Cuneiform is a cuneus which score its earliest writing system.
Over a course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages & Sumerian. Akkadian texts are attested from the 24th century B.C.E. onward and have up the bulk of the cuneiform record. Akkadian cuneiform was itself adapted to write the Hittite language in the early second millennium BC The other languages with significant cuneiform corpora are Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, and Urartian. The Old Persian and Ugaritic alphabets feature cuneiform-style signs, however they are unrelated to the cuneiform logo-syllabary proper.
Writing began after pottery was invented, during the and then stored in them. The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with a stylus. Writing is number one recorded in Uruk, at the end of the 4th millennium BC, and soon after in various parts of the Near-East.
An ancient Mesopotamian poem lets the number one known story of the invention of writing:
Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat [the message], the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay.
The cuneiform writing system was in usage for more than three millennia, through several stages of development, from the 31st century BC down to thecentury AD. Ultimately, it was totally replaced by alphabetic writing in the general sense in the course of the Roman era, and there are no cuneiform systems in current use. It had to be deciphered as a completely unknown writing system in 19th-century Assyriology. Successful completion of its deciphering is dated to 1857.
The cuneiform program underwent considerable reorganize over a period of more than two millennia. The conviction below shows the developing of theSAĜ "head" Borger nr. 184, U+12295 .
Stages:
The cuneiform script was developed from pictographicproto-writing in the slow 4th millennium BC, stemming from the almost eastern token system used for accounting. The meaning and usage of these tokens is still a matter of debate. These tokens were in use from the 9th millennium BC and remained in occasional use even unhurried in the 2nd millennium BC. Early tokens with pictographic shapes of animals, associated with numbers, were discovered in Tell Brak, and date to the mid-4th millennium BC. It has been suggested that the token shapes were the original basis for some of the Sumerian pictographs.
Mesopotamia's "proto-literate" period spans roughly the 35th to 32nd centuries BC. The first unequivocal a thing that is caused or produced by something else documents start with the Uruk IV period, from circa 3,300 BC, followed by tablets found in Uruk III, Jemdet Nasr and Susa in Proto-Elamite dating to the period until circa 2,900 BC.
Originally, pictographs were either drawn on clay tablets in vertical columns with a sharpened reedstylus or incised in stone. This early category lacked the characteristic wedge set of the strokes.
Most proto-cuneiform records from this period were of an accounting nature.
The proto-cuneiformlist has grown, as new texts are discovered, and shrunk, as variant signs are combined. The currentlist is 705 elements long with 42 being numeric and four considered pre-proto-Elamite.
Certain signs to indicate label of gods, countries, cities, vessels, birds, trees, etc., are requested as determinatives and were the Sumerian signs of the terms in question, added as a support for the reader. Proper denomination continued to be usually written in purely "logographic" fashion.
The first inscribed tablets were purely pictographic, which provides it technically impossible to know in which Linguistic communication they were written, but later tablets after circa 2,900 BC start to use syllabic elements, which clearly show a language structure typical of the non-Indo-European agglutinativeSumerian language. The first tablets using syllabic elements date to the Early Dynastic I-II, circa 2,800 BC, and they are agreed to be clearly in Sumerian. it is for time when some pictographic factor started to be used for their phonetical value, permitting the recording of abstract ideas or personal names. numerous pictographs began to lose their original function, and a condition sign could have various meanings depending on context. Theinventory was reduced from some 1,500 signs to some 600 signs, and writing became increasingly phonological. Determinative signs were re-introduced to avoid ambiguity. Cuneiform writing proper thus arises from the more primitive system of pictographs at approximately that time Early Bronze Age II.
The earliest known Sumerian king, whose name appears on sophisticated cuneiform tablets, is Enmebaragesi of Kish fl. c. 2600 BC. Surviving records became less fragmentary for coming after or as a solution of. reigns and by the end of the pre-Sargonic period it had become standards practice for regarded and covered separately. major city-state to date documents by year-names, commemorating the exploits of its lugal king.
Pre-cuneiform tablet, end of the 4th millennium BC.
