Cuneiform script

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Cuneiform script
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The cuneiform script is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Created by the Sumerians in the late 4th millennium BC, cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs. Over time, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract.

Cuneiforms were written on clay tablets, on which symbols were drawn with a blunt reed called a stylus. The impressions left by the stylus were wedge shaped, thus giving rise to the name cuneiform, wedge-writing.

The Sumerian script was adapted for the writing of the Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite (and Luwian), Hurrian (and Urartian) languages, and it inspired the Old Persian and Ugaritic national alphabets.

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Development

Originally, cuneiform pictograms were drawn on clay tablets in vertical columns with a pen made from a sharpened reed stylus. Eventually, however, people began to write from left to right in horizontal rows (rotating all of the pictograms 90° counter-clockwise in the process), and a new wedge-tipped stylus was used which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped ("cuneiform") signs; these two developments made writing quicker and easier. By adjusting the relative position of the tablet to the stylus, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions. The word "cuneiform" comes from the Latin word cuneus, meaning "wedge".

Cuneiform tablets could be fired in kilns to provide a permanent record, or they could be recycled if permanence was not needed. Many of the tablets found by archaeologists were preserved because they were baked when attacking armies burned the building in which they were kept.

The script was also widely used on commemorative stelae and carved reliefs to record the achievements of the ruler in whose honour the monument had been erected.

Cuneiform was first used by the Babylonians and later on was adapted and used by the Assyrians. Invented by the Babylonians to record the Sumerian language, cuneiform was subsequently adopted by the Akkadians, Elamites, Hittites and Assyrians to write their own languages and was widely used in Mesopotamia for about 3000 years, though the syllabic nature of the script as it was refined by the Sumerians was unintuitive to the Semitic speakers. This fact, before Sumerian civilization was rediscovered, prompted many philologists to suspect a precursor civilization to the Babylonian.

Most later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary, together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs in the script were polyvalent, having both a syllabic and logographic meaning. When the cuneiform script was adapted to writing the Hittite language, a layer of Akkadian logographic spellings was added to the script, with the result that we no longer know the pronunciations of many Hittite words conventionally written by logograms. The complexity of the system bears a resemblance to classical Japanese, written in a Chinese-derived script; some of these Sinograms were used as logograms, others as phonetic characters. Modern Japanese graphically distinguishes the logograms (kanji) from syllabary characters (kana) but otherwise retains a similar system.

The complexity of the system prompted the development of a number of simplified versions of the script. Old Persian was written in a subset of simplified cuneiform characters, that formed a simple, semi-alphabetic syllabary, using far fewer wedge strokes than Assyrian used, together with a handful of logograms for frequently occurring words like "god" and "king." The Ugaritic language was written using the Ugaritic alphabet, a standard Semitic style alphabet (an abjad) written using the cuneiform method.

The use of Aramaic became widespread under the Assyrian Empire and the Aramaean alphabet gradually replaced cuneiform. The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in AD 75.

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Decipherment

Image:Ashurnasirpal2 cuneiform.jpg
Stele of Ashur-nasir-pal II with dedicatory inscription written in cuneiform

Knowledge of cuneiform was lost until 1835 when Henry Rawlinson, a British army officer, found some of the Behistun inscriptions on a cliff at Behistun in Persia. Carved in the reign of King Darius of Persia (522 BC–486 BC), they consisted of identical texts in the three official languages of the empire: Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite. The Behistun inscription was to the decipherment of cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone was to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Rawlinson correctly deduced that the Old Persian was a syllabic script and he successfully deciphered it. Working independently of him, the Irish Assyriologist Edward Hincks also contributed to the decipherment. After translating the Persian, Rawlinson and Hincks began to decipher the others. They were greatly helped by Paul Émile Botta's discovery of the city of Niniveh in 1842. Among the treasures uncovered by Botta were the remains of the great library of Assurbanipal, a royal archive containing tens of thousands of baked clay tablets covered with cuneiform inscriptions.

