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Cuneiform and the Alphabet
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West Asia is probably the first place where people figured out how to write,
though Egyptian people began writing very soon afterwards. People seem to have begun
to write in Mesopotamiaabout 3000 BC, during the time of the Sumerians. The
Sumerians, and their successors down to about 1000 BC, wrote in a kind of signs called
cuneiform (pronounced koo-NEIGH-uh-form), and each sign stands for a syllable of a
word (consonant plus vowel). Of course with a different sign for every syllable, you
have to have a whole lot of signs, many more than we have letters in the Roman alphabet.
Having so many signs made it very hard to learn to write, and so very few people did
learn. Men who learned to write were called scribes, and they had important jobs, not
just writing but generally being organizers and administrators for the government, and
were often very powerful men. Most women did not ever learn to write, though some
certainly did.
How cuneiform writing worked
People did not know how to make paper yet, but they had plenty of clay, so most of the
time they wrote on tablets made of clay. They used a sharp river reed like a pen, to make
the marks. The reeds made triangular marks in the clay, so cuneiform is collections of
these little triangular marks in the clay.
The earliest writing we have from West Asia is mostly accounts and lists of things
donated to temples. But not long after that people began to write poems and stories.
One of the earliest stories is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which also includes a story about
the Flood. It may have been written as early as about 2500 BC. During the Akkadian
Empire, about 2000 BC, we have hymns to the gods written by one of the priestesses,
Enheduanna, who was the daughter of Sargon.
By 1700 BC the first written law code, the Code of Hammurabi, was written in Babylon,
also in cuneiform writing.
Around 1800 BC, however, a new kind of writing was invented, called the alphabet. The
alphabet has only a few signs, which are combined in different ways to make different
sounds, and so it is much easier to learn to read and write than in cuneiform or
hieroglyphs. Suddenly ordinary traders could learn to read and write, not just
specialists! The alphabet seems to have been invented in northern Egypt, by Canaanites
(or Jews) who were trading there and working in the turquoise mines. They saw
Egyptian hieroglyphs, but they couldn't read them, and they invented a simplified form
- the alphabet. The modern Hebrew and Arabic alphabets are both descended from this
original Semitic alphabet. It didn't take long for people all over West Asia to see that
the alphabet was easier to use than cuneiform, and by about 1000 BC many Semitic
people were starting to use the alphabet. Not long after that, Phoenician traders taught
the alphabet to the Greeks, who began to use it themselves by around 750 BC. Under
the Assyrian Empire, however, down to the 600s BC, important stone monuments all
over West Asia continued to be written in cuneiform, and government correspondence
also was still in cuneiform.
http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/westasia/literature/ (SEE VIDEO LINK FROM THIS WEBSITE IF TIME.)
Copyright 2012-2014 Karen Carr, Portland State University. This page last updated 2014.
This Babylonian tablet, about 3000 BC, accounts for two herds of sheep. The summation on the left seems to read: "840
(sheep inspected) in the morning ..., 540 (sheep inspected) in the evening ...; altogether 1380 sheep (inspected by) the chief
accountant." The second column on the right includes entries representing products like butter oil and wool delivered by the
shepherds.
Courtesy of Robert Englund, University of California, Los Angeles.
Use the following link on your iPads to discover more about the development of writing:
http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/writing/home_set.html