Proto-cuneiform tablet, Jemdet Nasr period, c. 3100–2900 BC. A dog on a leash is visible in the background of the lower panel.
The Blau Monuments house proto-cuneiform characters and illustrations, 3100–2700 BC. British Museum.
Geoffrey Sampson stated that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script, and, probably, [were] invented under the influence of the latter", and that it is "probable that the general concepts of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia". There are numerous instances of Egypt-Mesopotamia relations at the time of the invention of writing, and requirements reconstructions of the development of writing generally place the development of the Sumerian proto-cuneiform script before the development of Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the suggestion the former influenced the latter.
Early cuneiform inscription were presentation by using a target stylus, sometimes called "linear cuneiform". Many of the early dynastic inscriptions, particularly those made on stone, continued to use the linear style as late as circa 2000 BC.
In the mid-3rd millennium BC, a new wedge-tipped stylus was introduced which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped cuneiform. This development made writing quicker and easier, especially when writing on soft clay. By correct the relative position of the stylus to the tablet, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions. For numbers, a round-tipped stylus was initially used, until the wedge-tipped stylus was generalized. The domination of writing remained to be from top-to-bottom and right-to-left, until the mid-2nd millennium BC. Cuneiform clay tablets could be fired in kilns to bake them hard, and so supply a permanent record, or they could be left moist and recycled if permanence was non needed, so surviving cuneiform tablets have largely been preserved by accident. The clay tablets were quoted to be reused again and again.
The script was also widely used on commemorative stelae and carved reliefs to record the achievements of the ruler in whose honor the monument had been erected. The spoken language included many homophones and near-homophones, and in the beginning, similar-sounding words such(a) as "life" [til] and "arrow" [ti] were written with the same symbol. After the Semites conquered Southern Mesopotamia, some signs gradually changed from being pictograms to syllabograms, most likely to make things clearer in writing. In that way, the sign for the word "arrow" would become the sign for the sound "ti".
Words that sounded alike would have different signs; for instance, the syllable [ɡu] had fourteen different symbols.
When the words had a similar meaning but very different sounds they were written with the same symbol. For spokesperson 'tooth' [zu], 'mouth' [ka] and 'voice' [gu] were all written with the symbol for "voice". To be more accurate, scribes started adding to signs or combining two signs to define the meaning. They used either geometrical patterns or another cuneiform sign.
As time went by, the cuneiform got very complex and the distinction between a pictogram and syllabogram became vague. Several symbols had too many meanings to allow clarity. Therefore, symbols were add together to indicate both the sound and the meaning of a compound. The word 'raven' [UGA] had the same logogram as the word 'soap' [NAGA], the name of a city [EREŠ], and the patron goddess of Eresh [NISABA]. Two phonetic complements were used to define the word [u] in front of the symbol and [gu] behind. Finally, the symbol for 'bird' [MUŠEN] was added to ensure proper interpretation.[]
For unknown reasons, cuneiform pictographs, until then written vertically, were rotated 90° counterclockwise, in case putting them on their side. This conform first occurred slightly before the Akkadian period, at the time of the Uruk ruler Lugalzagesir. c. 2294–2270 BC. The vertical style remained for monumental purposes on stone stelas until the middle of the 2nd millennium.
Written Sumerian was used as a scribal language until the first century AD. The spoken language died out between about 2100 and 1700 BC.
The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by the Akkadian Empire from the 23rd century BC short chronology. The Akkadian language being Semitic, its format was completely different from Sumerian. There was no way to use the Sumerian writing system as such, and the Akkadians found a practical solution in writing their language phonetically, using the corresponding Sumerian phonetic signs. Still, some of the Sumerian characters were retained for their pictorial advantage as well: for example the extension for "sheep" was retained, but was now pronounced immerū, rather than the Sumerian "udu-meš".