By 1851, Hincks and Rawlinson could read 200 Babylonian signs. They were soon joined by two other decipherers: a young German-born scholar called Julius Oppert, and the versatile British Orientalist William Henry Fox Talbot. In 1857 the four men met in London and took part in a famous experiment to test the accuracy of their decipherments.

Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, gave each of them a copy of a recently discovered inscription from the reign of the Assyrian emperor Tiglath-Pileser I. A jury of experts was empanelled to examine the resulting translations and assess their accuracy.

In all essential points the translations produced by the four scholars were found to be in close agreement with one another. There were of course some slight discrepancies. The inexperienced Talbot had made a number of mistakes, and Oppert's translation contained a few doubtful passages due to his unfamiliarity with the English language. But Hincks' and Rawlinson's versions were virtually identical. The jury declared itself satisfied, and the decipherment of Akkadian cuneiform was adjudged a fait accompli.

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Transliteration

Template:Main

Cuneiform has a specific format for transliteration. Because of the script's polyvalence, transliteration is not only lossless, but may actually contain more information than the original document. For example, the sign DINGIR in a Hittite text may represent either the Hittite syllable an or may be part of an Akkadian phrase, representing the syllable il, or it may be a Sumerogram, representing the original Sumerian meaning, 'the creator'. (The Sumerian deity Enki, meaning Lord of the Earth, was believed to have fashioned the earliest human prototype). In transliteration, a different rendition of the same glyph is chosen depending on its role in the present context.

There are differing conventions for transliterating Sumerian, Akkadian (Babylonian) and Hittite (and Luwian) cuneiform texts. One convention that sees wide use across the different fields is the use of acute and grave accents as an abbreviation for homophone disambiguation. Thus, u is equivalent to u1, the first glyph expressing phonetic u. An acute accent, ú, is equivalent to the second, u2, and a grave accent ù to the third, u3 glyph in the series (while the sequence of numbering is conventional but essentially arbitrary and subject to the history of decipherment). In Sumerian transliteration, a multiplication sign 'x' is used to indicate ligatures.

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Sign inventories

There are of the order of 500 unique cuneiform signs; if variants and historical development are taken into account, the number is several thousand. Not all Sumerian signs are used in Akkadian, and not all Akkadian signs are used in Hittite. Borger (1981) lists 598 signs used in Assyrian/Babylonian. Signs used in Hittite cuneiform are listed by Forrer (1922), Friedrich (1960) and the HZL (Rüster and Neu 1989). The HZL lists a total of 375 signs, many with variants (for example, 12 variants are given for number 123 EGIR)

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Unicode

The Cuneiform script has been accepted for inclusion in Unicode 5.0, planned for release in late 2006:

U+12000–U+1236E (879 characters) "Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform"
U+12400–U+12473 (103 characters) "Cuneiform Numbers"
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Glyph tables

Basic syllable signs:

CV:

b- d- g- ḫ- k- l- m- n- p- q- r- s- š- ṣ- t- ṭ- w- y- z-
-a a   ba ␀ da ⁕ ga ₵, gá ₷ ḫa ℩ ka ⅗, ká ↍ la ↷ ma ∠, má ∣ na ∾, ná ∿ pa ≺ qa, qá ra ⊏ sa ⊓ ša ⊭ ṣa ta ⋫ wa ya za ⍝
-e e ₨ be - ge ḫe - - me ∨ ne ≈ - - - še ⊺ te ⋼ - - ze ⍢, zé
-i i ℿ bi ⁉ di ⁲ gi ℀, ℄ ḫi ℭ ki ↠ li ⇷ mi ∪ ni ≌, ≎ pi ≿ - ri ⊑ si ⋛ ti ⋾ ṭi wi5 - zi ⍣, ⍥
-u u ⌋, ú ⌑ bu ⁍ du ⁺ gu №, ℘ ḫu ℷ ku ↪ ↬ lu ⇻, ⇽ mu ∬ nu ≡ - - ru ⊒ su ⋢ šu⋗, šú ⋙ tu ⌅ ṭu - - zu ⍪

VC:

