Cuneiform script (pronounced /kjuːˈniː.ɨfɔrm/ kew-NEE-i-form or /ˈkjuːnɨfɔrm/ KEW-ni-form) is one of the earliest known forms of written expression Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that one must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to comprehend the text. By contrast, other possible symbolic systems such as information signs, painting, maps and mathematics often do not require prior knowledge of a spoken language. Emerging in Sumer Sumer was a civilization and historical region in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. It is the earliest known civilization in the world and is known as the Cradle of Civilization. The Sumerian civilization spanned over 3000 years and began with the first settlement of Eridu in the Ubaid period (mid 6th millennium BC) through the Uruk period (4th around the 30th century BC Categories: 3rd millennium BC | 30th century BC | Centuries | , with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium (the Uruk IV period), cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs A pictograph is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Earliest examples of pictographs include ancient or prehistoric drawings or paintings found on rock walls. Pictographs are also used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to considerable extent pictorial in appearance. In the course of the 3rd millennium BC the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract. The number of characters in use also grew gradually smaller, from about 1,000 unique characters in the Early Bronze Age The Bronze Age of a culture is the period when the most advanced metalworking in that culture used bronze. This could either have been based on the local smelting of copper and tin from ores, or trading for bronze from production areas elsewhere. Many, though not all, Bronze Age cultures flourished in prehistory to about 400 unique characters in Late Bronze Age (Hittite cuneiform Hittite cuneiform is the implementation of cuneiform script used in writing the Hittite language. The surviving corpus of Hittite texts is preserved in cuneiform on clay tablets dates to the 2nd millennium BC). Cuneiform writing was gradually replaced by alphabetic writing The Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet, and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BCE. The letters all represent consonants, some of which are matres lectionis, which also indicate long vowels in the Iron Age Neo-Assyrian Empire The Neo-Assyrian Empire was a period of Mesopotamian history which began in 934 BC and ended in 608 BC. During this period, Assyria assumed a position as possibly the most powerful nation on earth, and vying with Babylonia and other lesser powers for dominance of the region, though not until the reforms of Tiglath-Pileser III in the 8th century BC, and was practically extinct by the beginning of the Common Era Common Era, abbreviated as CE, is one of the designations for the world's most commonly used year-numbering system. The numbering of years using Common Era notation is identical to the numbering used with Anno Domini notation, 2010 being the current year in both notations and neither using a year zero. Common Era is also known as Christian Era and. It was deciphered from scratch in 19th century scholarship.

Cuneiform documents were written on clay tablets From the 4th millennium BCE in the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Hittite civilizations of the Mesopotamia region, cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of reed. Once written upon, many tablets were dried in the sun or air, remaining fragile. Later, these unfired clay tablets could be soaked in water, by means of a blunt reed Phragmites australis, the common reed, is a large perennial grass found in wetlands throughout temperate and tropical regions of the world. It is sometimes regarded as the sole species of the genus Phragmites, though some botanists divide Phragmites australis into three or four species and in particular the South Asian Khagra Reed is often treated for a stylus A stylus is a writing utensil. The word is also used for a computer accessory (PDAs). It usually refers to a narrow elongated staff, similar to a modern ballpoint pen. Many styluses are heavily curved to be held more easily. Another widely-used writing tool is the stylus used by blind users in conjunction with the slate for punching out the dots. The impressions left by the stylus were wedge shaped, thus giving rise to the name cuneiform ("wedge shaped," from the Latin cuneus, meaning "wedge").

The Sumerian script was adapted for the writing of the Akkadian Akkadian (also Accadian, Assyro-Babylonian) is an extinct Semitic language (part of the greater Afroasiatic language family) that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate. The name of the language is, Eblaite Eblaite is an extinct Semitic language, which was spoken in the 3rd millennium BCE in the ancient city of Ebla, at Tell Mardikh (تل مرديخ), between Aleppo and Hama, in western modern Syria. It is considered to be the second oldest written Semitic language after Akkadian, Elamite Elamite is an extinct language spoken by the ancient Elamites. Elamite was an official language of the Persian Empire from the sixth to fourth centuries BC. The last written records in Elamite appear about the time of the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great, Hittite Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia. The language is attested in cuneiform, in records from the 16th (Anitta text) down to the 13th century BC, with isolated Hittite loanwords and numerous personal names appearing in an Old Assyrian context from, Luwian Luwian is an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. Luwian is closely related to Hittite, and was among the languages spoken during the second and first millennia BC by population groups in central Anatolia, to the west or southwest of the core Hittite area . In the oldest texts, eg. the Hittite Code, the, Hattic Hattic was a language spoken by the Hattians in Asia Minor between the 3rd and the 2nd millennia BC. Scholars call this language 'Hattic' to distinguish it from the Hittite language--the Indo-European language of the Hittite Empire, Hurrian Hurrian is a conventional name for the language of the Hurrians , a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly vanished by 1000 BC. Hurrian was the language of the Mitanni kingdom in northern Mesopotamia, and was likely spoken at least initially in Hurrian settlements in Syria. It is generally believed that the speakers, and Urartian Urartian, Vannic, and Chaldean are conventional names for the language spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu that was located in the region of Lake Van, with its capital near the site of the modern town of Van, in the Armenian Highland, modern-day Eastern Anatolia region of Turkey languages, and it inspired the Ugaritic The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform abjad (alphabet without vowels), used from around 1500 BCE for the Ugaritic language, an extinct Northwest Semitic language discovered in Ugarit, Syria, in 1928. It has 31 letters. Other languages (particularly Hurrian) were occasionally written in it in the Ugarit area, although not elsewhere and Old Persian Old Persian cuneiform is a semi-alphabetic cuneiform script that was the primary script for the Old Persian language national alphabets.

