# Enki Sumerian — the oldest writing, measured as a coordinate system

> An exploration, not a claim. No translations are used and nothing here says what any sign means. Every result is a measurement, a test against chance, or an open question.

Updated 2026-10-18. 541 signs and 5,712 wedges measured and confirmed by hand (94.1% of the text); 79,660 tablets and 938,258 complete lines in the text tests. Page: https://enkisystems.com/sumerian. By Brad Harris (https://thebradharris.com).

## Observations
- Signs are built like counters (seen): 252 of 541 signs are one unit repeated a set number of times; a 4-wedge diamond occurs 2 to 9 times, down wedges and hooks 1 to 9.
- Hooks stop at 5 before units (seen): a hook sign directly followed by down wedges has 1–5 hooks 58,383 times and 6–9 hooks 11 times; 6–9 hook signs are used 1,422 times elsewhere.
- Lines repeat like stored records (seen): 78.9% of complete lines recur exactly on other tablets; one 15-symbol layout (N a b · N a c · N d e · N d f · N d g) appears 4,395 times on 584 tablets.
- Looking alike does not mean being used alike (open): rank correlation -0.001 across 64,261 pairs; signs on the same ladder share neighbours 2.6x more than unrelated signs, but most ladders are counting signs.

## Against the idea
- 970 symbols in use; the top 100 make up 83.2% of the text.
- 7 identical sign pairs by our measure; 84 signs are one wedge from another.
- Slanted wedges cluster at 45 and 135 degrees (442), not at multiples of 30 (211).
- 4 of 64 predicted missing signs were found.

## Unknowns
- Shapes come from a modern font, not yet from clay.
- Sign order comes from modern editions.
- The value of the place above the hooks is not pinned.
- The 10-hook sign (60,794 uses) does not fit the 1–5 ladder.
- The library idea has not been tested outside counting signs.

## Sources
- ePSD2/CDLI Ur III Corpus, Oracc JSON build of 7 Dec 2022 — https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/epsd2/admin/ur3/ — CC0 per its metadata
- Oracc Global Sign List — https://github.com/oracc/osl — sign ID to Unicode lookup only
- CuneiformClassic font, (c) 2011–2012 Steve Tinney and Michael Everson, all rights reserved — measured only, never reproduced
- Unicode Cuneiform charts — https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U12000.pdf
- HeiCuBeDa Hilprecht 3D scans — https://doi.org/10.11588/DATA/IE8CCN — CC BY-SA 4.0 (not used in these results)

Code and data: https://github.com/BradBuilds/enki-sumerian
Researched and published by Enki Systems · https://enkisystems.com/sumerian