Cuneiform Books
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Penguin (Non-Classics) (01 September 1999)Price: $12.24 -
Oxford University Press, USA (15 February 2009)Price: $9.86 -
University Of Chicago Press (15 February 1971)Price: $17.68 -
Harper Perennial (03 September 1983)Price: $11.66 -
Wiley-Blackwell (13 October 2006)Price: $33.65
Definition
The development of cuneiform writing was an evolution of an earlier Mesopotamian accounting system that had been used for five thousand years before. Clay tokens had been used for some form of record-keeping in Mesopotamia since as early as 8,000 BC. Cuneiform documents were written on clay tablets, by means of a reed stylus. The impressions left by the stylus were wedge shaped, thus giving rise to the name cuneiform ("wedge shaped," from the Latin cuneus, meaning "wedge").
Cuneiform script underwent considerable changes over a period spanning three millennia. In the course of the 3rd millennium BC the script became successively more cursive, and the pictographs developed into conventionalized linear drawings, the number of characters in use also refined from around 1,000 unique characters in the Early Bronze Age to around 400 characters in Late Bronze Age.
The original Sumerian script was adapted for the writing of the Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Luwian, Hattic, Hurrian, and Urartian languages, and it inspired the Ugaritic and Old Persian alphabets. Cuneiform writing was gradually replaced by the Aramaic alphabet during the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and by the second century of BC, the script had become extinct.
Articles
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The cuneiform script proper emerges out of pictographic proto-writing in the later 4th millennium BC. Mesopotamia's "proto-literate" period spans the 35th to 32nd centuries BC. The first documents unequivocally written in the Sumerian language date to the 31st century, found at Jemdet Nasr.
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Writing is undeniably one of humanity's most important inventions. The earliest forms of storing information on objects were numerical inscriptions on clay tablets, used for administration, accounting and trade. The first writing system dates back to around 3000 BC, when the Sumerians developed the first type script: hundreds of abbreviated pictograms that could be pressed into clay.
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Illustrations