-b -d -g -ḫ -k -l -m -n -p -q -r -s -š -ṣ -t -ṭ -z
a-     “ ” † ‭ ‸, ‾
e- ₨ ₖ ₗ ₠
i- ℿ ⅁ ⅋⅍ ⅎ ⅔ ⅕ ⅖
u- ⌋, ⌑ ⌒ ⌓ ⌝ ⌦ ⌨, ⌫, ⌴ ⍑, ⍗ ⍚
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List of glyphs

Template:Stubsection

Borger HZL Sumerian Akkadian Hittite Unicode meaning / comments
1 1 aš, dili, didli àš, àz, dil, del, ina, rù, rum as (rù) U+12038 𒀸
2 2 ḫal, aš.aš ḫal U+
3 22 mug U+ "oakum"
5 205 dúr, dúru, durun, tukul, tuš gu5, qú, tuš ku (gu5) U+ giš.tukul "tool, weapon"
6 209(1) zu sú, ṣú zu U+1235A 𒍚
7 213 kuš, su su U+ "hide, fur, viscera"
8 230 alal, pìsan, dur10, šen = su x a U+ "bucket"
9 4 bal bal, pal U+12044 ⁄ giš.bal "spindle"
10 6 gír, ul4 U+12108 ℈ giš.gír "knife, dagger", ul4.gal "sword"
13 8 an, dingir ìl an U+1202D ‭ "An, heaven, deity"
18 135,136 nundum = ka x nun; su6 = ka x sa U+ su6 "beard"
38 229 rí, u19, uru U+12337 ⌷ "city"
70 15 na na na U+1223E ∾
75 11 nu là nu U+12261 ≡ "not" (negation)
78 24 mušen bag, bak, baq ḫu U+12137 ℷ "bird"
84 33 zi sí, sé, ṣí, ṣé zi, ze U+12363 ⍣ "soul, life"
103 41 inanna, innin U+ "Inanna"
115 192 sag, sur14 šag, šak, šaq, riš U+ "head"
144 237 dumu, tur tur U+12309 ⌉ "son, child"
151 115 lugal šàr U+ "king"
203 124 úr úr U+ "penis"
210 131 geštin wi(5) U+ giš.geštin "vine"; the Hittite value is acrophonically from *winos "wine".
232 77 ir ir, er U+ "plead, ask, divinate"
296 178 giš is, es, iṣ, eṣ, iš6, níš ez, iz, (níš) U+ "wooden, wood, tree"; giš.mi = gissu "shade"
297 157 gu4, gud U+1211E ℞ "cow"
330 78 lú lú U+121FD ⇽ "man"
330 78 ses, šeš U+122C0 ⋀ "brother"
336 127 lil lil U+ lú.lil "fool"
468 69 kù, kug U+ "pure"; kug.an = azag "demon", kug.gi = guškin "gold"
539 65 síg, sík, siki U+ "wool"
595 223 gín, (tún) ṭu U+ "shekel"
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See also

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References

  • R. Borger, Assyrisch-Babylonische Zeichenliste, 2nd ed., Neukirchen-Vluyn (1981)
  • E. Forrer, Die Keilschrift von Boghazköi, Leipzig (1922)
  • J. Friedrich, Hethitisches Keilschrift-Lesebuch, Heidelberg (1960)
  • Chr. Rüster, E. Neu, Hethitisches Zeichenlexikon (HZL), Wiesbaden (1989)
  • Jean-Jacques Glassner, The Invention of Cuneiform, English translation, Johns Hopkins University Press (2003), ISBN 0-8018-7389-4.
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External links

ar:خط مسماري cs:Klínové písmo da:Kileskrift de:Keilschrift es:Escritura cuneiforme eo:Kojnoskribo fa:خط میخی fr:Cunéiforme gl:Escrita cuneiforme is:Fleygrúnir he:כתב יתדות ku:Tîpên bizmarî lt:Dantiraštis nl:Spijkerschrift ja:楔形文字 no:Kileskrift pl:Pismo klinowe pt:Escrita cuneiforme ru:Клинопись sl:Klinopis fi:Nuolenpääkirjoitus sv:Kilskrift zh:楔形文字

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