Cuneiform

For other uses, see Cuneiform (disambiguation).

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
Time period
c. 3100 BC – 2nd century AD[1]
DirectionLeft-to-right
RegionSumer
LanguagesSumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Urartian, Palaic, Aramaic, Old Persian
Related scripts
Parent systems
Child systems
None; influenced the shape of Ugaritic and Old Persian glyphs
ISO 15924
ISO 15924Xsux (020), ​Cuneiform, Sumero-Akkadian
Unicode
Unicode alias
Cuneiform
 This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.
This article contains cuneiform script. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of cuneiform script.

Cuneiform[note 1] is a logo-syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East.[4] The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era.[5] 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[6][7] 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 texts are attested from the 24th century BC onward and make up the bulk of the cuneiform record.[8][9] Akkadian cuneiform was itself adapted to write the Hittite language in the early second millennium BC.[10][11] The other languages with significant cuneiform corpora are Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, 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 dates to 75 AD.[12]

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[13] field of Assyriology, as the earliest excavations of cuneiform libraries – in the mid-19th century – were in the area of ancient Assyria.[14] 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 (approx. 130,000 tablets), the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin, the Louvre, the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, the National Museum of Iraq, the Yale Babylonian Collection (approx. 40,000 tablets), and Penn Museum.[15][16]

  1. ^ Adkins 2003, p. 47.
  2. ^ a b "Definition of cuneiform in English". Oxford Dictionaries. Archived from the original on September 25, 2016. Retrieved July 30, 2017.
  3. ^ Cuneiform: Irving Finkel & Jonathan Taylor bring ancient inscriptions to life. The British Museum. June 4, 2014. Archived from the original on October 17, 2015. Retrieved July 30, 2017.
  4. ^ Jagersma, Abraham Hendrik (2010). A descriptive grammar of Sumerian (PDF) (Thesis). Leiden: 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.
  5. ^ Sara E. Kimball; Jonathan Slocum. "Hittite Online". The University of Texas at Austin Linguistics Research Center. Early Indo-European OnLine. 2 The Cuneiform Syllabary. Archived from the original on November 7, 2023. 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.
  6. ^ Olson, David R.; Torrance, Nancy (February 16, 2009). The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-86220-2.
  7. ^ "The origins of writing". www.bl.uk. Archived from the original on March 11, 2022. Retrieved May 10, 2022.
  8. ^ Sara E. Kimball; Jonathan Slocum. "Hittite Online". The University of Texas at Austin Linguistics Research Center. Early Indo-European OnLine. 2 The Cuneiform Syllabary. Archived from the original on November 7, 2023. ...by approximately 2350 B.C.E. documents were written in cuneiform in Akkadian. Sumerian, a long extinct language, is related to no known language, ancient or modern, and its structure differed from that of Akkadian, which made it necessary to modify the writing system.
  9. ^ Huehnergard, John (2004). "Akkadian and Eblaite". The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages. Cambridge: 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...
  10. ^ Sara E. Kimball; Jonathan Slocum. "Hittite Online". The University of Texas at Austin Linguistics Research Center. Early Indo-European OnLine. 2 The Cuneiform Syllabary. Archived from the original on November 7, 2023. These modifications are important, because the Hittites borrowed them when they borrowed the writing system, probably from a north Syrian source, in the early second millennium B.C.E. In borrowing this system, the Hittites retained conventions established for writing Sumerian and Akkadian...
  11. ^ 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.
  12. ^ Westenholz, Aage (December 18, 2007). "The Graeco-Babyloniaca Once Again". Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie. 97 (2): 294. doi:10.1515/ZA.2007.014. S2CID 161908528. The latest datable cuneiform tablet that we have today concerns astronomical events of 75 AD and comes from Babylon. It provides a terminus post quem, at least for Babylon.
  13. ^ 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 (July 31, 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 (November 6, 2018). "Comment peut-on être assyriologue ? : Leçon inaugurale prononcée le jeudi 2 octobre 2014". Comment peut-on être assyriologue ?. Leçons inaugurales. Collège de France. ISBN 9782722604230. 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. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  14. ^ Kramer, Samuel Noah (1963). The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character. His numerous treatises, text editions, and polemics helped to consolidate the new science, now generally becoming known as Assyriology— based on the fact that the earliest excavations were conducted in northern Iraq, the home of the Assyrian people...
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference BAR was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ Streck, Michael P. (2010). "Großes Fach Altorientalistik. Der Umfang des keilschriftlichen Textkorpus". Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orientgesellschaft 142 (PDF). pp. 57–58.


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