice is an AI voice from ElevenLabs, checked by ear sound by sound, with the choices explained inside the app. Readings follow the electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary (ePSD2), and the museum photos come from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s open-access collection.
It is not the work of an Assyriologist. If you are one and spot something wrong, I’d like to hear from you.
Contact and corrections: cwai.eduba@gmail.com
