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Mesopotamia, often called "the Cradle of Civilization," was the birthplace of the world's first civilization, Sumer.
Mesopotamia was home to some of the world's greatest civilizations as well—not only of Sumer and the related culture of
Akkad but also of Babylonia and Assyria. From these countries came the world's first legal system, the Code of
Hammurabi, and the first great tale in Western civilization, the Gilgamesh Epic. The cuneiform (pronounced cue-NAY-iform) of Sumer was the first known form of writing and probably influenced Egyptian hieroglyphics. Israel felt the
influence of Mesopotamia: Tales from the region provide the source for many of the great stories in the early chapters of
the Bible, and later the Israelites would become captives of the Assyrians and Babylonians. From the mud of Sumerian
huts to the stars mapped by the astronomers of Babylon, there were few aspects of ancient life not touched by the
brilliant cultures of Mesopotamia.
Cuneiform
Without writing, the only way to communicate ideas is verbally, which means that a thought can only travel so
far. Only through writing can people convey complex thoughts and pass on detailed information, across time and space.
Even before the Egyptians first used hieroglyphics, the Sumerians of the fourth millennium b.c.> produced the
first form of written language, cuneiform (cue-NAY-i-form). The name cuneiform is Latin for "wedge-shaped." Indeed its
symbols do look like wedges placed at various angles to one another.
Cuneiform may have influenced the development of hieroglyphics, with which it shared many similarities. As with
hieroglyphics, the earliest cuneiform symbols were pictograms, or pictures of the thing they represented: a picture of a
man, for instance, for "man." Some of these pictograms came to stand for other concepts related to the function of the
object depicted. Thus a foot could symbolize walking, or symbols could be joined to produce a new idea. Hence the
combination of pictograms for mouth and water meant drink. Eventually the Sumerians developed phonograms, symbols
that stood for sounds or syllables. This made writing much easier. Before the introduction of phonograms, cuneiform
had as many as 2,000 symbols. Later, the number was reduced to 600—which is still a large number compared to the
twenty-six letters of the English alphabet.
The Sumerians used cuneiform to record the great Gilgamesh Epic (GIL-guh-mesh). They also developed a much more
practical use for cuneiform: keeping track of money. In any business situation, it is important to maintain a record of
what one spends and what one receives. This is called accounting. People keep accounts on a personal level today (for
example, by balancing a checkbook). Businesses do it on an even bigger scale, often employing full-time accountants for
the task.
Using a sharp stick called a stylus, a Sumerian accountant would make an impression in a soft clay tablet,
recording the details of who paid what to whom. Later the tablet would be baked and would harden, a permanent record
of a business transaction. Thousands and thousands of years later, when archaeologists examined the ruins of Sumer,
some of the first evidence of Sumerian culture that they found were what people today would call receipts!
The Early Dynastic Period (2750-2300 B.C.)
Eventually the ensi became greedy and began to oppress the people, who looked to powerful landowners for leadership. A
man who owned a great deal of property was called a lugal, which literally meant "great man," and in time the lugals
became like kings. Thus the theocracy (thee-OCK-ruh-see; government controlled by religious leaders) was replaced by a
monarchy, or rule by a king. Whereas the ensi were priests who became political leaders, the lugals were kings who
became religious leaders as well. In order for a Sumerian ruler to have legitimacy, or the right to rule, he needed to have
the approval of the gods: therefore it was necessary to combine political and religious functions. Historians refer to this
period of some four centuries as the Early Dynastic Period, "dynastic" (die-NASS-tick) being a form of dynasty. The
dynasties of Sumer were different from the dynasties of Egypt, established around the same time: the Sumerian dynasties
were much shorter and less powerful, and they spent much of their time at war with one another.
The Akkadian Empire (2300-2150 B.C.)
The Akkadians had come to Mesopotamia with the Semitic tribes who had migrated to the region centuries
before. Their culture was similar to that of the Sumerians. When Sargon (SAHR-gahn; c. 2334-2279 b.c.>) conquered
Sumer, he was not so much destroying a civilization as he was unifying two related peoples.
Around 2300 b.c.>, he conquered the city-states of Sumer and united them under one system, perhaps the first
empire in history. Under Akkadian rule, cuneiform developed further. The Akkadians began to produce works of
literature. Sargon also moved the government of Sumer further away from a theocracy: now the word ensi came to mean
not a representative of a god but a representative of a king.
