Distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, cuneiform script is the form that is oldest of writing on earth, first appearing even earlier than Egyptian hieroglyphics. Here are six details about the script that originated in ancient Mesopotamia…

Curators of the world’s largest collection of cuneiform tablets – housed in the British Museum – revealed in a 2015 book why the writing system can be relevant today as ever. Here, Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor share six lesser-known details about the history regarding the ancient script…

Cuneiform is not a language

The cuneiform system that is writing also not an alphabet, plus it does not have letters. Instead it used between 600 and 1,000 characters to publish words (or areas of them) or syllables (or areas of them).

The 2 languages that are main in Cuneiform are Sumerian and Akkadian (from ancient Iraq), although a lot more than a dozen others are recorded. What this means is we’re able to utilize it equally well right now to spell Chinese, Hungarian or English.

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Cuneiform was first used in around 3400 BC

The stage that is first elementary pictures that were soon also used to record sounds. Cuneiform probably preceded Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, because we know of early Mesopotamian experiments and ‘dead-ends’ as the established script developed – including the beginning of signs and numbers – whereas the hieroglyphic system seemingly have been born just about perfectly formed and able to go. Almost certainly Egyptian writing evolved from cuneiform – it can’t have already been an invention that is on-the-spot.

Amazingly, cuneiform always been used until the first century AD, and therefore the distance in time that separates us through the latest surviving cuneiform tablet is just just over 1 / 2 of that which separates that tablet through the first cuneiform.

Anything you necessary to write cuneiform was a reed plus some clay

Both of which were freely obtainable in the rivers alongside the Mesopotamian cities where cuneiform was used (now Iraq and Syria that is eastern). The phrase cuneiform arises from Latin ‘cuneus’, meaning ‘wedge’, and just means ‘wedge shaped’. It refers to the shape made every time a scribe pressed buy essays his stylus (made from a reed that is specially cut in to the clay.

Most tablets would fit comfortably in the palm of a hand – like mobile phones today – and were used for only a short time: maybe a few hours or days in school, or a few years for a letter, loan or account. Most of the tablets have survived purely by accident.

Those who read cuneiform for a full time income – and there are a few – prefer to think about it as the world’s most writing that is difficultor even the most inconvenient). However, it’s a doddle to master if you have six years to spare and work round the clock (not pausing for meals! All you have to do is learn the languages that are extinct by the tablets, then lots and lots of signs – some of which have significantly more than one meaning or sound.

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Children who go to the British Museum appear to take to cuneiform with a type of overlooked homing instinct, and additionally they often consider clay homework in spikey wedges even more exciting than exercises in biro written down.

In fact, a number of the surviving tablets within the museum collection belonged to schoolchildren, and show the spelling and handwriting exercises that they completed: they repeated the same characters, then words, then proverbs, over and over again until they could proceed to difficult literature.

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Cuneiform is as relevant as ever today

Ancient writings offer proof that our ‘modern’ ideas and problems have already been experienced by human beings for thousands of years – this can be always an realisation that is astounding. Through cuneiform the voices are heard by us not just of kings and their scribes, but children, bankers, merchants, priests and healers – women as well as men. It really is utterly fascinating to read through other people’s letters, especially when they truly are 4,000 years old and written in such elegant and delicate script.