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Cuneiform
One of the world's oldest known writing systems, cuneiform made it possible for the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia to keep track of their expanding empires via a literate bureaucracy. The invention of a symbolic writing system also allowed the people of the region to record their spiritual, social, and political values, as well as literature and history. Created by the Sumerians during the fourth millennium B.C., cuneiform writing was a revolutionary invention that changed human history dramatically. The term "cuneiform" is a Latin title that means "wedge shaped," referring to the manner in which cuneiform was created. Sumerian scribes began to write their earliest versions of cuneiform as pictographs, similar to Egyptian or Mesoamerican hieroglyphs in concept. There were many reasons why cuneiform was necessary, but one of the most important was the need for keeping track of such financial records as tax records and trade and commerce receipts. The earliest cuneiform texts merely count quantities in fragment sentences. By the time cuneiform had developed into a syllabic character set, scribes wrote complete sentences that expressed mental concepts as well as numeric quantities. Thus, cuneiform shifted from a bookkeeping method to a full‐fledged literary system capable of recording the laws, literature, and personal writings of entire societies. Some of the most important documents in ancient history were written in cuneiform, and their significance reflects the impact literacy has on societies in general. Written histories, laws, and religious texts work to fix cultural values and standards in ways that oral traditions do not. Mesopotamian governments benefited greatly from cuneiform by publishing their laws in the language. By presenting the public with written law codes, leaders were able to expect their citizens to actually abide by the rules; citizens could not claim ignorance of the laws. As a result, laws were codified using cuneiform throughout the region. Cuneiform also made it possible for Mesopotamian cultures to record their myths, legends, and religious values. Theologians wrote histories and genealogies of the gods, compendiums for reading omens, and guidebooks for temple worship. Epic poems were also created, detailing the lives of the gods and events of supernatural phenomena. One of the most important literary works is the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Babylonian tale that tells of a heroic figure who sets out to face the gods. Those texts served not only to educate and entertain, but to disseminate religious faith. Because of the fixed nature of texts, they also worked to solidify beliefs that may have been more malleable had they only passed through oral traditions. Finally, one of the most important innovations of cuneiform writing was that it allowed individuals to write letters and other ego‐
documents that historians can use for a glimpse into their inner lives. There are hundreds of thousands of such documents that have been discovered so far. Taken together with the bureaucratic, legal, and religious texts of the Mesopotamians, they give historians a deeper understanding of the readers and writers of cuneiform, far more complete than many other ancient societies that existed without literary documents. 1. What is cuneiform and what does it mean? 2. What was the benefit of publishing laws in the language of their people? 3. Besides laws, tax records and receipts, what else did cuneiform make possible to record? 4. How have historians been able to get a glimpse into the inner lives of the Sumerian people?