English: As Babylon grew, the language spoken on its streets had to change. This remarkable tablet captures the interaction between the age-old cuneiform writing used for Babylonian-Akkadian and the alphabetic Aramaic that ultimately displaced it. This clay tablet represents a classroom experiment; a teacher imposed a challenging writing exercise on pupils who spoke both languages. The pupils had to use traditional syllabic signs to express the sounds of the Aramaic alphabet. The letter order is the same as that of the modern Hebrew alphabet. Since the cuneiform script is syllabic, each consonant is followed by a vowel; the vowels here mostly much the vowels of the first syllable in the name of the alphabetic letter (aleph: a, bet: be, gimel: gi etc.). Circa 500 BCE. From southern Iraq (precise provenance unknown).

British Museum, no. 25636.

published in: Cross, Frank Moore (2003). "The Alphabet on a Late Babylonian Cuneiform School Tablet". Orientalia 72 (2): 223–228.