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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 ...
After the Old Babylonian period [12] or, according to some, as early as 1700 BC, [10] the active use of Sumerian declined. Scribes did continue to produce texts in Sumerian at a more modest scale, but generally with interlinear Akkadian translations [35] and only part of the literature known in the Old Babylonian period continued to be copied ...
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]
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.
[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]
Pictographs then began to appear on clay tablets around 4000 BCE, and after the later development of Sumerian cuneiform writing, a more sophisticated partial syllabic script evolved that by around 2500 BCE was capable of recording the vernacular, the everyday speech of the common people. [7] Sumerians used what is known as pictograms. [5]
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 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/.