Contents

History

The cuneiform writing system was in use for more than 30 centuries, as the world's first system through several stages of evolution, from the 34th century BC down to the 1st century AD.[1] It was completely replaced by alphabetic writing An alphabet is a standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit, and syllabaries, in which each character in the course of the Roman era The Roman era is a period in Western history, when Ancient Rome was the centre of power of the world around the Mediterranean Sea, where Latin was the lingua franca. The era precedes the Middle Ages and has left behind no descendant systems in continued use. For this reason, it had to be deciphered from scratch in 19th century Assyriology Assyriology is the archaeological, historical, and linguistic study of ancient Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq) and the related cultures that used cuneiform writing. The field covers the Akkadian sister-cultures of Assyria and Babylonia, together with their cultural predecessor; Sumer. The large number of cuneiform clay tablets preserved by these. Successful completion of decipherment is dated to 1857.

The system consists of a combination of logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic and syllabic signs.[2]

The cuneiform script underwent considerable changes over a period of more than two millennia. The image below shows the development of the sign SAG "head" (Borger nr. 184, U+12295 𒊕).

Stage 1 shows the pictogram as it was drawn around 3000 BC. Stage 2 shows the rotated pictogram as written around 2800 BC. Stage 3 shows the abstracted glyph in archaic monumental inscriptions, from ca. 2600 BC, and stage 4 is the sign as written in clay, contemporary to stage 3. Stage 5 represents the late 3rd millennium, and stage 6 represents Old Assyrian ductus of the early 2nd millennium, as adopted into Hittite. Stage 7 is the simplified sign as written by Assyrian scribes in the early 1st millennium, and until the script's extinction.

Proto-literate period

The cuneiform script proper emerges out of pictographic proto-writing The history of writing follows the art of expressing thought by letters or other marks. In the history of how systems of representation of language through graphic means have evolved in different human civilizations, more complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of ideographic and/or early mnemonic symbol. Language in the later 4th millennium. Mesopotamia's "proto-literate" period spans the 35th to 32nd centuries. The first documents unequivocally written in the Sumerian language Sumerian was the language of ancient Sumer, spoken in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) since at least the 4th millennium BCE. During the third millennium BCE, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian (and vice versa) date to the 31st century, found at Jemdet Nasr Jemdet Nasr is an archaeological site in Iraq's Babil Governorate, situated to the north-east of Babylon and Kish and east of Kutha. It may hold the earliest written account of any language.

The Sumerians of the Uruk period The Uruk period existed from the protohistoric Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age period in the history of Mesopotamia, following the Ubaid period and succeeded by the Jemdet Nasr period. Named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia. It was followed by the Sumerian civilization. The late Uruk used clay tokens to count their agricultural and manufactured foods. They would place the tokens in hollow clay containers and mark the lids with the number of tokens inside. They impressed a picture of the token inside as many times as the amount of tokens. Later they realized that they did not have to use both the tokens and the inscription on the containers, so they started using only the inscription. Later yet this system was streamlined with the introduction of symbols for numbers: for example, to avoid making 100 pictures to represent 100 tokens they started using a dedicated symbol for 100 together with a single token picture. Thus writing began.[2]

Originally, pictograms were either drawn on clay Clay is a naturally occurring material composed primarily of fine-grained minerals. Clay deposits are mostly composed of clay minerals, a subtype of phyllosilicate minerals, which impart plasticity and harden when fired or dried; they also may contain variable amounts of water trapped in the mineral structure by polar attraction. Organic materials tablets in vertical columns with a pen A pen is a long, thin, rounded device used to apply ink to a surface for the purpose of writing or drawing, usually on paper. There are several different types, including ballpoint, rollerball, fountain, and felt-tip. Historically, reed pens, quill pens, and dip pens were used. Modern-day pens come in a variety of colors, shapes and assortments made from a sharpened reed Phragmites australis, the common reed, is a large perennial grass found in wetlands throughout temperate and tropical regions of the world. It is sometimes regarded as the sole species of the genus Phragmites, though some botanists divide Phragmites australis into three or four species and in particular the South Asian Khagra Reed is often treated stylus A stylus is a writing utensil. The word is also used for a computer accessory (PDAs). It usually refers to a narrow elongated staff, similar to a modern ballpoint pen. Many styluses are heavily curved to be held more easily. Another widely-used writing tool is the stylus used by blind users in conjunction with the slate for punching out the dots, or incised in stone. This early style lacked the characteristic wedge shape of the strokes.

