Cuneiform

"Cuneiform" redirects here. For other uses, see Cuneiform (disambiguation).

Sumerian inscription in monumental archaic style, c. 26th century BC

Cuneiforms
Type	Logographic and syllabic
Languages	Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hattic, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Sumerian, Urartian
Time period	c. 30th century BC to 1st century AD
Parent systems	(Proto-writing) Cuneiforms
Child systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs[citation needed] Old Persian Ugaritic
ISO 15924	Xsux, 020
Direction	Left-to-right
Unicode alias	Cuneiform
Unicode range	U+12000 to U+123FF (Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform) U+12400 to U+1247F (Numbers)
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols.

Cuneiform script ( /kjuːˈniːɨfɔrm/ kew-nee-i-form or /ˈkjuːnɨfɔrm/ kew-ni-form (/ˈkjuːnɪfɔːm/ (British))) is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium (the Uruk IV period), cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs. In the three millennia the script spanned, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract as the number of characters in use also grew gradually smaller, from about 1,000 unique characters in the Early Bronze Age to about 400 unique characters in Late Bronze Age (Hittite cuneiform).

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, and by the 2nd century AD, the script had become extinct.

Cuneiform documents were written on clay tablets, by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. The impressions left by the stylus were wedge shaped, thus giving rise to the name cuneiform ("wedge shaped", from the Latin cuneus, meaning "wedge").

History

The cuneiform writing system was in use for more than 35 centuries, through several stages of evolution, from the 34th century BC down to the 1st century AD.^[1] It was completely replaced by alphabetic writing (in the general sense) in the course of the Roman era and there are no Cuneiform systems in current use. For this reason, it had to be deciphered from scratch in 19th century Assyriology. Successful completion of decipherment is dated to 1857.

The system consists of a combination of logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic and syllabic signs.^[2]

The cuneiform script underwent considerable changes over a period of more than two millennia. The image below shows the development of the sign SAG "head" (Borger nr. 184, U+12295 Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.