Comment by thaumasiotes

I'm not knocking runestones for being the wrong medium. I'm knocking them for not being documents. A typical cuneiform record might be analogized to an invoice for delivery of a crate of shirts or whatever. (And of course we also have textbooks, dictionaries, literature, correspondence, business reports, mathematical treatises, and every other type of written work.) A typical runic record would be more like the text "Made in Taiwan" printed on the shirt labels.

One of the biggest problems in the study of these cultures is that they left no written records. We know they had a writing system, the runes, but as far as we can tell they almost never used it for anything. Quite the opposite is true of Mesopotamian cultures, where we're buried in more records than we have the manpower to translate.