Cuneiform

We all know that the earliest writing systems were drawings usually done on rock, sides of mountains and cave walls. Doesn’t that seem pretty tedious? Though of course it’s beautiful, imagine writing a 10,000-word essay for a college class all done on several clay slabs with thousands of pictures. Aren’t you glad we evolved our way of writing? The earliest writing systems evolved separately and at pretty much the same time in Mesopotamia and Egypt, but current information shows that Mesopotamia’s writing came first. That writing system was developed by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia around 35,000 B.C.E. The old way of communicating plans, stories, and ideas was to use a writing that is representational. For example, a horse would be represented …show more content…
It is not a language; it is better to refer to it as a writing system or rather, writing systems. The term Cuneiform is somewhat cryptic; it tricks you into thinking it’s a language or a singular writing system. When in reality, it is several kinds of writing systems. These systems include; logo syllabic, syllabic, and alphabetic scripts. It used between 600 and 1000 characters to write words or syllables. That is so much more than our current 26 letter alphabet that we have to learn in school, how crazy would it be to learn and know all of those different characters? Maybe learning to read Cuneiform would be doable if you had all the time in the world and never had to sleep or eat. Sumerian and a language called Akkadian from ancient Iraq are the two main languages written in Cuneiform, there are more of course, but both of those are much more prevalent. There were about 15 different languages written in Cuneiform, some of them are; Eastern Semitic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Elamite, Eblaite, Hittite, Hurrian, Utartian, Ugaritic, and Old Persian. Cuneiform writing was used to keep record of things like, stories, personal letters, temple activities, myths, business, and trade. One would wonder how they decided to store these thousands of tablets, because they aren’t paper and are somewhat bulky. The clay tablets were stored in a hollow clay …show more content…
Right now it can be found in The British Museum, but it was originally found in Nineveh, northern Iraq. This tablet in particular is actually a copy of a tablet made in the reign of Ammisaduqa, king of Babylon, about 1000 years earlier. Astronomers of our time have used this tablet to calculate the dates of this king’s reign. This process should also make dating Babylonian rulers of the early second and late third millennium B.C.E. Sadly, there is a lot of uncertainty in these dates because the records are so