Certain signs to indicate names of gods, countries, cities, vessels, birds, trees, etc., are known as determinants A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they may derive historically from glyphs for real words, and functionally they resemble classifiers in East, and were the Sumerian signs of the terms in question, added as a guide for the reader. Proper names continued to be usually written in purely "logographic" fashion.

From about 2900 BC, many pictographs began to lose their original function, and a given sign could have various meanings depending on context. The sign inventory was reduced from some 1,500 signs to some 600 signs, and writing became increasingly phonological Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system. When describing the formal area of study, the term typically describes linguistic analysis either beneath the. Determinative signs were re-introduced to avoid ambiguity. This process is chronologically parallel to, and possibly not independent of,[citation needed] the development of Egyptian hieroglyphic Egyptian hieroglyphs (pronounced /ˈhaɪroʊɡlɪf/; from Greek ἱερογλύφος "sacred carving", itself pronounced [ˌhieroˈɡlypʰos]) was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on orthography.

Archaic cuneiform

Further information: Liste der archaischen Keilschriftzeichen Sumerian inscription in monumental archaic style, ca. 26th century BC Letter sent by the high-priest Lu'enna to the king of Lagash Lagash (Sumerian: Lagaš; transliteration: Lagaški; cuneiform logogram: ?𒁓𒆷𒆠 (literal signs: [SHIR.BUR].LA-KI); Akkadian: nakamtu; modern Tell al-Hiba, Iraq) is located northwest of the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and east of Uruk, Lagash was one of the oldest cities of Sumer and later Babylonia. Nearby Ngirsu (modern (maybe Urukagina Urukagina , alternately rendered as Uruinimgina or Irikagina, was a ruler (énsi) of the city-state Lagash in Mesopotamia. He is best known for his reforms to combat corruption, which are sometimes cited as the first example of a legal code in recorded history. Although the actual text has not been discovered yet, much of its content may be), informing him of his son's death in combat, c. 2400 BC, found in Telloh (ancient Ngirsu Ngirsu is modern Tell Telloh, Dhi Qar Governorate, Iraq, and it was a city of ancient Sumer, situated some 25 kilometres (16 mi) northwest of Lagash. Because of the initial nasal velar ŋ, the transcription of Ĝirsu is usually spelled as Ngirsu (also: G̃irsu, Girsu, Jirsu) to avoid confusion).

In the mid-3rd millennium BC, writing direction was changed to left to right in horizontal rows (rotating all of the pictograms 90° counter-clockwise in the process), and a new wedge-tipped stylus was used which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped ("cuneiform") signs; these two developments made writing quicker and easier. By adjusting the relative position of the tablet to the stylus, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions.

Cuneiform tablets could be fired in kilns Kilns are an essential part of the manufacture of all ceramics, which, by definition, require heat treatment, often at high temperature. During this process, chemical and physical reactions occur which cause the material to be permanently altered. In the case of pottery, clay materials are shaped, dried and then fired in a kiln. The final to provide a permanent record, or they could be recycled if permanence was not needed. Many of the clay tablets found by archaeologists were preserved because they were fired when attacking armies burned the building in which they were kept.

The script was also widely used on commemorative stelae A stele is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected for funerals or commemorative purposes, most usually decorated with the names and titles of the deceased or living — inscribed, carved in relief (bas-relief, sunken-relief, high-relief, and so forth), or painted onto the slab. It can also be used as territorial markers and carved reliefs to record the achievements of the ruler in whose honour the monument had been erected.

The spoken language consisted of many similar sounds and in the beginning the words "Life" [ti] and "Arrow" [til] were described in writing by the same symbol. After the Semites conquered Southern Mesopotamia, most likely to make things clearer in writing, some signs gradually changed from being pictograms to syllabograms. In that way the sign for the word "Arrow" would become the sign for the sound "ti". If a sound would represent many different words the words would all have different signs, for instance the syllable "gu" had fourteen different symbols. When the words had similar meaning but very different sounds they were written with the same symbol. For instance "tooth" [zu], "mouth" [ka] and "voice" [gu] were all written with the symbol for "voice". To be more accurate they started adding to signs or combine two signs to define the meaning. They used either geometrical patterns or another cuneiform sign.[2]

As time went by the cuneiform got very complex and the difference between a pictogram and syllabogram were getting vague. Several symbols were too overloaded to be clear. Therefore, symbols were begun to put together to define the writing in a better way and to give a hint on the meaning of the symbol (word). The word "Raven" [UGA] had the same logogram as the words "soap" [NAGA] "name of a city" [ERESH] and "the patron goddess of Eresh" [NISABA]. Two phonetic compliments were used to define the word [u] in front of the symbol and [gu] behind. To be sure there would not be any complications they added the symbol for "bird" [MUSHEN] behind the three symbols. The written part of the Sumerian language was used as a learned written language until the 1st century AD. The spoken language died out around the 18th century BC.[2]

