syllables (consonant + vowel + consonant), and about three hundred signs that were used as ideograms.13 The ideograms were essentially the signs that the Sumerians had used before them, but they were probably pronounced as Akkadian words when the texts were read. Something analogous occurs when an English speaker reads “$2.00” as “two dollars.” A Spanish speaker would read the same symbols as “dos dólares.” Our modern numeral symbols are simply current examples of ideograms.14 The Akkadian language