Cuneiform

Cuneiform is, as far as is known, the oldest form of writing in the world. It is a logo-syllabic system, employing both phonetic characters and logograms, or word signs, and it could be used to write different languages. The script was first developed by the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia, and the earliest records come from Uruk in southern Mesopotamia.

Across an active history spanning roughly three millennia, cuneiform was used to write around 15 different languages, among them Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Elamite, Hittite, Urartian and Old Persian. By the second century CE knowledge of the characters had faded away.

The name of the script derives from the Latin cuneus, meaning "wedge," a reference to the wedge-shaped strokes that define its appearance. This form arose because the writing was pressed into soft clay with the slanted edge of a stylus, so that linear strokes acquired their characteristic wedge shape as the script grew successively more cursive over the course of the 3rd millennium BCE. Assyrian and Babylonian scribes worked with the thick stem of a reed, the Arundo donax, splitting the stalks to create a trapezoidal tip, pressing signs into damp clay and firing the inscribed tablets in a kiln, which made them almost indestructible.

Cuneiform employs between 600 and 1,000 characters impressed on clay, spelling words by dividing them into syllables, while other signs stood for whole words. The number of characters used in writing was reduced from over 1,000 to 600 in order to simplify and clarify the written word.

The earliest traces of cuneiform are traced to the end of the 4th millennium BCE, around 3200 BCE. Very early cuneiform is represented by an accounting tablet from Uruk III of the late fourth millennium BCE. The city of Uruk surpassed all others as an urban center, covered approximately 250 hectares, or.96 square miles, and has been called the first city in world history. On a tablet recording the allocation of beer, the symbol for beer, an upright jar with pointed base, appears three times, and alongside the pictographs are five different shaped impressions representing numerical symbols.

The alphabet was invented only in the early second millennium BCE, somewhere in the vicinity of Egypt, Sinai, or possibly Byblos in the Levant.

Compared to other ancient civilizations, Mesopotamian written sources are abundant, and above all they are original.

Written material in at least eight languages has been recovered from Ugarit: Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hittite, Luwian, Sumerian, Hurrian, Egyptian and an unknown language written in Cypro-Minoan. The alphabetic cuneiform of Ugarit is structurally almost identical to the linear alphabets that were becoming established elsewhere in the Levant and would develop into the Phoenician, Hebrew and Arabic alphabets.

Assyrian scholarship was focused on understanding the will of the gods, so the library focused on texts that interpreted omens from the gods. Ashurbanipal enjoyed scholarly pursuits and could read and write, which was unusual for a king.

The sexagesimal system of the Babylonians, that is to say base 60 in modern notation, underpinned counting in ancient Mesopotamia. Among the highlights of the Yale Babylonian Collection is a mathematical school tablet labelled YBC 7289 which approximates the square root of two.

A particularly exciting venture is the electronic Babylonian Literature project, which currently holds about 20,000 editions of tablet fragments from the British Museum. Searchable databases of cuneiform texts and artefacts include the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, the Open Richly-Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, Archibab, Achemenet, the Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts and the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. The CDLI pursues the systematic digital documentation and electronic dissemination of the entire cuneiform text corpus.

The latest known example of the script is an astronomical almanac from CE 75, found in southern Mesopotamia and predicting the appearances of stars, planets and other heavenly bodies.

The Library of Ashurbanipal, of the 7th century BCE, is the oldest known systematically organized library in the world, established in Nineveh by the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal to preserve the history and culture of Mesopotamia. Its holdings were buried beneath the burning walls of Ashurbanipal's palace and were lost for over 2,000 years. The first broken and scattered remains came to light at Nineveh in 1849 and are now at the British Museum.

The Ashurbanipal Library, commonly referred to as the Kuyunjik Collection, is a convenient label for around 32,000 cuneiform tablets and fragments from the British Museum's excavations at Nineveh.

Cuneiform writing culminated in the extensive records from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, built up around 650 BCE. A large part of the library was produced on the orders of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria from 669 to about 630 BC, though others are earlier.

Europe was already familiar with wedge-shaped cuneiform writing from copies made in 1765 by Carsten Niebuhr at the ruined Persian capital of Persepolis, and Grotefend, who began teaching at the Göttingen city school in 1797, worked from that material.

Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson was a British army officer and Orientalist who deciphered the Old Persian portion of the trilingual cuneiform inscription of Darius I the Great at Bīsitūn in Iran. Edward Hincks took the first great strides in deciphering Akkadian cuneiform in 1846 by searching for the names of ancient Persian kings in the parallel inscriptions, obtaining the approximate phonetic value of more than 100 Akkadian characters.

The discovery of the Gilgamesh flood story was announced in 1872 by George Smith, who was examining clay tablets that archaeologists had shipped back to London from Nineveh. On 20 May 1857 the judges gathered at the Royal Asiatic Society's townhouse on New Burlington Street to test the competing translations of cuneiform.

The Behistun Inscription is a relief with accompanying text carved 330 feet (100 meters) up a cliff in Kermanshah Province, western Iran. It stands at Bisotun, along the ancient trade route linking the Iranian high plateau with Mesopotamia, and its principal monument is the bas-relief and cuneiform inscription ordered by Darius I the Great when he rose to the throne of the Persian Empire in 521 BC. The inscription is trilingual in Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian, relating Darius I's autobiography, his authority to rule by divine grace, and his triumph over those who opposed his rise to power.

Sir Henry Rawlinson copied the three cuneiform texts in 1835 and 1843; his copy enabled him and other notable scholars of the time to decipher the inscriptions. The English translation of the Behistun Persian text used by Livius was made by L. Thompson and published in London in 1907 as The Sculptures and Inscription of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistun. Bisotun was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2006 under criteria (ii) and (iii), with a property of 187 hectares.

Hundreds of thousands of cuneiform artifacts have been unearthed throughout Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey, and these archaeological discoveries are our main sources for Mesopotamian history. The British Museum's collection of cuneiform tablets, which includes the Kuyunjik tablets from Nineveh, is among the most important in the world, containing approximately 130,000 texts and fragments and perhaps the largest collection outside of Iraq.

Cuneiform was the most widespread and historically significant writing system in the ancient Middle East, its active history comprising the last three millennia BCE. It and hieroglyphs continue to vie for the title of the oldest writing system, a title that rightfully belongs to cuneiform. Both predate the alphabet by far more than a thousand years.