Akkadian cuneiform

A list of Sumerian deities, ca. 2400 BC

The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by the Akkadians The Akkadian Empire was an empire centered in the city of Akkad and its surrounding region (Akkadian URU Akkad KI) in Ancient Iraq, (Mesopotamia). The Akkadian state was the predecessor of the ethnic Akkadian states of Babylonia and Assyria; formed following centuries of Akkadian cultural synergy with Sumerians, it reached the height of its power from ca. 2500 BC, and by 2000 BC had evolved into Old Assyrian cuneiform, with many modifications to Sumerian orthography. The Semitic The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. They constitute a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. The most widely spoken Semitic language by far today is Arabic . It is followed by Amharic (2 equivalents for many signs became distorted or abbreviated to form new "phonetic" values, because the syllabic nature of the script as refined by the Sumerians was unintuitive to Semitic speakers.

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 is tail-less, the length of the wedges' tails could vary as required for sign composition.

Signs tilted by (ca.) 45 degrees are called tenû in Akkadian, thus DIŠ is a vertical wedge and DIŠ tenû a diagonal one. Signs modified with additional wedges are called gunû, and signs crosshatched with additional Winkelhaken are called šešig.

Cuneiform tablet from the Kirkor Minassian collection in the US Library of Congress The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and holds the largest number of books. The head of the, ca. 24th century BC. One of the Amarna letters The Amarna letters are an archive of correspondence on clay tablets, mostly diplomatic, between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru during the New Kingdom. The letters were found in Upper Egypt at Amarna, the modern name for the Egyptian capital of Akhetaten, founded by pharaoh Akhenaten (1350s – 1330s BC), 14th century BC. Neo-Assyrian ligature KAxGUR7 (𒅬); the KA sign (𒅗) was a Sumerian compound marker, and appears frequently in ligatures enclosing other signs. GUR7 is itself a ligature of SÍG.AḪ.ME.U, meaning "to pile up; grain-heap" (Akkadian kamāru; karû).

"Typical" signs have usually in the range of 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 still 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 Akkadian (also Accadian, Assyro-Babylonian) is an extinct Semitic language (part of the greater Afroasiatic language family) that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate. The name of the language is included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables, which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional consonant sound followed by a vowel sound, together with logograms A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes (speech sounds) or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories 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 Japanese (日本語?, [nihoŋɡo] ) is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family. There are a number of proposed relationships with other languages, but none of them has gained unanimous acceptance. Japanese is an agglutinative, written in a Chinese Chinese or the Sinitic language (汉语／漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语／華語 Huáyǔ; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages-derived script, where some of these Sinograms were used as logograms, and others as phonetic characters.

Assyrian cuneiform

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 ca. 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, with the result that we don't know the pronunciations of many Hittite words conventionally written by logograms.

In the Iron Age (ca. 10th to 6th c. BC), Assyrian cuneiform was further simplified. From the 6th century, the Assyrian language was marginalized by Aramaic, written in the Aramaean alphabet, but Neo-Assyrian cuneiform remained in use in literary tradition well into Parthian times ( 250 BC-226 AD ). The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in 75 AD.[citation needed]

Derived scripts

The complexity of the system prompted the development of a number of simplified versions of the script. Old Persian was written in a subset of simplified cuneiform characters known today as Old Persian cuneiform. 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" and "king." The Ugaritic language was written using the Ugaritic alphabet, a standard Semitic style alphabet (an abjad) written using the cuneiform method.

Decipherment

For centuries, travellers to Persepolis, in modern-day Iran, had noticed carved cuneiform inscriptions and were intrigued.[3] Attempts at deciphering these Old Persian writings date back to Arabic/Persian historians of the medieval Islamic world, though these early attempts at decipherment were largely unsuccessful.[4] The Englishman Sir Thomas Herbert in the 1634 edition of his travel book “A relation of some yeares travaile” reported seeing at Persepolis carved on the wall “a dozen lines of strange characters…consisting of figures, obelisk, triangular, and pyramidal” and thought they resembled Greek. However by the 1664 edition he had guessed, correctly, that they represented not letters or hieroglyphics but words and syllables, and furthermore that they were to be read from left to right. He even reproduced some for his readers.[3] He was also correct in guessing that they were not merely decorative, but were ‘legible and intelligible’ and therefore decipherable. However, his insights never received the credit they perhaps deserved and, like earlier Arabic/Persian insights, he is rarely mentioned in standard histories of the decipherment of cuneiform.

