Cuneiform

Cuneiform
A trilingual cuneiform inscription of Xerxes I at Van Fortress in Turkey, an Achaemenid royal inscription written in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian forms of cuneiform
Script type and syllabary
Period
c. 2900 BC – c. 100 AD
DirectionLeft-to-right
RegionSumer
LanguagesSumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Urartian, Palaic, Aramaic, Old Persian, Ugaritic
Related scripts
Parent systems
Proto-cuneiform (Proto-writing)
  • Cuneiform
Child systems
None; influenced the shape of Ugaritic and Old Persian glyphs
ISO 15924
ISO 15924Xsux (020), ​Cuneiform, Sumero-Akkadian
Unicode
Unicode alias
Cuneiform
Unicode range

Cuneiform[note 1] is a logo-syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the ancient Near East.[3] The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era.[4] Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions (Latin: cuneus) which form their signs. Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system[5][6] and was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq).

Over the course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages in addition to Sumerian. Akkadian names appear in early Sumerian records and fully Akkadian texts are attested from the 25th century BC onward and make up the bulk of the cuneiform record, mostly from the Akkadian Empire, Assyria and Babylonia.[4][7] Akkadian cuneiform was itself adapted to write the Hittite language in the early 2nd millennium BC.[4][8] The other languages with significant cuneiform corpora are Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, Ugaritic, Aramaic, Dilmunite, some Canaanite languages and Urartian. The Old Persian and Ugaritic alphabets feature cuneiform-style signs; however, they are unrelated to the cuneiform logo-syllabary proper. The latest known cuneiform tablet, an astronomical almanac written in Eastern Aramaic from Uruk, dates to AD 79/80.[9]

Cuneiform was rediscovered in modern times in the early 17th century with the publication of the trilingual Achaemenid royal inscriptions at Persepolis; these were first deciphered in the early 19th century. The modern study of cuneiform belongs to the ambiguously named[10] field of Assyriology, as the earliest excavations of cuneiform libraries during the mid-19th century were in the area of ancient Assyria.[5] An estimated half a million tablets are held in museums across the world, but comparatively few of these are published. The largest collections belong to the British Museum (approximately 130,000 tablets), the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin, the Louvre, the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, the National Museum of Iraq, the Yale Babylonian Collection (approximately 40,000 tablets), and the Penn Museum.[11][12]

  1. ^ a b "cuneiform". Oxford Dictionaries.
  2. ^ Cuneiform: Irving Finkel & Jonathan Taylor bring ancient inscriptions to life. The British Museum. June 4, 2014.
  3. ^ Jagersma, Abraham Hendrik (2010). A descriptive grammar of Sumerian (PDF) (Thesis). Faculty of the Humanities, Leiden University. p. 15. In its fully developed form, the Sumerian script is based on a mixture of logographic and phonographic writing. There are basically two types of signs: word signs, or logograms, and sound signs, or phonograms.
  4. ^ a b c Kimball, Sara E.; Slocum, Jonathan. "Hittite Online". The University of Texas at Austin Linguistics Research Center. Early Indo-European OnLine. 2 The Cuneiform Syllabary. Hittite is written in a form of the cuneiform syllabary, a writing system in use in Sumerian city-states in Mesopotamia by roughly 3100 B.C.E. and used to write a number of languages in the ancient Near East until the first century B.C.E.
  5. ^ a b Olson, David R.; Torrance, Nancy (2009). The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-86220-2.
  6. ^ "The origins of writing". The British Museum. Archived from the original on March 11, 2022. Retrieved May 10, 2022.
  7. ^ Huehnergard, John (2004). "Akkadian and Eblaite". Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages. Cambridge University Press. p. 218. ISBN 978-0-521-56256-0. Connected Akkadian texts appear c. 2350 and continue more or less uninterrupted for the next two and a half millennia...
  8. ^ Archi, Alfonso (2015). "How the Anitta text reached Hattusa". Saeculum: Gedenkschrift für Heinrich Otten anlässlich seines 100. Geburtstags. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. ISBN 978-3-447-10365-7. The existence of the Anitta text demonstrates that there was not a sudden and total interruption in writing but a phase of adaptation to a new writing.
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference Hunger2014 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^
    • Hommel, Fritz (1897). The Ancient Hebrew Tradition as Illustrated by the Monuments. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. p. 29. It is necessary here to remark, that the application of the term "Assyriology," as it is now generally used, to the study of the cuneiform inscriptions, is not quite correct; indeed it is actually misleading.
    • Meade, Carroll Wade (1974). Road to Babylon: Development of U.S. Assyriology. Brill. pp. 1–2. ISBN 978-90-04-03858-5. The term Assyriology is derived from these people, but it is very misleading.
    • Daneshmand, Parsa (2020). "Chapter 14 Assyriology in Iran?". Perspectives on the History of Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Penn State University Press. p. 266. doi:10.1515/9781646020898-015. ISBN 9781646020898. S2CID 236813488. The term "Assyriology" is itself problematic because it covers a broad range of topics.
      Charpin, Dominique (2018). "Comment peut-on être assyriologue ? : Leçon inaugurale prononcée le jeudi 2 octobre 2014". Comment peut-on être assyriologue ?. Leçons inaugurales (in French). Collège de France. ISBN 9782722604230 – via OpenEdition Books. Dès lors, le terme assyriologue est devenu ambigu : dans son acception large, il désigne toute personne qui étudie des textes notés dans l'écriture cunéiforme.
  11. ^ Cite error: The named reference BAR was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  12. ^ Streck, Michael P. (2010). "Großes Fach Altorientalistik. Der Umfang des keilschriftlichen Textkorpus". Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orientgesellschaft 142 (PDF) (in German). pp. 57–58.


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