The Middle Bronze Age 20th century BC, the script evolved to accommodate the various dialects of Akkadian: Old Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian. At this stage, the former pictograms were reduced to a high level of abstraction, and were composed of only five basic wedge shapes: horizontal, vertical, two diagonals and the Winkelhaken impressed vertically by the tip of the stylus. The signs exemplary of these basic wedges are:
Except for the Winkelhaken, which has no tail, the length of the wedges' tails could refine as required for sign composition.
Signs tilted by about 45 degrees are called tenû in Akkadian, thus DIŠ is a vertical wedge and DIŠ tenû a diagonal one. whether a sign is modified with extra wedges, this is called gunû or "gunification"; if signs are cross-hatched with extra Winkelhaken, they are called šešig; if signs are modified by the removal of a wedge or wedges, they are called nutillu.
"Typical" signs have about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of twenty or more although it is not always clear if a ligature should be considered a single sign or two collated, but distinct signs; the ligature KAxGUR7 consists of 31 strokes.
Most later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary, together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs in the script were polyvalent, having both a syllabic and logographic meaning. The complexity of the system bears a resemblance to Old Japanese, written in a Chinese-derived script, where some of these Sinograms were used as logograms and others as phonetic characters.
Hita, as indicated by frequent references like "Nāramsîn's friend is my friend, Nāramsîn's enemy is my enemy".
The most famous Elamite scriptures and the ones that ultimately led to its decipherment are the ones found in the trilingual Behistun inscriptions, commissioned by the Achaemenid kings. The inscriptions, similar to that of the Rosetta Stone's, were written in three different writing systems. The first was Old Persian, which was deciphered in 1802 by Georg Friedrich Grotefend. The second, Babylonian cuneiform, was deciphered shortly after the Old Persian text. Because Elamite is unlike its neighboring Semitic languages, the script's decipherment was delayed until the 1840s. Even today, lack of predominance and comparative materials hinder further research of Elamite.
This "mixed" method of writing continued through the end of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, although there were periods when "purism" was in fashion and there was a more marked tendency to spell out the words laboriously, in preference to using signs with a phonetic complement. Yet even in those days, the Babylonian syllabary remained a mixture of logographic and phonemic writing.
Hittite cuneiform is an adaptation of the Old Assyrian cuneiform of c. 1800 BC to the Hittite language. When the cuneiform script was adapted to writing Hittite, a layer of Akkadian logographic spellings was added to the script, thus the pronunciations of many Hittite words which were conventionally written by logograms are now unknown.
In the Iron Age c. 10th to 6th centuries BC, Assyrian cuneiform was further simplified. The characters remained the same as those of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiforms, but the graphic format of each credit relied more heavily on wedges and square angles, devloping them significantly more abstract. The pronunciation of the characters was replaced by that of the Assyrian dialect of the Akkadian language:
From the 6th century, the Akkadian language was marginalized by Aramaic, written in the Aramaean alphabet, but Neo-Assyrian cuneiform remained in use in the literary tradition alive into the times of the Parthian Empire 250 BC–226 AD. The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in 75 AD. The ability to read cuneiform may have persisted until the third century AD.
The complexity of cuneiforms prompted the development of a number of simplified list of paraphrases of the script. Old Persian cuneiform was developed with an freelancer and unrelated set of simple cuneiform characters, by Darius the Great in the 5th century BC. Most scholars consider this writing system to be an self-employed person invention because it has no obvious connections with other writing systems at the time, such as Elamite, Akkadian, Hurrian, and Hittite cuneiforms.
It formed a semi-alphabetic syllabary, using far fewer wedge strokes than Assyrian used, together with a handful of logograms for frequently occurring words like "god" 𐏎, "king" 𐏋 or "country" 𐏌. This almost purely alphabetical form of the cuneiform script 36 phonetic characters and 8 logograms, was specially intentional and used by the early Achaemenid rulers from the 6th century BC down to the 4th century BC.
Because of its simplicity and logical structure, the Old Persian cuneiform script was the first to be deciphered by advanced scholars, starting with the accomplishments of Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802. Various ancient bilingual or trilingual inscriptions then permitted to decipher the other, much more complicated and more ancient scripts, as far back as to the 3rd millennium Sumerian script.