Cuneiform script

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The cuneiform script is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Created by the Sumerians from ca. the 34th century 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 shaped").

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.

[edit] History

The cuneiform script underwent considerable changes over a period of more than two millennia. The image below exemplifies this at the example of the sign SAG "head" (Borger nr. 184, U+12295 𒊕). Stage 1 shows the pictogram as it was drawn around 3000 BC. Stage 2 shows the rotated pictogram as written around 2800 BC. Stage 3 shows the abstracted glyph in archaic monumental inscriptions, from ca. 2600 BC, and stage 4 is the sign as written in clay, contemporary to stage 3. Stage 5 represents the late 3rd millennium, and stage 6 represents Old Assyrian ductus of the early 2nd millennium, as adopted into Hittite. Stage 7 is the simplified sign as written by Assyrian scribes in the early 1st millennium and until the script's extinction.

[edit] Pictograms

Originally, pictograms were drawn on clay tablets in vertical columns with a pen made from a sharpened reed stylus, or incised in stone. This early style was still lacking the characteristic wedge-shape of the strokes.

From about 2900 BC, the pictographs began to lose their original function, and a given sign could have various meanings depending on context. The sign inventory was reduced from some 1,500 signs to some 600 signs, and writing became increasingly phonological. Determinative signs were re-introduced to avoid ambiguity. This process is directly parallel to, and probably not independent of, the development of Egyptian hieroglyphic orthography.

[edit] Archaic cuneiform

Sumerian inscription in monumental archaic style, ca. 26th century

Letter sent by the high-priest Lu'enna to the king of Lagash (maybe Urukagina), informing him of his son's death in combat, c. 2400 BC, found in Telloh (ancient Girsu).

A list of Sumerian deities, ca. 2400 BC

Cuneiform tablet from the Kirkor Minassian collection in the US Library of Congress, ca. 24th century.

In the mid-3rd millennium, writing direction was changed to 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.

[edit] Akkadian cuneiform

One of the Amarna letters, 14th century.

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.

The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by the Akkadians from ca. 2500 BC, and by 2000 BC evolved into Old Assyrian cuneiform, with many modifications to Sumerian orthography. Because the syllabic nature of the script as it as refined by the Sumerians was unintuitive to the Semitic speakers, many philologists suspected a non-Semitic precursor civilization to the Babylonian even before Sumerian civilization was rediscovered.

At this stage, the former pictograms were reduced to a high level of abstraction, and were composed of only five basic wedge shapes: horizontal, vertical, two diagonals and the Winkelhaken impressed vertically by the tip of the stylus. The signs exemplary of these basic wedges are:

• AŠ (B001, U+12038) 𒀸: horizontal
• DIŠ (B748, U+12079) 𒁹: vertical
• GE₂₃, DIŠ tenû (B575, U+12039) 𒀹: downward diagonal
• GE₂₂ (B647, U+1203A) 𒀺: upward diagonal
• U (B661, U+1230B) 𒌋: the Winkelhaken

Except for the Winkelhaken which is tail-less, the length of the wedges' tails could vary as required for sign composition.

Signs tilted by (ca.) 45 degrees are called tenû in Akkadian, thus DIŠ is a vertical wedge and DIŠ tenû a diagonal one. Signs modified with additional wedges are called gunû, and signs crosshatched with additional Winkelhaken are called šešig.

"Typical" signs have usually in the range of about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of up to twenty (although it is not always clear if a ligature should be considered a single sign or two collated but still distinct signs).

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 th 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.

[edit] Derived scripts

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 known today as Old Persian cuneiform. It formed a 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.

[edit] Extinction

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.

[edit] Decipherment

Stele of Ashur-nasir-pal II (9th century) with dedicatory inscription written in cuneiform

Knowledge of cuneiform was lost until 1835 when Henry Rawlinson, a British East India Company army officer, found the Behistun inscriptions 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: young German-born scholar Julius Oppert, and 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.

[edit] Transliteration

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, 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.

Therefore, a text containing DINGIR and MU in succession could be construed to represent the words "ana", "ila", god + "a" (the accusative ending), god + water, or a divine name "A" or Water. Someone transcribing the signs would make the decision how the signs should be read and assemble the signs as "ana", "ila", "Ila" ('god"+accusative case), etc. A transliteration of these signs, however, would separate the signs with dashes "il-a", "an-a", "DINGIR-a". This is still easier to read than the original cuneiform, but now the reader is able to trace the sounds back to the original signs and determine if the correct decision was made on how to read them.

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.

[edit] Syllabary

The tables below show signs used for simple syllables of the form CV or VC. As used for the Sumerian language, the cuneiform script was in principle capable of distinguishing 14 consonants, transliterated as

b, d, g, ḫ, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, š, t, z

as well as four vowel qualities, a, e, i, u. The Akkadian language needed to distinguish its emphatic series, q, ṣ, ṭ, adopting various "superfluous" Sumerian signs for the purpose (e.g. qe=KIN, qu=KUM, qi=KIN, ṣa=ZA, ṣe=ZÍ, ṭur=DUR etc.) Hittite as it adopted the Akkadian cuneiform further introduced signs for the glide w, e.g. wa=we=PIN, wi₅=GEŠTIN) as well as a ligature I.A for ya.

