ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Old Persian cuneiform

Hi kiddo! Do you know what writing is? Yes? Great! So imagine if you were going to write something with a pencil, right? But instead of letters like we use today, you have to use little pictures to represent words. That's kind of what Old Persian Cuneiform is - a way of writing that uses pictures to represent words.

But it's not just any pictures, they're special little pictures called "cuneiform" because they're shaped like triangles. Imagine taking a piece of play-doh and squishing it so it's kind of like a triangle - that's what these little pictures look like.

Now, the Old Persian Cuneiform way of writing was used a long time ago, in a place called Persia (which is now Iran) by some very important people called the Persians. They used this way of writing to record important things like laws and government decisions.

And because these little pictures were used to represent words, that meant only a special group of people called scribes were able to read and write in Old Persian Cuneiform. It was like a secret code that only a few people knew how to decode!

So that's Old Persian Cuneiform in a nutshell - a special way of writing that uses pictures instead of letters, and was used a long time ago by important people!