Cuneiform is an writing that is ancient that was first found in around 3400 BC.

Distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, cuneiform script is the oldest form of writing on earth, first appearing even earlier than Egyptian hieroglyphics. Here are six facts about the script that originated from ancient Mesopotamia…

Curators for the world’s largest collection of cuneiform tablets – housed at the British Museum – revealed in a 2015 book why the writing system can be as relevant today as ever. Here, Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor share six lesser-known factual statements about the annals of the ancient script…

Cuneiform just isn’t a language

The cuneiform system that is writing also not an alphabet, and it also doesn’t have letters. Instead it used between 600 and 1,000 characters to write words (or areas of them) or syllables (or areas of them).

The 2 languages that are main in Cuneiform are Sumerian and Akkadian (from ancient Iraq), although a lot more than a dozen others are recorded. This means we’re able to use it equally well to spell Chinese, Hungarian or English today.

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Cuneiform was first found in around 3400 BC

The stage that is first elementary pictures which were soon also used to record sounds. Cuneiform probably preceded Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, because we all know of early Mesopotamian experiments and ‘dead-ends’ whilst the established script developed – like the beginning of signs and numbers – whereas the hieroglyphic system seems to have been born more or less perfectly formed and ready to go. Almost certainly Egyptian writing evolved from cuneiform – it can’t have already been an on-the-spot invention.

Amazingly, cuneiform continued to be used through to the first century AD, and therefore the exact distance in time that separates us through the latest surviving cuneiform tablet is just just over 1 / 2 of that which separates that tablet through the cuneiform that is first.

All you necessary to write cuneiform was a reed and some clay

Both of which were freely for sale in the rivers alongside the Mesopotamian cities where cuneiform was used (now Iraq and Syria that is eastern). Your message cuneiform comes from Latin ‘cuneus’, meaning ‘wedge’, and just means ‘wedge shaped’. It is the shape made every time a scribe pressed his stylus (made of a specially cut reed) into the clay.

Most tablets would fit comfortably within the palm of a hand – like mobile phones essaytyperonline.com review today – and were used for only a short time: maybe several hours or days at school, or a few years for a letter, loan or account. A number of the tablets have survived purely by accident.

Those who read cuneiform for an income – and there are many – like to think about it whilst the world’s most difficult writing (or perhaps the most inconvenient). However, it’s a doddle to master if you have six years to spare and work round the clock (not pausing for meals! All you have to do is learn the languages that are extinct because of the tablets, then thousands of signs – some of which have significantly more than one meaning or sound.

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Children who visit the British Museum seem to take to cuneiform with a kind of overlooked homing instinct, and so they often consider clay homework in spikey wedges alot more exciting than exercises in biro written down.

In fact, a number of the surviving tablets in the museum collection belonged to schoolchildren, and show the spelling and handwriting exercises which they completed: they repeated the exact same characters, then words, then proverbs, over and over again until they could proceed to difficult literature.

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Cuneiform is really as relevant as ever today

Ancient writings offer proof which our ‘modern’ ideas and problems have already been experienced by human beings for thousands of years – that is always an realisation that is astounding. Through cuneiform we hear the voices not just of kings and their scribes, but children, bankers, merchants, priests and healers – women along with men. It really is utterly fascinating to read other people’s letters, especially when they’ve been 4,000 yrs old and written in such elegant and script that is delicate.