Cuneiform script is one of the earliest known
systems of writing, distinguished by its wedge-shaped
marks on clay tablets, made by means of a
blunt reed for a stylus. The name cuneiform
itself simply means "wedge shaped", from the
Latin cuneus "wedge" and forma "shape," and
came into English usage probably from Old
French cunéiforme.
Emerging in Sumer in the late 4th millennium
BC, 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. The system consists of a combination
of logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic and
syllabic signs.
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. By the 2nd
century AD, the script had become extinct,
and all knowledge of how to read it was lost
until it began to be deciphered in the 19th
century.
Between half a million and two million cuneiform
tablets are estimated to have been excavated
in modern times. Of these, only approximately
30,000 - 100,000 have ever been read or published.
The British Museum holds the largest collection,
c.130,000, followed by the Vorderasiatisches
Museum Berlin, the Louvre, the Istanbul Archaeology
Museums, the National Museum of Iraq, the
Yale Babylonian Collection and Penn Museum.
Most of these have "lain in these collections
for a century without being translated, studied
or published," since there are only a few
hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world.
History
The cuneiform writing system was in use for
a span of more than three millennia, through
several stages of development, from the 34th
century BC down to the 2nd century AD. Ultimately,
it was completely replaced by alphabetic writing
in the course of the Roman era and there are
no Cuneiform systems in current use. It had
to be deciphered as a completely unknown writing
system in 19th-century Assyriology. Successful
completion of its decipherment is dated to
1857.
Proto-literate period
The cuneiform script proper developed from
pictographic proto-writing in the late 4th
millennium BC. Mesopotamia's "proto-literate"
period spans roughly the 35th to 32nd centuries.
The first documents unequivocally written
in the Sumerian language date to c. the 31st
century, found at Jemdet Nasr.
Originally, pictographs were either drawn
on clay tablets in vertical columns with a
sharpened reed stylus, 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 determinatives, 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.
The earliest known Sumerian king whose name
appears on contemporary cuneiform tablets
is Enmebaragesi of Kish. Surviving records
only very gradually become less fragmentary
and more complete for the following reigns,
but by the end of the pre-Sargonic period,
it had become standard practice for each major
city-state to date documents by year-names
commemorating the exploits of its lugal.
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.
Determinative signs were re-introduced to
avoid ambiguity. Cuneiform writing proper
thus arises from the more primitive system
of pictographs at about that time.
Archaic cuneiform
In the mid-3rd millennium BC, writing direction
was changed to left to right in horizontal
rows, and a new wedge-tipped stylus was used
which was pushed into the clay, producing
wedge-shaped 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
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 and carved reliefs to record the achievements
of the ruler in whose honor the monument had
been erected.
The spoken language consisted of many similar
sounds, and in the beginning similar sounding
words such as "life" [til] and "arrow" [ti]
were described in writing by the same symbol.
After the Semites conquered Southern Mesopotamia,
some signs gradually changed from being pictograms
to syllabograms, most likely to make things
clearer in writing. 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.
As time went by the cuneiform got very complex
and the distinction between a pictogram and
syllabogram became vague. Several symbols
had too many meanings to permit clarity. Therefore,
symbols were put together to indicate both
the sound and the meaning of compound. 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 complements were used to define
the word [u] in front of the symbol and [gu]
behind. Finally the symbol for "bird" [MUSHEN]
was added to ensure proper interpretation.
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.
Akkadian cuneiform
The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by
the Akkadians from c. 2500 BC, and by 2000
BC had evolved into Old Assyrian cuneiform,
with many modifications to Sumerian orthography.
The Semitic 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
AŠ 𒀸: horizontal;
DIŠ 𒁹: vertical;
GE23, DIŠ tenû 𒀹: downward diagonal;
GE22 𒀺: upward diagonal;
U 𒌋: the Winkelhaken.
Except for the Winkelhaken which has no tail,
the length of the wedges' tails could vary
as required for sign composition.
Signs tilted by about 45 degrees are called
tenû in Akkadian, thus DIŠ is a vertical
wedge and DIŠ tenû a diagonal one. If a
sign is modified with additional wedges, this
is called gunû or "gunification;" if signs
are crosshatched with additional Winkelhaken,
they are called šešig; if signs are modified
by the removal of a wedge or wedges, they
are called nutillu.
"Typical" signs have usually in the range
of about five to ten wedges, while complex
ligatures can consist of twenty or more; the
ligature KAxGUR7 consists of 31 strokes.
Most later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform
preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian
script. Written Akkadian included phonetic
symbols from the Sumerian syllabary, together
with logograms 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, written in a Chinese-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 c. 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, thus the pronunciations of many
Hittite words which were conventionally written
by logograms are now unknown.
In the Iron Age, 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. The last known cuneiform
inscription, an astronomical text, was written
in 75 AD.
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
written using the cuneiform method.
Decipherment
For centuries, travellers to Persepolis, in
modern-day Iran, had noticed carved cuneiform
inscriptions and were intrigued. 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.