Understanding of cuneiform therefore had to wait until Carsten Niebuhr brought the first reasonably complete and accurate copies of the inscriptions at Persepolis to Europe.[3] Bishop Frederic Munter of Copenhagen discovered that the words in the Persian inscriptions were divided from one another by an oblique wedge and that the monuments must belong to the age of Cyrus and his successors. One word, which occurs without any variation towards the beginning of each inscription, he correctly inferred to signify "king".[3] By 1802 Georg Friedrich Grotefend had determined that two king's names mentioned were Darius and Xerxes, and had been able to assign alphabetic values to the cuneiform characters which composed the two names.[5][nb 1][3]

In 1836, the eminent French scholar, Eugène Burnouf discovered that the first of the inscriptions published by Niebuhr contained a list of the satrapies of Darius. With this clue in his hand, he identified and published an alphabet of thirty letters, most of which he had correctly deciphered.[3][6][7]

A month earlier, Burnouf's friend and pupil, Professor Christian Lassen of Bonn, had also published a work on "The Old Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions of Persepolis".[7][8] He and Burnouf had been in frequent correspondence, and his claim to have independently detected the names of the satrapies, and thereby to have fixed the values of the Persian characters, was in consequence fiercely attacked. According to Sayce, whatever his obligations to Burnouf may have been, Lassen's "contributions to the decipherment of the inscriptions were numerous and important. He succeeded in fixing the true values of nearly all the letters in the Persian alphabet, in translating the texts, and in proving that the language of them was not Zend, but stood to both Zend and Sanskrit in the relation of a sister."[3]

Meanwhile, in 1835 Henry Rawlinson, a British East India Company army officer, visited the Behistun Inscriptions in Persia. Carved in the reign of King Darius of Persia (522–486 BC), they consisted of identical texts in the three official languages of the empire: Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite. The Behistun inscription was to the decipherment of cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone was to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.[9]

Rawlinson correctly deduced that the Old Persian was a phonetic script and he successfully deciphered it. In 1837 he finished his copy of the Behistun inscription, and sent a translation of its opening paragraphs to the Royal Asiatic Society. Before, however, his Paper could be published, the works of Lassen and Burnouf reached him, necessitating a revision of his paper and the postponement of its publication. Then came other causes of delay. In 1847 the first part of the Rawlinson's Memoir was published; the second part did not appear till 1849.[10][nb 2] The task of deciphering the Persian cuneiform texts was virtually accomplished.[3]

After translating the Persian, Rawlinson and, working independently of him, the Irish Assyriologist Edward Hincks, began to decipher the others. (The actual techniques used to decipher the Akkadian language have never been fully published; Hincks described how he sought the proper names already legible in the deciphered Persian while Rawlinson never said anything at all, leading some to speculate that he was secretly copying Hincks.[11]) They were greatly helped by Paul Émile Botta's discovery of the city of Nineveh in 1842. Among the treasures uncovered by Botta were the remains of the great library of Assurbanipal, a royal archive containing tens of thousands of baked clay tablets covered with cuneiform inscriptions.

By 1851, Hincks and Rawlinson could read 200 Babylonian signs. They were soon joined by two other decipherers: young German-born scholar Julius Oppert, and versatile British Orientalist William Henry Fox Talbot. In 1857 the four men met in London and took part in a famous experiment to test the accuracy of their decipherments. Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, gave each of them a copy of a recently discovered inscription from the reign of the Assyrian emperor Tiglath-Pileser I. A jury of experts was empanelled to examine the resulting translations and assess their accuracy. In all essential points the translations produced by the four scholars were found to be in close agreement with one another. There were of course some slight discrepancies. The inexperienced Talbot had made a number of mistakes, and Oppert's translation contained a few doubtful passages which the jury politely ascribed to his unfamiliarity with the English language. But Hincks' and Rawlinson's versions corresponded remarkably closely in many respects. The jury declared itself satisfied, and the decipherment of Akkadian cuneiform was adjudged a fait accompli.

In the early days of cuneiform decipherment, the reading of proper names presented the greatest difficulties. However, there is now a better understanding of the principles behind the formation and the pronunciation of the thousands of names found in historical records, business documents, votive inscriptions and literary productions. The primary challenge was posed by the characteristic use of old Sumerian non-phonetic logograms in other languages that had different pronunciations for the same symbols. Until the exact phonetic reading of many names was determined through parallel passages or explanatory lists, scholars remained in doubt, or had recourse to conjectural or provisional readings. Fortunately, in many cases, there are variant readings, the same name being written phonetically (in whole or in part) in one instance, and logographically in another.

Transliteration

Extract from the Cyrus Cylinder (lines 15–21), giving the genealogy of Cyrus the Great and an account of his capture of Babylon in 539 BC.

Cuneiform has a specific format for transliteration. Because of the script's polyvalence, transliteration is not only lossless, but may actually contain more information than the original document. For example, the sign DINGIR in a Hittite text may represent either the Hittite syllable an or may be part of an Akkadian phrase, representing the syllable il, it may be a Sumerogram, representing the original Sumerian meaning, 'god' or the determinative for a deity. In transliteration, a different rendition of the same glyph is chosen depending on its role in the present context.