"Mesopotamia." Ancient Civilizations Reference Library. Ed. Judson Knight. Detroit: U*X*L, 2000. Student Resource Center Junior. Gale. Beaver Country Day School. 18 Dec. 2008
<http://find.galegroup.com/srcx/infomark.do?&contentSet=GSRC&type=retrieve&tabID=T001&prodId=SRC4&docId=EJ2173150015&source=gale&srcprod=SRCJ&userGroupName=mlin_m_beaver&version=1.0>.
Gale Student Research Center
The people of Mesopotamia left behind hundreds of thousands of clues about |what life was like 4,000 years ago. These
clues are inscribed clay tablets that contain administrative documents, letters, historical inscriptions, literary and
religious compositions, and scholarly texts about mathematics, astronomy, divination, and grammar. While few people in
Mesopotamia could read or write, creating a written record was highly valued. As a result, scribes were hired to write
everything from letters to wedding agreements.
When discussing Mesopotamia, a distinction must be made between its language and script. Language refers to
the vocabulary and grammar used to communicate ideas, while script is the collection of symbols used to represent a
spoken language in written form. So, while script and language are often studied together, they are not the same. The
script of Mesopotamia is called cuneiform; the languages were Sumerian and Akkadian.
Writing was invented in Uruk around 3400 B.C., but this was not the first attempt to record information.
Cylinder seals had long been used to identify officials who witnessed a transaction. Small tokens were used to count
objects as they changed hands. No one knows specifically who invented writing, but the idea caught on very quickly.
The earliest writing in Mesopotamia used some signs that were pictures and some that were abstract. These
were drawn on clay tablets with a reed whose end had been carved to a fine point. Most of these early economic tablets
contained only a few signs and numbers. They were probably written in Sumerian.
On tablets that date to about 3100 B.C., however, scholars can begin to read words. One principle of this writing
used the rebus method. A rebus means writing that uses a picture of an object to represent something else that sounds the
same. Such writings, however, can be understood in only one language. For example, the rebus can be understood only in
English as "before I go." Using this method, abstract ideas that were not easily depicted could now be written down. In
this way, the cuneiform sign (right) that represented sum (meaning "garlic") was used to represent the Sumerian
homonym sum ("to give").
Changes in both the technique and the appearance of writing were also under way. The reed stylus lost its point
and became angular, and signs were no longer drawn on the clay, but were made by pressing the edge of the stylus into
the clay. In this way, the distinctive wedge-shaped cuneiform signs were created (the term "cuneiform" is Latin for
"wedge-shaped").
The cuneiform script contains almost 600 signs. They represented words and syllables and could also be used to
mark objects as belonging to a specific class. Some signs--the dingir ([??]), for example--had all three values. It
represented the words "sky," "heaven," and "god"; it also represented the syllable an; and it could be used to mark the
names of deities.
This script has an extremely long history throughout which the principles of writing that were present since its
invention remained constant. Well-established by the end of the fourth millennium B.C., it remained in use for more than
3,000 years. The last dated text is from A.D. 75, and some scholars believe that cuneiform sources were still read, although
not produced, as late as the third century A.D. In addition to Sumerian and Akkadian, this writing was used for Elamite,
Hittite, Old Persian, and Ugaritic.
Most of the texts that have survived from the early period are economic, but there are also many scholarly and
literary compositions. The variety shows that writing was valued both for its practical purposes and as an art.
The best evidence for the teaching of scribes comes from around 1750 B.C. At that time, scribes-in-training went
to school in the [??] ([e.sub.2]-dub-ba-a-or "tablet house") located in their teacher's home. They were first taught to hold
the stylus, then to make cuneiform signs and copy sentences. Gradually, they were assigned longer documents to copy,
and it is these copies that have preserved many scholarly and literary texts. The curriculum originated in Nippur and was
remarkably consistent across Mesopotamia for more than 1,000 years. Even after Sumerian was no longer spoken, master
scribes wrote dictionaries and grammars to teach the language. Using these aids, the scribes continued to produce
Sumerian texts long after the language died.
Source Citation:
Payne, Elizabeth E. "Writing in Mesopotamia." Calliope. 14. 1 (Sept 2003): 38(4). Student Resource Center - Junior. Gale.
