by Frances Stanford

Created on: August 06, 2009

Cuneiform was the ancient form of writing used in the Near East. The earliest examples of this system of writing date back to 3000 B.C. The writing was possibly invented by the Sumarians and was gradually adopted by the neighboring countries of Persia, Babylon and Assyria. Each culture modified the writing system to suit their own needs and their specific languages, but the result was that by about 2000 B.C. there was some form of cuneiform in use in almost all of the countries of the Near East.

This was a relatively simple system of writing in which characters were printed in wet clay on a tablet with a reed stylus that had an edge in the shape of a rectangle or triangle. The tablet was then left to dry in the sun and when dried the characters displayed the wedge shape from which this system of writing takes its name. The word cuneiform is a derivative of the Latin word "cuneus" which translates to mean wedge.

Cuneiform developed in a manner similar to that of the alphabet and hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. The characters were pictures of concrete objects or pictographs to denote people or animals. These were very difficult to draw, especially in wet clay. Therefore scribes simplified the symbols and often the form that represented an object was so simple that it had no connection to the object or person whatsoever. It was extremely difficult to represent abstract ideas and actions in this form of writing.

The number of characters in the Cuneiform system of writing was further reduced with the use of the same pictograph denoting different messages. For example, a drawing of a foot could mean a part of the body or it could denote the action of walking, running or simply going somewhere. At the beginning of the development of this system of writing, there were about 2000 different characters used for writing messages. By 2300 B.C. this number had been reduced to about 600.

There are specimens of cuneiform in existence today that date back to about the 6th century A.D. It is possible that it became obsolete at about the same time as Christianity emerged as a world religion and was only discovered in archaeological excavations carried out in the Middle East in the 18th century. One of the most important discoveries was the inscriptions found on a cliff face in Iran, which lists the achievements of Darius the Great. The Red Temple in Warka, Iraq is also another important site where you can view inscriptions written in the cuneiform system of writing.

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