In the 15th century the Venetian Barbero explored
ancient ruins in the Middle East and came
back with news of a very odd writing he had
found carved on the stones in the temples
of Shiraz and on many clay tablets.
In 1625 the Roman traveler Pietro Della Valle,
coming back from Mesopotamia and Persia, brought
back a tablet written with cuneiform glyphs
he had found in Ur, and also the copy of five
characters he had seen in Persepolis. Della
Valle understood that the writing had to be
read from left to right, following the direction
of wedges. However he didn't attempt to decipher
the scripts.
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. In the 1664 edition he reproduced
some and thought they were ‘legible and
intelligible’ and therefore decipherable.
He also guessed, correctly, that they represented
not letters or hieroglyphics but words and
syllables, and were to be read from left to
right. Herbert is rarely mentioned in standard
histories of the decipherment of cuneiform.
Carsten Niebuhr brought the first reasonably
complete and accurate copies of the inscriptions
at Persepolis to Europe. Bishop Friedrich
Münter 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". By 1802 Georg Friedrich
Grotefend had determined that two king's names
mentioned were Darius and Xerxes, and had
been able to assign correct alphabetic values
to the cuneiform characters which composed
the two names. Although Grotefend's Memoir
was presented to the Göttingen Academy on
September 4, 1802, the Academy refused to
publish it; it was subsequently published
in Heeren's work in 1815, but was overlooked
by most researchers at the time.
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.
A month earlier, a friend and pupil of Burnouf's,
Professor Christian Lassen of Bonn, had also
published his own work on The Old Persian
Cuneiform Inscriptions of Persepolis. 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 consequently 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".
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, 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.
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 his article could be published,
however, the works of Lassen and Burnouf reached
him, necessitating a revision of his article
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 until 1849.
The task of deciphering the Persian cuneiform
texts was virtually accomplished.
After translating the Persian, Rawlinson and,
working independently of him, the Irish Assyriologist
Edward Hincks, began to decipher the others.
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, literary
productions and legal documents. 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 one instance,
and logographically in another.
Transliteration
Cuneiform has a specific format for transliteration.
Because of the script's polyvalence, transliteration
requires certain choices of the transliterating
scholar, who must decide in the case of each
sign which of its several possible meanings
is intended in 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", 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", 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. A transliterated
document thus presents both the reading preferred
by the transliterating scholar as well as
the opportunity to reconstruct the original
text.
There are differing conventions for transliterating
Sumerian, Akkadian and Hittite 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.
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. In a Diri compound, the
individual signs are separated with dots in
transliteration. Capital letters may also
be used to indicate a Sumerogram, 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
at least 16 consonants, transliterated as
b, d, g, g̃, ḫ, k, l, m, n, p, r, ř, s,
š, t, z
as well as four vowel qualities, a, e, i,
u. The Akkadian language had no use for g̃
or ř but needed to distinguish its emphatic
series, q, ṣ, ṭ, adopting various "superfluous"
Sumerian signs for the purpose Hittite as
it adopted the Akkadian cuneiform further
introduced signs for the glide w, e.g. wa=PI,
wi5=GEŠTIN) as well as a ligature I.A for
ya.
Sign inventories
The Sumerian cuneiform script had on the order
of 1,000 distinct signs. 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 lists 939 signs used in the earliest
period. With an emphasis on Sumerian forms,
Deimel lists 870 signs used in the Early Dynastic
II period and for the Early Dynastic IIIa
period. Rosengarten lists 468 signs used in
Sumerian. Lagash and Mittermayer list 480
Sumerian forms, written in Isin-Larsa and
Old Babylonian times. Regarding Akkadian forms,
the standard handbook for many years was Borger
with 598 signs used in Assyrian/Babylonian
writing, recently superseded by Borger 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, Friedrich and the HZL. The HZL
lists a total of 375 signs, many with variants.
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.
Unicode
Unicode assigns to Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform
script the following ranges:
U+12000–U+123FF "Cuneiform"
U+12400–U+1247F "Cuneiform Numbers and Punctuation"
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. 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, and Robert
Englund. Rather than opting for a direct ordering
by glyph shape and complexity, according to
the numbering of an existing catalog, the
Unicode order of glyphs was based on the Latin
alphabetic order of their "last" Sumerian
transliteration as a practical approximation.
List of major Cuneiform tablet discoveries
See also
Notes
References
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F. Thureau-Dangin, Recherches sur l'origine
de l'écriture cunéiforme, Paris.
Ronald Herbert Sack, Cuneiform Documents from
the Chaldean and Persian Periods, ISBN 0-945636-67-9
External links
Akkadian font for Windows and Mac
Babylonian Cunieform offering to the King
of Erech
Epigraphy at DMOZ
Smarthistory, Cuneiform and the Invention
of Writing
Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts and Akkadian
font for Ubuntu Linux-based operating system
Unicode Fonts for Oracc, fonts for transliterating
and displaying cuneiform
Writing ancient Iranian cuneiform on YouTube
by subject-matter expert Soheil Delshad
