Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Sumerian cuneiform, ca. 26th century BCE. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) is an online digital library of texts and translations of Sumerian literature that was created by a now-completed project based at the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford. [1]
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 ...
[citation needed] The Sumerian language remained in official and literary use in the Akkadian and Babylonian empires, even after the spoken language disappeared from the population; literacy was widespread, and the Sumerian texts that students copied heavily influenced later Babylonian literature. [2]
By c. 2800 BC, some tablets began using syllabic elements that clearly indicated a relation to the Sumerian language. Around 2600 BC, [67] [68] cuneiform symbols were developed using a wedge-shaped stylus to impress the shapes into wet clay. This cuneiform ("wedge-shaped") mode of writing co-existed with the proto-cuneiform archaic mode. Deimel ...
The cuneiform lexical lists are a series of ancient Mesopotamian glossaries which preserve the semantics of Sumerograms, their phonetic value and their Akkadian or other language equivalents. [1] They are the oldest literary texts from Mesopotamia and one of the most widespread genres in the ancient Near East.
Actual decipherment did not take place until the beginning of the 19th century, initiated by Georg Friedrich Grotefend in his study of Old Persian cuneiform. He was followed by Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin in 1822 and Rasmus Christian Rask in 1823, who was the first to decipher the name Achaemenides and the consonants m and n.
The term was first used by Ernest Renan in 1859 as a parallel to the term Egyptology, in a discussion of the translation of Assyrian terms from other cuneiform languages. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] By 1897 Fritz Hommel described the term as misleading, [ 5 ] and today the International Association for Assyriology itself calls the term "old-fashioned".
The Sumerian cuneiform sign by itself was originally an ideogram for the Sumerian word an ('sky' or 'heaven'); [2] its use was then extended to a logogram for the word diĝir ('god' or 'goddess') [3] and the supreme deity of the Sumerian pantheon Anu, and a phonogram for the syllable /an/.