#cueniform

By Bjørn Christian Tørrissen - Own work by uploader, http://bjornfree.com/galleries.html, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8296178

Cuneiform is a specific writing system that was in use from about 4000 BCE to about 75 CE in Mesopotamia and the wider Middle East. It was initially developed to record livestock and other commodities, perhaps for transactions or taxes. Tokens used for accounting purposes gradually evolved into tablets that were inscribed with a stylus that gave cuneiform its particular shape. It was initially used by the Sumerian people, who spoke a language that was unrelated to any other around it. Drawings of animals and glyphs that recorded numbers were rotated and simplified as the writing system developed into a fuller written language. It wasn't until the Romans conquered the area that it was replaced it with their alphabet.

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The Sumerians had their own story about how their written language was developed that was recorded around 1800 BCE in an epic poem called Enmerkar and the Land of Aratta that goes "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." Kulaba is also known as Uruk, one of the major city-states of the Sumerian people, The location does match where the earliest cuneiform tablets were found.

By Mason, William Albert, 1855-1923 - This file has been extracted from another file, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87617492

Similar to hieroglyphs, though developed separately, cuneiform started out as a pictographic language, where the symbol written corresponded to a specific word. There is some evidence that Sumerian glyphs influenced the development of Egyptian hieroglyphs given they developed before and the two groups of people were in contact with each other, though it's difficult to tell for sure, from this end of history, if that is true or not.

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Seven stages are recognized in the development of cuneiform through its usage. The first stage is a pictogram, then the pictogram was rotated from a vertical orientation to a horizontal orientation. The next step shows an abstraction of that pictogram and then adapted to writing with the stylus and clay tablet. Next, the system was adapted for use with the Hittite language, then simplified to use with the Assyrian language.

By Unknown artist - Marie-Lan Nguyen (2005), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=407203

As the ideas being recorded became more complicated than recording keeping, the pictographs evolved into a type of syllabic system. This started with homophones being represented by the same symbol (for example 'life' (tii) and 'arrow' (ti) sounding very similar and being written with the same symbol, which gradually began to represent the sound 'ti'. This was not a one symbol to one sound, as in Japanese katakana and hiragana, though. Some sounds had up to fourteen symbols, where words that were closely related might share a symbol. Symbols also had grammatical meanings and their meaning could shift depending on how they're combined, more like the Chinese writing system. There were even symbols that had no effect on the sounds but adjusted the meaning of the words around them. Sumerian was spoken until somewhere between 2100-1700 BCE.

By Gire 3pich2005 - This file was derived from: Akkadian syllabary.svg, FAL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87405344

The Akkadian people began using cuneiform despite speaking a completely unrelated language. They found it useful since their languages used similar sounds. There were about 600 symbols in use at the time. There were some symbols that represented words which changed their pronunciation (for example, the symbol for 'sheep' went from being pronounced 'uda' to 'immerum'). The written language evolved to work better with various dialects of Akkadian and then adapted to work with five types of wedge shapes: horizontal, vertical, downward from left to right, upward from right to left, and a carat shape called a Winkelhaken or hook. Signs then were written with between five and ten wedges and some linked signs could have up to twenty, or even up to 31.

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The Elamite people used a simplified version of the Akkadian version of cuneiform. The earliest known version appeared around 2200 BCE, though some experts think it had been in use since 2500 BCE. The oldest document found was a treaty between the Akkadian emperor Nāramsîn and the Elamite ruler Hita, stating "Nāramsîn's friend is my friend, Nāramsîn's enemy is my enemy".

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The Hittite adopted cuneiform around 1800 BCE. They used both Akkadian and Sumerian symbols, and Akkadian spellings as well for many of their words, making it impossible to figure out how they pronounced those particular words. This pattern seemed to have held for the Hurrian and Urartian people (approximately 2300-1000 BCE).

By Theophilus Goldridge Pinches M.R.A.S. (1856 – 6 June 1934 Muswell Hill, London) - Miscelleneous inscription Vol 5, Column 2, line 98Published in 1905, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91330812

The next major peoples to use cuneiform were the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonians starting about 911 BCE. They further simplified the number of symbols as well as relying more on wedges and square angles, making the symbols more abstract than they had been before. The script became more phonetic and less representative of real-world objects.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Persian_cuneiform

The last major group of people to use cuneiform was the Old Persian empire. Darius the Great was king around 490 BCE when cuneiform was simplified into a semi-alphabetic script with symbols for words that were used frequently. There were 36 phonetic characters and 8 symbols. Within this language, there were three vowel sound (a, i, u) and twenty two consonants (k, x, g, c, ç, j, t, θ, d, p, f, b, n, m, y, v, r l, x, z, š, h). The consonants are blended with vowels to form the morphemes that make up the language, similar to Japanese katakana and hiragana. Consonants that can be used on their own are written with the symbol blended with the a vowel. There was also a symbol to separate words. Because of this simplicity, this version was the first translated by modern scholars. It also helped that there were many inscriptions written in two or three languages, lending assistance to the translators for the more complicated versions of cuneiform.

logograms (word signs):

Ahuramazdā (the creator deity in Zoroastrianism): 𐏈, 𐏉, 𐏊 (genitive)

xšāyaθiya "king": 𐏋

dahyāuš- "country": 𐏌, 𐏍

baga- "god": 𐏎

būmiš- "earth": 𐏏

word divider: 𐏐

numerals:

1 𐏑, 2 𐏒, 5 𐏒𐏒𐏑, 7 𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏑, 8 𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏒, 9 𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏑

10 𐏓, 12 𐏓𐏒, 13 𐏓𐏒𐏑, 14 𐏓𐏒𐏒, 15 𐏓𐏒𐏒𐏑, 18 𐏓𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏒, 19 𐏓𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏑, 20 𐏔, 22 𐏔𐏒, 23 𐏔𐏒𐏑, 25 𐏔𐏒𐏒𐏑, 26 𐏔𐏒𐏒𐏒, 27 𐏔𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏑, 40 𐏔𐏔, 60 𐏔𐏔𐏔,

120 𐏕𐏔

Resources: The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD)

An Introductory Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform Syllabary [English]