CUNEIFORM
The earliest writing in Mesopotamia was a picture writing invented by the
Sumerians who wrote on clay tablets using long reeds. The script the
Sumerians invented and handed down to the Semitic peoples who conquered
Mesopotamia in later centuries, is called cuneiform, which is
derived from two Latin words: cuneus , which means "wedge," and
forma , which means "shape." This picture language, similar to but
more abstract than Egyptian hieroglyphics, eventually developed into a
syllabic alphabet under the Semites (Assyrians and Babylonians) who
eventually came to dominate the area.
In Sumer, the original
writing was pictographic ("picture writing"); individual words were
represented by crude pictorial symbols that resembled in some way the
object being represented, as in the Sumerian word for king, lu-gal
:
The first symbol pictures
"gal," or "great," and the second pictures "lu," or "man." Eventually,
this pictorial writing developed into a more abstract series of wedges and
hooks. These wedges and hooks are the original cuneiform and represented
in Sumerian entire words (this is called ideographic and the word
symbols are called ideograms, which means "concept writing"); the
Semites who adopted this writing, however, spoke an entirely different
language, in fact, a language as different from Sumerian as English is
different from Japanese. In order to adapt this foreign writing to a
Semitic language, the Akkadians converted it in part to a syllabic writing
system; individual signs represent entire syllables. However, in addition
to syllable symbols, some cuneiform symbols are ideograms ("picture
words") representing an entire word; these ideograms might also, in other
contexts, be simply syllables. For instance, in Assyrian, the cuneiform
for the syllable "ki" is written as follows:
However, as an ideogram,
this cuneiform also stands for the Assyrian word irsitu , or
"earth." So reading cuneiform involves mastering a large syllabic alphabet
as well as a large number of ideograms, many of them identical to syllable
symbols. This complicated writing system dominated Mesopotamia until the
century before the birth of Christ; the Persians greatly simplified
cuneiform until it represented something closer to an alphabet.
The Mesopotamians wrote on
clay tablets with long reeds while the clay was still wet. The fresh clay
then hardened and a permanent record was created. The original
Mesopotamian writings were crude pictures of the objects being named, but
the difficulty of drawing on fresh clay eventually produced the wedges and
hooks unique to cuneiform. This writing would be formed by laying the
length of the reed along the wet clay and moving the end nearest the hand
from one side to another to form the hooks.
As with all cultures, writing greatly changed Mesopotamian social
structure and the civilization's relationship to its own history. Writing
allowed laws to be written and so to assume a static and independent
character; history became more detailed and incorporated much more of
local cultures' histories.
Richard Hooker