Therefore, a text containing DINGIR and MU in succession could be construed to represent the words "ana", "ila", god + "a" (the accusative ending), god + water, or a divine name "A" or Water. Someone transcribing the signs would make the decision how the signs should be read and assemble the signs as "ana", "ila", "Ila" ('god"+accusative case), etc. A transliteration of these signs, however, would separate the signs with dashes "il-a", "an-a", "DINGIR-a" or "Da". This is still easier to read than the original cuneiform, but now the reader is able to trace the sounds back to the original signs and determine if the correct decision was made on how to read them.

There are differing conventions for transliterating Sumerian, Akkadian (Babylonian) and Hittite (and Luwian) cuneiform texts. One convention that sees wide use across the different fields is the use of acute and grave accents as an abbreviation for homophone disambiguation. Thus, u is equivalent to u1, the first glyph expressing phonetic u. An acute accent, ú, is equivalent to the second, u2, and a grave accent ù to the third, u3 glyph in the series (while the sequence of numbering is conventional but essentially arbitrary and subject to the history of decipherment). In Sumerian transliteration, a multiplication sign 'x' is used to indicate ligatures. As shown above, signs as such are represented in capital letters, while the specific reading selected in the transliteration is represented in small letters. Thus, capital letters can be used to indicate a so-called Diri compound - a sign sequence that has, in combination, a reading different from the sum of the individual constituent signs (for example, the compound IGI.A - "water" + "eye" - has the reading imhur, meaning "foam"). In a Diri compound, the individual signs are separated with dots in transliteration. Capital letters may also be used to indicate a Sumerogram (for example, KUG.BABBAR - Sumerian for "silver" - being used with the intended Akkadian reading kaspum, "silver"), an Akkadogram, or simply a sign sequence of whose reading the editor is uncertain. Naturally, the "real" reading, if it is clear, will be presented in small letters in the transliteration: IGI.A will be rendered as imhur4.

Since the Sumerian language has only been widely known and studied by scholars for approximately a century, changes in the accepted reading of Sumerian names have occurred from time to time. Thus the name of a king of Ur, read Ur-Bau at one time, was later read as Ur-Engur, and is now read as Ur-Nammu or Ur-Namma; for Lugal-zaggisi, a king of Uruk, some scholars continued to read Ungal-zaggisi; and so forth. Also, with some names of the older period, there was often uncertainty whether their bearers were Sumerians or Semites. If the former, then their names could be assumed to be read as Sumerian, while, if they were Semites, the signs for writing their names were probably to be read according to their Semitic equivalents, though occasionally Semites might be encountered bearing genuine Sumerian names. There was also doubt whether the signs composing a Semite's name represented a phonetic reading or a logographic compound. Thus, e.g. when inscriptions of a Semitic ruler of Kish, whose name was written Uru-mu-ush, were first deciphered, that name was first taken to be logographic because uru mu-ush could be read as "he founded a city" in Sumerian, and scholars accordingly retranslated it back to the original Semitic as Alu-usharshid. It was later recognized that the URU sign can also be read as rí and that the name is that of the Akkadian king Rimush.

Syllabary

The tables below show signs used for simple syllables of the form CV or VC. As used for the Sumerian language, the cuneiform script was in principle capable of distinguishing 14 consonants, transliterated as

b, d, g, ḫ, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, š, t, z

as well as four vowel qualities, a, e, i, u. The Akkadian language needed to distinguish its emphatic series, q, ṣ, ṭ, adopting various "superfluous" Sumerian signs for the purpose (e.g. qe=KIN, qu=KUM, qi=KIN, ṣa=ZA, ṣe=ZÍ, ṭur=DUR etc.[clarification needed]) Hittite as it adopted the Akkadian cuneiform further introduced signs for the glide w, e.g. wa=we=PIN, wi5=GEŠTIN) as well as a ligature I.A for ya.

