Recognition is regarded as a basic human attribute. In pattern recognition, there are many practical applications such as: handwriting, fingerprints, face recognition and many others. The purpose of the current work is to propose a method is able to recognize cuneiform symbols through the use of neural network. In order to achieve this objective, the image is loaded into the memory and the preprocessing can be done with introduce some modifications. Then, the attributes are extracted by finding the frequency of the on-pixels in the (50× 50) image matrix on the horizontal lines, vertical lines, the upper triangle of the main diagonal, and the lower triangle of the main diagonal. Finally, Backpropagation Algorithm was used in recognition with (20) hidden nodes and at the learning rate (0.05), within a short training time.

1. INTRODUCTION
Sumerian civilization is the earliest known civilization in the historic region of southern Mesopotamia; its location approximately identical with the modern Iraq from north of Baghdad to the Arabian Gulf as shown in Figure 1. The total area of Sumer was about 10,000 square miles [1] -[3].
The Sumerian writing system [4] is one of the oldest systems of writing in the world [4][5]. In the 4th millennium BCE, the system of Sumerian writing was a Logographic [3], that are symbols or pictures represent a complete word [2]. First developed by the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE, it was used more than 3 millennia continuously [6]. Then, it is developed to become a cuneiform inscription on the tablets [7], which is considered one of the earliest forms of written language [2], so the tablets were used for the documentation of imported and exported goods during trade and laws [2]. As well as, record laws and important issues about agriculture, economy, politics, and so forth [8]. The clay tablets could be rectangular, circular, and cylindrical slabs. Sumerians molded the tablets manually and using a wedge-shaped stylus inscribed on the wet tablets. They kept these clay tablets in private places inside the palaces until they were dried either by the sun or by fire [9], as shown in Figure 2.