The cuneiform script developed by the Sumerians in the late fourth to early third millennia BC as a tool for bureaucratic recording would become the principal writing system for the cultures of the Near East for some 3,000 years. It was adapted for use by languages from different families, Semitic (Akkadian and Ugaritic) and Indo-European (Elamite/Old Persian, Hittite, and Urartian). During the first millennium BC, this system gave way to the simpler Phoenician alphabet and its derivatives (which include the Latin alphabet used for English). The last datable tablets using cuneiform come from the first century AD. Only in the nineteenth century would knowledge of this script be recovered.
The name “cuneiform” (“wedge-shaped”) refers to a narrow V-shaped wedge that was combined in various ways to represent single sounds, syllables, and entire words. In ancient Mesopotamia scribes wrote on clay tablets, the favored writing material, by pressing a reed stylus with a wedge-shaped point into the moist surface. The tablets would be left to dry. On rare occasions they would be baked hard, either deliberately in a kiln or accidentally in a fire. Baked tablets have survived extremely well; the naturally dried tablets are prone to damage. Excavations in Iraq and neighboring countries have yielded thousands of these tablets, although it should be said that archaeologists may dig for years before recovering tablets, and many sites have none at all. The tablets contain an enormous amount of information on economy, society, and history, and form the backbone of our knowledge of the Ancient Near East. Those who study these tablets (or indeed any inscription) call themselves epigraphers and add a further label that designates the cuneiform language in which they specialize, such as sumerologists; hittitologists; or assyriologists (for the Akkadian language), after the people whose ruined Iron Age cities were the first Mesopotamian sites explored by Europeans in the nineteenth century.
Cuneiform writing developed from a pictographic or “protocuneiform” system first used during the later Protoliterate period in order for temples to keep track of their accounts. Uruk seems key in the early development of writing, for the greatest number of such protocuneiform tablets have come from this city, from Level IV in the Eanna precinct. Most of these tablets are inventories, showing the picture of an animal, for example, accompanied by a number, with circles for tens and lines for ones. These tablets with lists seem to correlate with tokens used for counting discovered at many Mesopotamian sites. According to Denise Schmandt-Besserat, the clay tokens (spheres and cones) and the bullae (hollow balls) with numeral markings on their exteriors were reduced to the more manageable system of signs on a clay tablet. This streamlining of the procedure to record numbers lay at the heart of the Sumerian invention of writing. Schmandt-Besserat’s theory is controversial, however. Some scholars believe that the protocuneiform script did not derive directly from earlier tokens and bullae, but instead was developed separately and rapidly as another tool useful for bureaucratic recording.
To say anything more complicated than “nine sheep” or “fifteen baskets of barley” necessitated modifications. Unlike the Chinese, who retained and expanded the original logographic character of their script (one sign per word), the Sumerians moved toward a syllabary. Some pictures continued to stand for entire words, but others began to represent sounds. More and more abstracted, the pictures finally became simply clusters of wedges. This transformation was completed in the Early Dynastic period, an age when the uses of writing spread dramatically. Further adaptations occurred when Sumerian cuneiform was utilized to transcribe the Akkadian language.
Akkadian was deciphered by the middle of the nineteenth century, but documents in Sumerian were still rare and poorly understood. Only with French excavations at Telloh (ancient
Girsu), begun in 1877, and American excavations at Nippur, from 1889, did Sumerian tablets emerge in quantity. The language could then be studied in detail.
World History
