Cuneiform

Cuneiform

Cuneiform is one of the earliest writing systems. It was used in the ancient Near East. People created it in the early Bronze Age and kept using it until the 1st century BC. The name "cuneiform" comes from the wedge-shaped marks that make up its signs. People made these marks by pressing a reed stylus into soft clay.

At first, cuneiform was made to write the Sumerian language spoken in southern Mesopotamia. This area is now called Iraq. Over time, people changed it to write many other languages. These included Akkadian, Hittite, Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, and Urartian. Some alphabets, like Old Persian and Ugaritic, also used cuneiform-style signs.

People found cuneiform again in the 17th century. They discovered trilingual inscriptions at Persepolis. These inscriptions were finally understood in the early 19th century. This started the modern study of this ancient script, called Assyriology. Today, museums all over the world have many cuneiform tablets. Some of the biggest collections are in the British Museum, Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin, the Louvre, the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, the National Museum of Iraq, the Yale Babylonian Collection, and the Penn Museum.

History

See also: History of writing

Writing began after pottery was invented, during the Neolithic. People used clay tokens to keep track of animals and goods. These tokens were put inside round clay envelopes called clay bullae. Later, people drew signs on flat tablets with a stylus. The first writing appeared in Uruk around the end of the 4th millennium BC, and soon after in other parts of the Near-East.

An old story from Mesopotamia tells how writing was created:

The messenger could not repeat the message, so a lord took some clay and put words on it like a tablet. Before that, no one had put words on clay.

People used cuneiform writing for over three thousand years, from the 31st century BC to the second century AD. It was a mystery until the 19th century, when Assyriology began to study it. By 1857, people had finally learned to read it.

Cuneiform writing came from simple pictures called pictographic proto-writing. It started from a system of tokens used for counting in the Near Eastern area. Early tokens with pictures of animals were found in Tell Brak and date to the mid-4th millennium BC. The first clear written records began around 3300 BC in the Uruk IV period.

At first, pictures were drawn on clay tablets with a sharp reed stylus or cut into stone. Most early records were about counting things. Some signs showed names of gods, places, or objects. These are called determinatives.

The earliest tablets were just pictures, so it is hard to know what language they used. But later tablets, from around 2900 BC, began to use sounds, showing the Sumerian language.

Around 2800 BC, some pictures began to stand for sounds, which let people write ideas and names. Many pictures stopped being used for their original meaning, and one sign could mean different things depending on the context. The number of signs dropped from about 1,500 to about 600, and writing became more about sounds.

Early writing was done with a pointed stylus, called "linear cuneiform". Some stones still used this style until around 2000 BC. In the middle of the third millennium BC, a new stylus with a wedge tip was invented. This made writing faster and easier, especially on soft clay. By changing the angle of the stylus, writers could make many different marks with one tool.

People used cuneiform on stone monuments called stelae to record the achievements of rulers. Words that sounded the same used different signs. Writers also combined signs to make new ones.

The old cuneiform script was used by the Akkadian Empire starting in the 24th century BC. The Akkadian language was very different from Sumerian, so the Akkadians wrote it using Sumerian sound signs. They still kept many Sumerian signs for their meaning.

Elamite cuneiform was a simpler form of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. It was used to write the Elamite language in what is now Iran from the third millennium BC to the fourth century BC.

Hittite cuneiform adapted Old Assyrian cuneiform to write the Hittite language, which appeared around 1800 BC and was used until the 13th century BC.

In the Iron Age (around the 10th to 6th centuries BC) during the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Assyrian cuneiform became simpler.

The many complicated cuneiform signs led to simpler versions. Old Persian cuneiform was created with a new set of simple signs by Darius the Great in the 5th century BC.

The cuneiform script changed considerably over more than 2,000 years. The image below shows the development of the sign SAĜ "head" (Borger nr. 184, U+12295 𒊕). Stages: shows the pictogram as it was drawn around 3000 BC shows the rotated pictogram as written from c. 2800–2600 BC shows the abstracted glyph in archaic monumental inscriptions, from c. 2600 BC is the sign as written in clay, contemporary with stage 3 represents the late 3rd millennium BC represents Old Assyrian ductus of the early 2nd millennium BC, as adopted into Hittite is the simplified sign as written by Assyrian scribes in the early 1st millennium BC and until the script's extinction.

Archaeology

Archaeologists have found between 500,000 and 2 million cuneiform tablets. But only about 30,000 to 100,000 have been studied or shared with the public. The British Museum has the largest group of these tablets, with around 130,000. Other museums in Berlin, Paris, Istanbul, Iraq, and the United States also have many tablets. Many of these tablets have been in museums for over 100 years without being fully examined, because there are very few experts who can understand and translate them.

Decipherment

Main article: Decipherment of cuneiform

The first cuneiform inscriptions were found in the early 1600s at Persepolis. Scholars studied these inscriptions and saw that they were written in different languages.

The real work of understanding cuneiform began in 1836 when scholars started to learn Old Persian cuneiform. Many people helped to find the meanings of the symbols. By looking at inscriptions from places like Persepolis and Ganjnāme, they learned to read cuneiform. The work was finished when scholars fully understood the Behistun Inscription.

Transliteration

Cuneiform writing uses a special way to show its signs called transliteration. This helps scholars understand the ancient texts better. When transliterating, experts decide how to read each sign because one sign can mean many things.

For example, a sign might stand for a sound, a whole word, or an idea like "god." Transliteration separates these signs with dashes, making it easier to see how they might be read. Scholars use special rules to show different sounds and meanings, like using capital letters for certain words.

These rules help everyone read and study cuneiform texts more clearly.

Sign inventories

See also: List of cuneiform signs and Cuneiform (Unicode block)

The Sumerian cuneiform script had many different signs, about 1,000 at first. Over time, the number of signs was reduced to about 600. Different languages, like Akkadian and Hittite, used some of these signs but not all.

A. Falkenstein counted 939 signs from very early times, and other researchers have listed different numbers depending on when and what language they studied. The way people wrote changed over time, which led to more variations in the signs used.

Syllabary

The tables below show how Sumero-Akkadian sounds were written with cuneiform signs.

Numerals

Main article: Babylonian cuneiform numerals

The Sumerians used a base-60 system for their numbers. For example, the number "70" was shown using the symbol for "60" together with the symbol for "10". The order of these symbols mattered, as it told the reader that the number was 60 plus 10, not 10 plus 60.

Usage

Cuneiform was a writing system used in ancient Mesopotamia for many purposes. People wrote on clay tablets, stone, and wax boards. They used it to record laws, make maps, write medical guides, and share religious stories. Everyone, from ordinary people to scholars, could learn different levels of cuneiform.

Today, some modern logos are inspired by cuneiform symbols. For example, the logo of the Liberty Fund uses a symbol meaning “liberty,” and the GigaMesh Software Framework uses a symbol that means “street” or “road junction.”

Unicode

Unicode version 16.0 has special sections for an ancient writing system called cuneiform. These sections include characters used for languages like Sumerian and Akkadian. The characters are grouped into special number ranges, which helps computers show and study this old script.

The idea to add cuneiform to Unicode was suggested by experts in 2004. They used lists of cuneiform signs from big research projects to choose which characters to add. This helps historians and students use cuneiform texts on modern computers.

Corpus

Many efforts have been made since the 1800s to collect all known cuneiform writings. Today, two important projects continue this work: the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative and the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus. These help scholars study the ancient scripts more easily.