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Cuneiform Tablet....
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The Cuneiform script is one of the earliest known forms of written
expression. Created by the Sumerians in the late 4th millennium BC,
cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs. Over time, the
pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract. The
Sumerian script was adapted for the writing of the Akkadian, Elamite,
Hittite and Luwian languages, and it inspired the Old
Persian and Ugaritic
national alphabets.
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By
adjusting the relative position of the tablet to the stylus, the writer
could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions.
Cuneiform tablets could be fired in kilns to provide a permanent record, or they could be
recycled if permanence was not called for. Many of the tablets found by
archaeologists were preserved because they were baked when attacking armies
burned the building in which they were kept. |
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Invented by the Sumerians to record the Sumerian
language,This tablet cuneiform was subsequently adopted by the Akkadians,
Babylonians, Elamites, Hittites and
Assyrians to write their own languages and was widely
used in Mesopotamia for about 3000 years, though the syllabic nature of the
script as it was refined by the Sumerians was unintuitive to the
Semitic
speakers. This fact, before Sumerian civilization was rediscovered, prompted
many philologists to suspect a precursor civilization to the
Babylonian. |
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The complexity of the system prompted the development
of a number of simplified versions of the script. Old
Persian was written
in a subset of simplified cuneiform characters, that formed a simple,
semi-alphabetic syllabary, using far fewer wedge strokes than
Assyrian
used, together with a handful of logograms for frequently occurring words
like "god" and "king." The Ugaritic language was written using the
Ugaritic alphabet, a standard Semitic style alphabet (an abjad) written
using the cuneiform method. The use of Aramaic became widespread under the
Assyrian Empire and the Aramaean
alphabet gradually replaced cuneiform.
The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in
75 AD. |
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