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Cuneiform [note 1] is a logo-syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. [3] The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. [4] Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions (Latin: cuneus) which form their ...
The decipherment of cuneiform began with the decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform between 1802 and 1836. The first cuneiform inscriptions published in modern times were copied from the Achaemenid royal inscriptions in the ruins of Persepolis , with the first complete and accurate copy being published in 1778 by Carsten Niebuhr .
Before cuneiform, however, there was an archaic script using abstract pictographic signs called proto-cuneiform. It first appeared around 3350 to 3000 BC in the city of Uruk, in modern southern Iraq.
[7] [8] Today, alternate terms such as "cuneiform studies" or "study of the Ancient Near East" are also used. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Originally Assyriology referred primarily to the study of the texts in the Assyrian language discovered in quantity in the north of modern-day Iraq, ancient Assyria, following their initial discovery at Khorsabad in 1843.
The Caylus vase is an Egyptian alabaster jar dedicated in the name of the Achaemenid king Xerxes I (c.518–465 BCE) in Egyptian hieroglyphs and Old Persian cuneiform, which in 1823 played an important role in the modern decipherment of cuneiform and the decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts.
For broader coverage of this topic, see Writing. A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a script, as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing was invented during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each writing system invented without prior knowledge of writing gradually evolved from a system of proto-writing that ...
Edward Hincks was born in Cork on 19 August 1792. He was the eldest son of the Rev. Thomas Dix Hincks, a distinguished Protestant minister, orientalist and naturalist. Edward was an elder brother of Sir Francis Hincks, a prominent Canadian politician who was also sometime Governor of Barbados, and William Hincks, the first Professor of Natural History at Queen's College, Cork, and afterwards ...
The proto-cuneiform script was a system of proto-writing that emerged in Mesopotamia, eventually developing into the early cuneiform script used in the region's Early Dynastic I period. It arose from the token-based system that had already been in use across the region in preceding millennia.