Beaver Country Day School. 18 Dec. 2008 <http://find.galegroup.com/srcx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IACDocuments&type=retrieve&tabID=T003&prodId=SRC4&docId=A109945308&source=gale&srcprod=SRCJ&userGroupName=mlin_m_beaver&version=1.0>.
New Source: Encyclopedia Britannica
Origin and character of cuneiform
The origins of cuneiform may be traced back approximately to the end of the 4th millennium BC. At that time the
Sumerians, a people of unknown ethnic and linguistic affinities, inhabited southern Mesopotamia and the region west of
the mouth of the Euphrates known as Chaldea. While it does not follow that they were the earliest inhabitants of the
region or the true originators of their system of writing, it is to them that the first attested traces of cuneiform writing are
conclusively assigned. The earliest written records in the Sumerian language are pictographic tablets from Uruk (Erech),
evidently lists or ledgers of commodities identified by drawings of the objects and accompanied by numerals and
personal names. Such word writing was able to express only the basic ideas of concrete objects. Numerical notions were
easily rendered by the repetitional use of strokes or circles. However, the representation of proper names, for example,
necessitated an early recourse to the rebus principle—i.e., the use of pictographic shapes to evoke in the reader's mind an
underlying sound form rather than the basic notion of the drawn object. This brought about a transition from pure word
writing to a partial phonetic script. Thus, for example, the picture of a hand came to stand not only for Sumerian šu
(“hand”) but also for the phonetic syllable šu in any required context. Sumerian words were largely monosyllabic, so the
signs generally denoted syllables, and the resulting mixture is termed a word-syllabic script. The inventory of phonetic
symbols henceforth enabled the Sumerians to denote grammatical elements by phonetic complements added to the word
signs (logograms or ideograms). Because Sumerian had many identical sounding (homophonous) words, several
logograms frequently yielded identical phonetic values and are distinguished in modern transliteration—(as, for example,
ba, bá, bà, ba4). Because a logogram often represented several related notions with different names (e.g., “sun,” “day,”
“bright”), it was capable of assuming more than one phonetic value (this feature is called polyphony).
In the course of the 3rd millennium the writing became successively more cursive, and the pictographs developed into
conventionalized linear drawings. Due to the prevalent use of clay tablets as writing material (stone, metal, or wood also
were employed occasionally), the linear strokes acquired a wedge-shaped appearance by being pressed into the soft clay
with the slanted edge of a stylus. Curving lines disappeared from writing, and the normal order of signs was fixed as
running from left to right, without any word-divider. This change from earlier columns running downward entailed
turning the signs on one side.
"cuneiform." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 18 Dec. 2008
<http://search.eb.com/eb/article-53174>.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Spread and development of cuneiform
Before these developments had been completed, the Sumerian writing system was adopted by the Akkadians,
Semitic invaders who established themselves in Mesopotamia about the middle of the 3rd millennium. In adapting the
script to their wholly different language, the Akkadians retained the Sumerian logograms and combinations of logograms
for more complex notions but pronounced them as the corresponding Akkadian words. They also kept the phonetic
values but extended them far beyond the original Sumerian inventory of simple types (open or closed syllables like ba or
ab). Many more complex syllabic values of Sumerian logograms (of the type kan, mul, bat) were transferred to the
phonetic level, and polyphony became an increasingly serious complication in Akkadian cuneiform (e.g., the original
pictograph for “sun” may be read phonetically as ud, tam, tú, par, lah, hiš). The Akkadian readings of the logograms added
new complicated values. Thus the sign for “land” or “mountain range” (originally a picture of three mountain tops) has the
phonetic value kur on the basis of Sumerian but also mat and šad from Akkadian matu (“land”) and šadû (“mountain”). No
effort was made until very late to alleviate the resulting confusion, and equivalent “graphies” like ta-am and tam
continued to exist side by side throughout the long history of Akkadian cuneiform.
