Sumerian cuneiform tablet (c. 3100 – 2900 BC).  Administrativeaccount recording the distribution of

Sumerian cuneiform tablet (c. 3100 – 2900 BC).  Administrativeaccount recording the distribution of barley and emmer wheat. Probably from Uruk (Warka, Iraq).The first system of writing in the world was developed by theSumerians, beginning c. 3500 – 3000 BC.  It was the mostsignificant of Sumer’s cultural contributions, and much of thisdevelopment happened in the city of Uruk.A stylus was used to creat wedge-like impresssions in soft clay, andthe clay was fired afterwards.  The word “cuneiform” comes fromthe Latin cuneus, meaning “wedge”.These wedge-like impressions were first pictographs, and later onphonograms (symbols representing vocal sounds) and “word-concepts”– closer to a modern-day understanding of words and writing.  Allthe great Mesopotamian civilizations used cuneiform, including theSumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Hatti, Hittites, Assyrians andHurrians.  Around 100 BC, it was abandoned in favour of thealphabetic script.The earliest texts used proto-cuneiform, and were pictorial. Writing was a technique for noting down things, items and objects(e.g. Two Sheep Temple God Inanna).  This system worked well forconcrete, visible subjects, but could give little in the way ofdetails.  As subject matter became more intangible (e.g. the will ofthe gods, the quest for immortality), cuneiform developed incomplexity to represent this.By 3000 BC, the representations were more simplified.  The stylus’impressions conveyed word-concepts rather than word-signs – forexample, the scribe could write about the more abstract concept of“honour”, rather than having to specifically depict “anhonourable man”.The “rebus” principle was used to isolate the phonetic (sound)value of a particular sign.  Rebus is a device that combinespictures (or pictographs) with individual letters to depict wordsand/or phrases.  For example, the picture of a bumblebee followed bythe letter “n” would represent the word “been”.  With therebus principle, scribes could express grammatical relationships andsyntax to clarify meaning and be more precise.There are only a few examples of the use of rebus in the earlieststages of cuneiform (c. 3200 – 3000 BC).  Consistent usage of rebusbecame apparent only after c. 2600 BC.  This was the beginning of atrue writing system, characterized by a complex combination of wordsigns and phonograms (signs for vowels and syllables).By c. 2500 BC, cuneiform (written mostly on clay tablets) was usedfor a wide variety of religious, political, literary, scholarly andeconomic documents.Now the reader of the tablet didn’t have to struggle with the meaningof a pictograph – they could read word-concepts that more clearlyconveyed the scribe’s meaning.  The number of characters used inwriting was reduced from 1000 to 600, to make it simpler.By the time of the famous priestess-poet Enheduanna (c. 2285 – 2250BC), cuneiform had become sophisticated enough to convey not onlyemotional states such as love or betrayal, but also the reasonsbehind the writer’s experience of these states.  Enheduanna wrote acollection of hymns to Inanna in the Sumerian city of Ur, and she isthe first author in the world known by name. -- source link

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