Mark Ronan's website
Cuneiform
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Cuneiform
was a system of writing, dating from before 3000 BC until the early years AD.
It used characters built up from wedge-shaped strokes (hence the term
cuneiform, derived from the Latin word cuneus meaning a wedge), and most texts were written on
clay tablets. The use of clay means that an enormous amount of material has
survived, albeit in a fragmentary state, and we can now read letters, legal
documents, omens, medical texts, and many other records written between two
thousand and five thousand years ago. In its formative stage, with symbols
scratched on clay tablets, rather than formed using the later wedge-shaped
strokes, it is probably the earliest writing system in the world. An
excellent introduction to cuneiform is given by C.B.F. Walker (Cuneiform, British Museum Press). A
cuneiform sign can stand for a whole word, or part of a word, or it can
indicate that the following or preceding word is the name of a person, god,
plant, fish, bird, etc. Many cuneiform signs can also take purely phonetic
values. The earliest cuneiform tablets are lists, in which the signs are
words (including numbers) or parts of words, and it is not obvious what
language is being written. Grammatical elements, in the form of phonetic
signs appear in about 2600 BC and it is then clear that the texts are in the Sumerian language. Later in about 2350 BC the Akkadian language was also written, and the script was adapted to
write a variety of quite different languages: Elamite, Eblaite, Hurrian, Hittite, and a few others.
The direction of writing was from left to right, except in some early texts
where the signs are distributed in rectangular boxes, the boxes being read
one after another in columns, from top to bottom, with the first column on
the left. The
world's first alphabet, for the Ugaritic language (spoken in Ugarit on the
Syrian coast), used adaptations of cuneiform signs, and came into use between
1400 and 1300 BC. For
a good website on cuneiform, giving examples of how the signs developed, see
the University of Pennsylvania website. |
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