Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license.
Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat.
We can research this topic together.
Hand-copy of a cuneiform clay-tablet
An autograph in Assyriology is the hand-copy of a cuneiform clay-tablet. Producing an autograph is often the first step of a tablet's archaeological interpretation and the autograph is frequently the authoritative form that is published as source material. Autographing the text is followed by transliteration, transcription and translation.
References
Hayes, John L. (2000). A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts. Aids and Research Tools in Ancient Near Eastern Studies (Second revised ed.). Malibu: Undena Publications. ISBN0-89003-508-1.