Cuneiform

The first system of writing in human history, developed in ancient Mesopotamia, which used a reed to impress wedge-shaped marks onto the surface of clay tablets.

The characteristic wedge-shaped writing of western Asia, used for over 3000 years, emerging in the 4th millennium BC in southern Mesopotamia as a system of accounting during the Uruk period. It consisted of triangular markings pressed on a clay tablet with a split reed. The word itself comes from Latin 'cuneus' meaning wedge-shaped" "wedge". The pictographic script of the Uruk period the oldest known in the world was reduced to angular forms to make it more suitable for impressing in wet clay with a split reed. The nature of the script was very like that of the Egyptians with ideographs phonograms and determinatives. The script was used for a number of languages (Sumerian Akkadian Elamite Hittite Old Persian etc.) even being adapted to serve as an alphabet at Ugarit. The first success in its decipherment was by Georg Grotefend a German philologist in 1802. In inscriptions from Persepolis he recognized the names of Darius and Xerxes and the Old Persian word for 'king'. In 1844-1847 further progress came through the recording and study of Darius's rock inscriptions at Behistun by Henry Rawlinson. He was able to translate the Old Persian version; Westergaard in 1854 tackled the Elamite text and Rawlinson with others cracked the Babylonian in 1857. This was much the most important of the three as it led directly back through the many cuneiform inscriptions at that time coming to light to the first written records those of ancient Sumer. Cuneiform texts have been found in Egypt at el-'Amarna and on various objects of the Persian Period. In the Near East cuneiform tablets from Egypt have been found at Bogazkoy in Anatolia and Kamid el-Loz in Syria. A consonantal alphabet developed at Ugarit which vanished with the town at beginning of 12th c BC; and syllabary script was used solely by Achaemenid Persians to transcribe their language from 6th-4th c BC."

The cuneiform system is characterised by wedge-shaped signs on clay tablets, representing words or syllables in languages such as Akkadian and Sumerian.

Writing system developed in Sumer in the early 3rd millennium bc and used in many areas of western Asia until the last few centuries bc. The system involved making impressions on clay tablets with a wedge-shaped stylus, which has given the script its name (from the Latin cuneus, a wedge, and forma, shape). Cuneiform developed out of the simple pictographic script of the late Uruk period, which is the earliest known writing in the world and evolved as a response to the demands of the growing temple administration, in order to cope with the necessary book-keeping. The fully developed cuneiform writing was no longer pictographic, but a partly syllabic script of several hundred signs, consisting of a mixture of ideograms, phonograms and determinatives. The cuneiform script was evolved for the Sumerian language, but it was subsequently adapted for many other languages, including Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite and Old Persian. The decipherment of cuneiform was the work of a number of scholars of the 19th century, including Grotefend and Sir Henry Rawlinson, whose transcription of the massive trilingual inscription at Bisitun in western Iran provided the key to the decipherment.