-a -e -i -u
a 𒀀,

á 𒀉

 e 𒂊,

é 𒂍

 i 𒄿,

í=IÁ 𒐊

 u 𒌋,

ú 𒌑
b- ba 𒁀,

bá=PA 𒉺, bà=EŠ 𒂠

 be=BAD 𒁁,

bé=BI 𒁉, bè=NI 𒉌

 bi 𒁉,

bí=NE 𒉈, bì=PI 𒉿

 bu 𒁍,

bú=KASKAL 𒆜, bù=PÙ 𒅤
d- da 𒁕,

dá=TA 𒋫

 de=DI 𒁲,

dé , dè=NE 𒉈

 di 𒁲,

dí=TÍ 𒄭

 du 𒁺,

dú=TU 𒌅, dù=GAG 𒆕, du4=TUM 𒌈
g- ga 𒂵,

gá 𒂷

 ge=GI 𒄀,

gé=KID 𒆤, gè=DIŠ 𒁹

 gi 𒄀,

gí=KID 𒆤, gì=DIŠ 𒁹, gi4 𒄄, gi5=KI 𒆠

 gu 𒄖,

gú 𒄘, gù=KA 𒅗, gu4 𒄞, gu5=KU 𒆪, gu6=NAG 𒅘, gu7 𒅥
ḫ- ḫa 𒄩,

ḫá=ḪI.A 𒄭𒀀, ḫà=U 𒌋, ḫa4=ḪI 𒄭

 ḫe=ḪI 𒄭,

ḫé=GAN 𒃶

 ḫi 𒄭,

ḫí=GAN 𒃶

 ḫu 𒄷
k- ka 𒅗,

ká 𒆍, kà=GA 𒂵

 ke=KI 𒆠,

ké=GI 𒄀

 ki 𒆠,

kí=GI 𒄀

 ku 𒆪,

kú=GU7 𒅥, kù 𒆬, ku4 𒆭
l- la 𒆷,

lá=LAL 𒇲, là=NU 𒉡

 le=LI 𒇷,

lé=NI 𒉌

 li 𒇷,

lí=NI 𒉌

 lu 𒇻,

lú 𒇽
m- ma 𒈠,

má 𒈣

 me 𒈨,

mé=MI 𒈪, mè 𒀞/𒅠

 mi 𒈪,

mí=MUNUS 𒊩, mì=ME 𒈨

 mu 𒈬,

mú=SAR 𒊬
n- na 𒈾,

ná 𒈿, nà=AG 𒀝, na4 ("NI.UD") 𒉌𒌓

 ne 𒉈,

né=NI 𒉌

 ni 𒉌,

ní=IM 𒉎

 nu 𒉡,

nú=NÁ 𒈿
p- pa 𒉺,

pá=BA 𒐀

 pe=PI 𒉿,

pé=BI 𒁉

 pi 𒉿,

pí=BI 𒁉, pì=BAD 𒁁

 pu=BU 𒁍,

pú=TÚL 𒇥, pù 𒅤
r- ra 𒊏,

rá=DU 𒁺

 re=RI 𒊑,

ré=URU 𒌷

 ri 𒊑,

rí=URU 𒌷

 ru 𒊒,

rú=GAG 𒆕, rù=AŠ 𒀸
s- sa 𒊓,

sá=DI 𒁲, sà=ZA 𒍝, sa4 ("ḪU.NÁ") 𒄷𒈾

 se=SI 𒋛,

sé=ZI 𒍣

 si 𒋛,

sí=ZI 𒍣

 su 𒋢,

sú=ZU 𒍪, sù=SUD 𒋤, su4 𒋜
š- ša 𒊭,

šá=NÍG 𒐼, šà 𒊮

 še 𒊺,

šé , šè 𒂠

 ši=IGI 𒅆,

ší=SI 𒋛

 šu 𒋗,

šú 𒋙, šù=ŠÈ 𒂠, šu4=U 𒌋
t- ta 𒋫,

tá=DA 𒁕

 te 𒋼,

té=TÍ 𒊹

 ti 𒋾,

tí 𒊹, tì=DIM 𒁴, ti4=DI 𒁲

 tu 𒌅,

tú=UD 𒌓, tù=DU 𒁺
z- za 𒍝,

zá=NA4 𒉌𒌓

 ze=ZI 𒍣,

zé=ZÌ 𒍢

 zi 𒍣,

zí 𒍢, zì 𒍥

 zu 𒍪,

zú=KA 𒅗
a- e- i- u-
a 𒀀,

á 𒀉

 e 𒂊,

é 𒂍

 i 𒄿,

í=IÁ 𒐊

 u 𒌋,

ú 𒌑
-b ab 𒀊,

áb 𒀖

 eb=IB 𒅁,

éb=TUM 𒌈

 ib 𒅁,

íb=TUM 𒌈

 ub 𒌒,

úb=ŠÈ 𒂠
-d ad 𒀜,

ád 𒄉

 ed=Á 𒀉 id=Á 𒀉,

íd=A.ENGUR 𒀀𒇉

 ud 𒌓,

úd=ÁŠ 𒀾
-g ag 𒀝,

ág 𒉘

 eg=IG 𒅅,

ég=E 𒂊

 ig 𒅅,

íg=E 𒂊

 ug 𒊌
-ḫ aḫ 𒄴,

áḫ=ŠEŠ 𒋀

 eḫ=AḪ 𒄴 iḫ=AḪ 𒄴 uḫ=AḪ 𒄴,

úḫ 𒌔
-k ak=AG 𒀝 ek=IG 𒅅 ik=IG 𒅅 uk=UG 𒊌
-l al 𒀠,

ál=ALAM 𒀩

 el 𒂖,

él=IL 𒅋

 il 𒅋,

íl 𒅍

 ul ,

úl=NU 𒉡
-m am 𒄠/𒂔,

ám=ÁG 𒉘

 em=IM 𒅎 im 𒅎,

ím=KAŠ4 𒁽

 um 𒌝,

úm=UD 𒌓
-n an 𒀭 en 𒂗,

én, èn=LI 𒇷

 in 𒅔,

in4=EN 𒂗, in5=NIN 𒊩𒌆

 un 𒌦,

ún=U 𒌋
-p ap=AB 𒀊 ep=IB ,

ép=TUM 𒌈

 ip=IB 𒅁,

íp=TUM 𒌈

 up=UB 𒌒,

úp=ŠÈ 𒂠
-r ar 𒅈,

ár=UB 𒌒

 er=IR 𒅕 ir 𒅕,

íp=A.IGI 𒀀𒅆

 ur 𒌨,

úr 𒌫
-s as=AZ 𒊍 es=GIŠ 𒄑,

és=EŠ 𒂠

 is=GIŠ 𒄑,

ís=EŠ 𒂠

 us=UZ,

ús=UŠ 𒍑
-š aš 𒀸,

áš 𒀾

 eš 𒌍/𒐁,

éš=ŠÈ 𒂠

 iš 𒅖,

íš=KASKAL 𒆜

 uš 𒍑,

úš𒍗=BAD 𒁁
-t at=AD 𒀜,

át=GÍR gunû 𒄉

 et=Á 𒀉 it=Á 𒀉 ut=UD 𒌓,

út=ÁŠ 𒀾
-z az 𒊍 ez=GIŠ 𒄑,

éz=EŠ 𒂠

 iz= GIŠ 𒄑,

íz=IŠ 𒅖

 uz ,

úz=UŠ 𒍑, ùz 𒍚

Sign inventories

See also: List of cuneiform signs Cuneiform writing in Ur, southern Iraq

The Sumerian cuneiform script had of the order of 1,000 unique signs (or about 1,500 if variants are included). This number was reduced to about 600 by the 24th century BC and the beginning of Akkadian records. Not all Sumerian signs are used in Akkadian texts, and not all Akkadian signs are used in Hittite.

