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.
The Macmillan dictionary of archaeology, Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1983Copied