Professor Wilfred LambertIt would be hard to single out "the world’s leading expert on cuneiform," but Lambert would certainly have been in the running.
Professor Wilfred Lambert, the Assyriologist who has died aged 85, was a scholar of ancient Mesopotamia and the world’s leading expert on cuneiform, an ancient form of writing which began as a system of pictographs and, over three millennia, developed into a more simplified and abstract script.
Via the Agade list. Background here.