Cuneiform
Topic: Bronze Age Civilisations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China · NCERT: Class 9, Ch 4 "Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation"; Class 11, Ch 1 "Writing and City Life"
Meaning
Cuneiform is the Mesopotamian script of wedge-shaped signs. The name comes from Latin cuneus (wedge) and forma (shape). A scribe pressed the signs into a wet clay tablet with a reed cut at an angle, then dried the tablet in the sun. Each sign stood for a syllable (a part of a word), not a single letter, so there were hundreds of signs. Very few people could read it. It began with picture-like signs at Uruk c. 3200 BCE, became proper cuneiform by c. 2600 BCE, lasted until the first century CE and was deciphered in the 1850s.
Example
The earliest Uruk tablets, c. 3200 BCE, are about 5,000 lists of oxen, fish and loaves of bread given to or by temples. Writing began as accounts, not literature.
Don't confuse with
- Hieroglyphs: the Egyptian script, written on stone and papyrus. Champollion deciphered it in 1822 using the Rosetta Stone.