![]() ![]() They likely began as pictographic- sheep symbol for a sheep-but they evolved into signs that look nothing like what they refer to, just as the letters “s-h-e-e-p” have no visual connection to a woolly, four-legged animal. The marks became more abstract over the centuries. ![]() Cuneiform, in other words, evolved from a way to track and store information into a way to explain the world symbolically. Then another leap of abstraction was introduced when symbols were developed for intangible ideas, such as God, or women. At first these phonemes (one symbol for one thing, instead of letters to make a word) symbolized concrete things for example, an image of a sheep meant a literal sheep. ![]() Gradually, Sumerians developed symbols for words. They began using clay containers instead of cloth ones, and instead of putting stones inside of them, they stamped the outside of the envelopes that indicated the number and type of tokens inside. One could then "read" the envelope to know what information was being conveyed. These stone tokens would sometimes be placed in a container, and given to someone else as a form of receipt-not that different from what we do today when we hand currency with numbers on it to buy a quart of milk, and the clerk gives us back a piece of paper with numbers on it to confirm the transaction.īy the 4th century B.C., the Sumerians had taken this system to another level of abstraction and efficiency, moving it from proto-writing to writing. ![]() A bunch of stones might mean a bunch of sheep. For example, they would take a stone and declare it a representation for something else. Most agree that cuneiform began as proto-writing-like African drumming and Incan quipa – and evolved into the first full-fledged writing system, with signs corresponding to speech. The root of cuneiform lies in tokens, or chits, used by Sumerians to convey information. The script is often tiny-almost too small to see with the naked eye, as small the smallest letters on a dime. Why so tiny? That remains one of cuneiform’s biggest mysteries. Sometimes cuneiform was formed into prisms, larger tablets and cylinders, but mainly it was written on palm-sized pieces of clay. It looks like a series of lines and triangles, as each sign is comprised of marks-triangular, vertical, diagonal, and horizontal-impressed onto wet clay with a stylus, a long thin instrument similar to a pen. It was used to write at least a dozen languages, just as the alphabet that you are reading now is also (for the most part) used in Spanish, German and many other languages. But not clay, which has proven to be the most durable, and perhaps most sustainable, writing surface humanity has used.Ĭuneiform means "wedge-shaped," a term the Greeks used to describe the look of the signs. Deciding to use clay for a writing surface was ingenious: vellum, parchment, papyrus and paper-other writing surfaces people have used in the past-deteriorate easily. As remarkable as is the discovery of new bits of millennia-old literature is the story of cuneiform itself, a now obscure but once exceedingly influential writing system, the world’s first examples of handwriting.Ĭuneiform, was invented some 6,000 years ago in what is now southern Iraq, and it was most often written on iPhone-sized clay tablets a few inches square and an inch high. Cuneiform made headlines recently with the discovery of 22 new lines from the Epic of Gilgamesh, found on tablet fragments in Iraq. ![]()
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