The earliest type of Semitic cuneiform in Mesopotamia is called the Old Akkadian, seen for example in the
inscriptions of the ruler Sargon of Akkad (died c. 2279 BC). Sumer, the southernmost part of the country, continued to be
a loose agglomeration of independent city-states until it was united by Gudea of Lagash (died c. 2124 BC) in a last brief
manifestation of specifically Sumerian culture. The political hegemony then passed decisively to the Akkadians, and King
Hammurabi of Babylon (died 1750 BC) unified all of southern Mesopotamia. Babylonia thus became the great and
influential centre of Mesopotamian culture. The Code of Hammurabi is written in Old Babylonian cuneiform, which
developed throughout the shifting and less brilliant later eras of Babylonian history into Middle and New Babylonian
types. Farther north in Mesopotamia the beginnings of Assur were humbler. Specifically Old Assyrian cuneiform is
attested mostly in the records of Assyrian trading colonists in central Asia Minor (c. 1950 BC; the so-called Cappadocian
tablets) and Middle Assyrian in an extensive Law Code and other documents. The Neo-Assyrian period was the great era
of Assyrian power, and the writing culminated in the extensive records from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (c.
650 BC).
The expansion of cuneiform writing outside Mesopotamia began in the 3rd millennium, when the country of Elam in
southwestern Iran was in contact with Mesopotamian culture and adopted the system of writing. The Elamite sideline of
cuneiform continued far into the 1st millennium BC, when it presumably provided the Indo-European Persians with the
external model for creating a new simplified quasi-alphabetic cuneiform writing for the Old Persian language. The
Hurrians in northern Mesopotamia and around the upper stretches of the Euphrates adopted Old Akkadian cuneiform
around 2000 BC and passed it on to the Indo-European Hittites, who had invaded central Asia Minor at about that time.
In the 2nd millennium the Akkadian of Babylonia, frequently in somewhat distorted and barbarous varieties,
became a lingua franca of international intercourse in the entire Middle East, and cuneiform writing thus became a
universal medium of written communication. The political correspondence of the era was conducted almost exclusively in
that language and writing. Cuneiform was sometimes adapted, as in the consonantal script of the Canaanite city of Ugarit
on the Syrian coast (c. 1400 BC), or simply taken over, as in the inscriptions of the kingdom of Urartu or Haldi in the
Armenian mountains from the 9th to 6th centuries BC; the language is remotely related to Hurrian, and the script is a
borrowed variety of Neo-Assyrian cuneiform. Even after the fall of the Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms in the 7th and
6th centuries BC, when Aramaic had become the general popular language, rather decadent varieties of Late Babylonian
and Assyrian survived as written languages in cuneiform almost down to the time of Christ.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Decipherment of cuneiform
Many of the cultures employing cuneiform (Hurrian, Hittite, Urartian) disappeared one by one, and their written
records fell into oblivion. The same fate overtook cuneiform generally with astonishing swiftness and completeness. One
of the reasons was the victorious progress of the Phoenician script in the western sections of the Middle East and the
classical lands in Mediterranean Europe. To this writing system of superior efficiency and economy, cuneiform could not
offer serious competition. Its international prestige of the 2nd millennium had been exhausted by 500 BC, and
Mesopotamia had become a Persian dependency. Late Babylonian and Assyrian were little but moribund artificial literary
idioms. So complete was the disappearance of cuneiform that the classical Greeks were practically unaware of its
existence, except for the widely traveled Herodotus, who in passing mentions Assyria Grammata (“Assyrian characters”).
"cuneiform." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 18 Dec. 2008
<http://search.eb.com/eb/article-53176>.
Influence of Cuneiform
The main type of cuneiform, with its inventory of ideograms (including “determinatives” or “classifiers”) and
phonetic signs, is a word-syllabic system like the Egyptian, hieroglyphic Hittite, Minoan-Mycenaean, proto-Elamite, and
proto-Indic. The Sumerian system seems to be the oldest. To what extent it stimulated the origin or influenced the
development of the others is a difficult problem connected with the monogenesis or polygenesis (common or multiple
origin) of writing. The Phoenician consonantal script provided the new typological pattern on which the Ugaritic and Old
Persian systems were constructed, keeping only the outer likeness of the wedge form.
"cuneiform." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 18 Dec. 2008
<http://search.eb.com/eb/article-53180>.
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Sumerian Writing
type of writing used by the ancient Sumerian civilization of southern Mesopotamia. It is the earliest form of cuneiform
writing.
Sumerian writing." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 18 Dec. 2008 <http://search.eb.com/eb/article9070299>.