Cuneiform :: Egyptian Writing Essays

Cuneiform The earliest piece of music in Mesopotamia was a ascertain write invented by the Sumerians who wrote on clay tablets using long reeds. The leger the Sumerians invented and handed down to the Semitic peoples who conquered Mesopotamia in later centuries, is called cuneiform, which is derived from two Latin says cuneus , which means wedge, and forma , which means shape. This picture language, similar to yet to a greater extent abstract than Egyptian hieroglyphics, eventually developed into a syllabic alphabet under the Semites (Assyrians and Babylonians) who eventually came to dominate the bea. In Sumer, the original writing was pictographic (picture writing) individual words were represented by crude pictorial symbols that resembled in some way the object organism represented, as in the Sumerian word for king. The first symbol pictures gal, or great, and the second pictures lu, or man. Eventually, this pictorial writing developed into a more abstract series of wedges and hooks. These wedges and hooks are the original cuneiform and represented in Sumerian entire words (this is called ideographic and the word symbols are called ideograms, which means concept writing) the Semites who adopted this writing, however, spoke an entirely divergent language, in fact, a language as different from Sumerian as English is different from Japanese. In order to adapt this foreign writing to a Semitic language, the Akkadians converted it in part to a syllabic writing system individual signs represent entire syllables. However, in admittance to syllable symbols, some cuneiform symbols are ideograms (picture words) representing an entire word these ideograms might also, in other contexts, be simply syllables. For instance, in Assyrian, the cuneiform for the syllable ki is written. However, as an ideogram, this cuneiform also stands for the Assyrian word irsitu , or earth. So reading cuneiform invo lves mastering a large syllabic alphabet as well as a large number of ideograms, more of them identical to syllable symbols. This complicated writing system dominated Mesopotamia until the century originally the birth of Christ the Persians greatly simplified cuneiform until it represented something close to an alphabet.