How much tranlation can you get off a 1.5 inch piece of cuneiform?
http://www.ancientscripts.com/cuneiform.html
"The truth is that cuneiform denotes not one but several kinds of writing systems, including logo-syllabic, syllabic, and alphabetic scripts."
Ugaritic cuneiform appears to have been the only alphabetic cuneiform, and limited in geographic area (one site, Ras Shamra, on the Mediterranean coast). The rest are quite economical in the number of symbols needed to write a word, but extravagant in the number of symbols used overall. :')