Falkenstein (1936) lists 939 signs used in the earliest period (late Uruk, 34th to 31st centuries) With an emphasis on Sumerian forms, Deimel (1922) lists 870 signs used in the Early Dynastic II period (28th century, "LAK") and for the Early Dynastic IIIa period (26th century, "ŠL"). Rosengarten (1967) lists 468 signs used in Sumerian (pre-Sargonian) Lagash and Mittermayer ("aBZL", 2006) list 480 Sumerian forms, written in Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian times. Regarding Akkadian forms, the standard handbook for many years was Borger ("ABZ", 1981) with 598 signs used in Assyrian/Babylonian writing, recetly superseded by Borger ("MesZL", 2004) with an expansion to 907 signs, an extension of their Sumerian readings and a new numbering scheme.

Signs used in Hittite cuneiform are listed by Forrer (1922), Friedrich (1960) and the HZL (Rüster and Neu 1989). The HZL lists a total of 375 signs, many with variants (for example, 12 variants are given for number 123 EGIR)

Numerals

Main article: Babylonian Numerals

The Sumerians used a numerical system based on 1, 10 and 60. The way of writing a number like 70 would be the sign for 60 and the sign for 10 right after. This way of counting is still used today for measuring time as 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour.[2]

Unicode

Main article: Unicode cuneiform

Unicode (as of version 5.0) assigns to the Cuneiform script the following ranges:

U+12000–U+1236E (879 characters) "Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform"
U+12400–U+12473 (103 characters) "Cuneiform Numbers"

The final proposal for Unicode encoding of the script was submitted by two cuneiform scholars working with an experienced Unicode proposal writer in June 2004.[12] The base character inventory is derived from the list of Ur III signs compiled by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative of UCLA based on the inventories of Miguel Civil, Rykle Borger (2003), and Robert Englund. Rather than opting for a direct ordering by glyph shape and complexity, according to the numbering of an existing catalogue, the Unicode order of glyphs was based on the Latin alphabetic order of their "last" Sumerian transliteration as a practical approximation.

See also

Ancient Near East portal

Notes

  1. ^ Although Grotefend's Memoir was presented to the Gottingen Academy on September 4, 1802, the Academy refused to publish it; it was subsequently published in Heeren's work in 1815.
  2. ^ It seems that various parts of Rawlisons' paper formed Vol X of this journal. The final part III comprised chapters IV (Analysis of the Persian Inscriptions of Behistunand) and V (Copies and Translations of the Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions of Persepolis, Hamadan, and Van), pp. 187–349.

References

  1. ^ Adkins 2003, p. 47.
  2. ^ a b c d e Lo 2007.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h Sayce 1908.
  4. ^ El Daly, Okasha (2004), Egyptology: The Missing Millennium : Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings, Routledge, pp. 39–40 & 65, ISBN 1844720632
  5. ^ Heeren 1815.
  6. ^ Burnouf 1836
  7. ^ a b Pritchard 1844, p. 30–31
  8. ^ Lassen.
  9. ^ Adkins 2003.
  10. ^ Rawlinson 1847.
  11. ^ Daniels 1996.
  12. ^ http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2786.pdf

Bibliography

External links

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