I think I actually did this one in my undergraduate degree. The text, the triangular stuff going on above the figure is Akkadian cuneiform. I am not kidding you, at one point in my life my goal was to be an epigrapher, so I was studying things like Hebrew and Akkadian (in more lay terms Babylonian). Unfortunately I have forgotten most of it, so I don't remember what this says. Cuneiform is actually incredibly difficult. It was the first known writing system so granted there were some kinks that needed to get worked out, but part of it to was that only the scribes were literate and people had to pay them to send or interpret their letters. The scribes didn't want it to be easy because then they would be out of work. Basically the way cuneiform works is that there are three types of sign: logogram, determinative, and the phonetic signs. Logograms represent a full word, determinatives refer to what the word in question was made of (i.e. the word for boat always has the determinative for wood with it), the phonemes are like they sound they are a syllable. Now the difficulty comes in that one sign often has three different syllable sounds associated with is as well as a logogram or determinative meaning with it.
