Cuneiform Fonts

Cuneiform Composite

This is the official font of the book, soon to be a major movie. It was created and is maintained by Steve Tinney. Alphabetician and font designer Michael Everson of Evertype corrected many glyph problems.

This is a composite font which is based on Ur III forms but which ranges from Fara to Neo-Assyrian in its outliers. The reason for this is that it was designed to cover all of the cuneiform defined in Unicode version 5.0. For PDFs of the Unicode 5.0 code pages see the Unicode web site.

It is anticipated that subsequent development of CuneiformComposite will improve the relative sizes of signs and fix any remaining glyph errors.

CuneiformComposite is released under the terms of the SIL Open Font License.

Installation Instructions

Download the ZIP file containing CuneiformComposite 1.001 (you may need to control-click to save it rather than open it in your browser window) and unzip the font.

System-specific font-installation procedures vary--additional installation hints for systems not covered below are welcome.

Mac OS X

Double click on the font to open it in Fontbook and click on Install.

Linux

For Redhat EL 3 simply copy the font (as superuser) to /usr/share/fonts.

Windows

For XP see these cookbook instructions. At present IE 7 may be required to view the character tables though reports do vary; Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 do not seem to recognize the SMP characters. Word pre-Vista at least does not seem to be able to handle the font; anyone who can solve these issues, if they are solvable, is urged to e-mail Steve Tinney.

After you install the font, you can test-drive it by viewing the following pages:
Unicode Cuneiform Table page 1
Unicode Cuneiform Table page 2
Unicode Cuneiform Table page 3
Unicode Cuneiform Table page 4
Unicode Cuneiform Table page 5