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Cuneiform: Wikipedia
Quoting wikipedia: Cuneiform script is one of the earliest known systems of writing. Emerging in Sumer in the late 4th millennium BC (the Uruk IV period), cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs. In the third millennium, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract as the number of characters in use grew smaller, from about 1,000 in the Early Bronze Age to about 400 in Late Bronze Age (Hittite cuneiform). 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 Phoenician alphabet during the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and by the 2nd century AD, the script had become extinct, all knowledge of how to read it forgotten until it began to be deciphered in the 19th century. Cuneiform documents were written on clay tablets, by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. The impressions left by the stylus were wedge shaped, thus giving rise to the name cuneiform "wedge shaped", from the Latin cuneus "wedge". The cuneiform writing system was in use for more than 35 centuries, through several stages of development, from the 34th century BC down to the 2nd century AD. It was completely replaced by alphabetic writing in the course of the Roman era and there are no Cuneiform systems in current use. For this reason, it had to be deciphered from scratch in 19th century Assyriology. Successful completion of decipherment is dated to 1857. The system consists of a combination of logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic and syllabic signs. The cuneiform script underwent considerable changes over a period of more than two millennia. Cuneiforms can be partitioned by era, from the Proto-literate period (4th millennium BC until about 2900 BC), the archaic cuneiform (3rd millennium BC), Akkadian cuneiform (ca. 2500 BC), and finally Assyrian cuneiform. Derived scripts include Old Persian cuneiform, and Ugaritic. |
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file name: Cuneiform History
file name: Cuneiform History after after Samuel Noah Kramer
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Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ https://luc.devroye.org ⦿ https://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html |