CV:

VC:

[edit] Sign inventories

See also list of cuneiform signs.

The Sumerian cuneiform script had of the order of 1,000 unique signs (or about 1,500 if variants are included). This number was reduced to about 600 by the 24th century BC and the beginning of Akkadian records. Not all Sumerian signs are used in Akkadian, and not all Akkadian signs are used in Hittite.

• Falkenstein (1936) lists 939 signs used in the earliest period (late Uruk, 34th to 31st centuries)
• Borger (2003) lists 907 signs.
• Deimel (1922) lists 870 signs used in the Early Dynastic IIIa period (26th century).
• Borger in 1981 lists 598 signs used in Assyrian/Babylonian writing, and 907 in 2003. His numbering is based on Deimel's Sumerisches Lexikon.
• Rosengarten (1967) lists 468 signs used in Sumerian (pre-Sargonian) Lagash.
• 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)

[edit] Unicode

Main article: Unicode cuneiform

Unicode (as of version 5.0) assigns to the Cuneiform script the following ranges:

U+12000–U+1236E (879 characters) "Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform"

U+12400–U+12473 (103 characters) "Cuneiform Numbers"

The proposal for Unicode encoding of the script had been submitted by the Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding (ICE) in June 2004. [1] The base character inventory is derived from the list of Ur III signs compiled by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative of UCLA based on the inventories of Miguel Civil, Rykle Borger (2003), and Robert England. Rather than opting for an ordering by glyph shape and complexity, according to the numbering of an existing catalogue, the Unicode order of glyphs is the Latin alphabet order of their 'main' Sumerian transliteration.

[edit] See also

• List of cuneiform signs
• Ugaritic alphabet
• Old Persian cuneiform script

[edit] References

• R. Borger, Assyrisch-Babylonische Zeichenliste, 2nd ed., Neukirchen-Vluyn (1981)
• R. Borger, Mesopotamisches Zeichenlexikon, Münster (2003). [2]
• A. Deimel, Liste der archaischen Keilschriftzeichen (WVDOG 40; Berlin 1922) [3]
• A. Falkenstein, Archaische Texte aus Uruk, Berlin-Leipzig (1936) [4]
• E. Forrer, Die Keilschrift von Boghazköi, Leipzig (1922)
• J. Friedrich, Hethitisches Keilschrift-Lesebuch, Heidelberg (1960)
• Jean-Jacques Glassner, The Invention of Cuneiform, English translation, Johns Hopkins University Press (2003), ISBN 0-8018-7389-4.
• René Labat, Manuel d'epigraphie Akkadienne, Geuthner, Paris (1959); 6th ed., extended by Florence Malbran-Labat (1999), ISBN 2-7053-3583-8.
• O. Neugebauer, A. Sachs (eds.), Mathematical Cuneiform Texts, New Haven (1945).
• Y. Rosengarten, Répertoire commenté des signes présargoniques sumériens de Lagash, Paris (1967) [5]
• Chr. Rüster, E. Neu, Hethitisches Zeichenlexikon (HZL), Wiesbaden (1989)
• Nikolaus Schneider, Die Keilschriftzeichen der Wirtschaftsurkunden von Ur III nebst ihren charakteristischsten Schreibvarianten, Keilschrift-Paläographie; Heft 2, Rom: Päpstliches Bibelinstitut (1935). [6]
• Wolfgang Schramm, Akkadische Logogramme, Goettinger Arbeitshefte zur Altorientalischen Literatur (GAAL) Heft 4, Goettingen (2003), ISBN 3-936297-01-0.
• F. Thureau-Dangin, Recherches sur l'origine de l'écriture cunéiforme, Paris (1898).

[edit] External links

• Budge, E.A. Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets, &c. in the British Museum London, Harrison and Sons, 1896.
• Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. A Joint Project of the University of California at Los Angeles and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
• CDLI wiki
• ETCSL sign list
• Evolution of Cuneiform

Digital encoding and rendering

• cuneiformsigns.org Analysis and reports to support an international standard for computer encoding of the Cuneiform writing system
• iClay Java applet for the "interactive viewing of 2D+ images of cuneiform tablets over the Internet"
• Cuneiform fonts for TeX/LaTeX/PDFLaTeX by Karel Piska (Type 1, GPL)
• Ullikummi (Hittite package) by Sylvie Vanséveren (TrueType, freeware)
• UR III font by Guillaume Malingue (TrueType, freeware)
• Sumerian font by Carsten Peust (TrueType, freeware)
• Akkadian sign list (alain.be)