A SHORT STORY OF THE CUNEIFORM SCRIPT
author: Olivera Batajic
translation into English: Vesna Jevtić
The cuneiform script is the oldest and at the time the most frequently used script in the Middle East, used actively for writing in several languages throughout the period of over three millennia B.C. Cuneiform is not its original name, namely, it was first known as litterae cuneatae, of Latin cuneus meaning a wedge. It referred to the shapes made by a wedge from which the characters of the cuneiform script originated. A special tool was used to impress shapes into wet clay, thus producing such peculiar strokes. The shape of the stroke was brusque, because of the tool and the wet clay that was hard to imprint circular (rounded) strokes into.
Towards the end of the fourth millennium B.C. the Sumerians populated the south part of Mesopotamia (between the rivers of Euphrates and Tigris, in the part that spread from the Persian Gulf to Baghdad, the capital of today’s Iraq, divided into Sumer in the south and Akkad in the north – the states of two different nations that cherished very good relations, but had amazingly different languages) where they developed a civilization founded on agriculture. Besides significant inventions such as the wheel and the lever, they also invented a system of record making. It happened as a necessity since the accounts, that could not be remembered or passed on orally, had to be recorded. So the first slates contained symbols representing accounts related to agriculture.
Subsequently, the slates contained records of social structures, e.g. how many bakers, brewers, blacksmiths, slaves etc. there were in one community. There are also examples of school slates in which there is a text written in the teacher’s hand on one side and the pupil’s practice on the other. With such examples the speculations could be made on how they used to learn to write.
The first symbols were actually pictures – the representations of objects from life and nature. As the script got simplified, the pictographs developed which later led to abstract stylizations that no longer had its original easily recognizable forms. It was the result of using the wedge to write on a clay slate.
The first slates were very small and square, and the writing went from top to bottom.
Later, larger rectangular slates began to be used, which made the scribe change the position of his left hand, which was used to hold the slate while the text was being written. So the change occurred of the position of the characters on the slate which were then turned by 90 degrees (anticlockwise) and hence the pictorial recognizability of the symbols was lost, which can be clearly seen in the following picture.
From the middle of the second millennium writing on and reading from the slates went from the left to the right, along horizontal lines. As soon as each character had been fully worked out and shaped into its final form, strict rules were introduced as to the way they were imprinted.
Small and simple characters, in their strictly defined forms, could be parts of larger and more composite characters (the composition system already existing with Chinese characters). However, with the integration of the smaller and simpler ones, those new composite characters did not get a literal combination of meanings, but were interpreted in another way – as a new idea, a new concept. (Something similar to this we can see today in the popular emoticons used in email and SMS communication, where the characters make pictures, of which each has its own distinctive meaning.)
What is very interesting is that there were slates in which there were lists of characters that must have been used to help the scribes in writing, as some sort of primitive dictionaries. Everyday use comprised approx. 600 characters, which called for a very good memory of that who knew how to write.
Some time later, trying to improve the then existing script, they started to expand the meanings of the existing composite characters. For example, the nouns were first given the meanings of the verbs as well, and then also referred to those performing the action (employment). Finally, by observation of the phonetic similarities and their coinciding with the principles of the rebus (sign reading) where the meaning of the word is figurative, motivated by its sound properties more than by the (original) meanings of the symbol, it proved efficient for comprehension. They came to the idea to use pictographs which would not directly denote a certain object any longer, but the sound of the pronounced word that the object represented. It was the first step towards the syllabic (segmented) writing.
Gradually, the sound property of the sign became much more important than the meaning of it. The relation between the syllable and the sign was not simple at all. The rebuses (it is interesting that today rebuses are mostly considered kids’ game, while once they were the only system of writing) and syllabic writing increased the possibility of meaning (import) of the words, on one hand, but also of equivocacy (ambiguity) in the entire system of writing, on the other, as many characters became polyvalent, having several different meanings as well as phonetic properties. To solve the problem, the third change occurred – the third type of characters was introduced, the determinatives. Those characters were not supposed to be read, but to be used to ‘decipher’ the meanings of the main characters before which they were put and were meant to define whether the character concerned should be read phonetically or as a pictograph.
So the system of cuneiform writing, containing three types of characters, was fully developed. The word characters were the carriers of the sound and the meaning as well, the syllabic character and its phonetic complement were used to interpret the sound, and the determiners were there to explain the broad meaning of the character itself. Graphically, they could not be discerned as they were made of the same wedge-shaped strokes. It was only later that the new changes were introduced and the script improved, when it was used for other languages of the region which belonged to different language groups.
The Akkadians, the Semitic ancestors of the Arabians and the Jews, around 2000 B.C. became the dominant nation in Mesopotamia. So the Akkadian language became the main speaking language, while the Sumerian was becoming extinct and remained preserved in the religious books and used only for church ceremonies (as is the case with Latin in the Catholic Church).
In 18th century B.C. Babylonia met its full ascent, so the cuneiform system of writing became adopted throughout the kingdom. The same happened with Assyria. It is also known that the cuneiform script was used by the Elamites as well (the capital Susa, today’s Iran) for the language of Elam. The Hittites from Anatoly (today’s Turkey) adopted a simplified form of the cuneiform script, but it is interesting to point out that their language belongs to the Indo-European group. The Old Persian, used in the Persian Empire (today’s Iran), also used this system.
So, between 3rd and 1st millennium B.C., the cuneiform script was spreading between the Euphrates and the Tigris down to Palestine in the south and the Armenia in the north.
From the accounts, the script on the slates began to be used as a royal memorandum, to note down the vernacular, and, the most important of all, as the alternative way of communication, of writing down thoughts and various other impressions. So between these nations the first form of postal communication was introduced, and they even used special clay envelopes for it.
Being made of the very durable material as clay is, a large number of slates has remained to this day. By deciphering the script, many discoveries have been made about the civilizations which produced them. Today, with the technological development the entire deciphering process have been computerized. There are programs with which the texts from the slates can be read, interpreted, and then fed into a permanent data base. Consequently, the same programs could be used to generate a text imitating the strokes from the clay slates.
The invention and the development of the cuneiform script allowed many hymns and prophetic texts to be saved as well as many literary works of the time. The most famous among those is the Epic on Gilgamesh, which was first orally passed on, then the entire work was reconstructed much later mostly owing to the excerpts from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal,(669-627 B.C.) in Nineveh.
We in the Periscope have prepared a trip to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, where, among other things, you can see the examples of the cuneiform script.