‎This application is text editor with cuneiform keyboard for unicode text. This text editor can edit sumerian language and akkadian language. Text data can be saved in UTF-8 format. This app is equipped with a mail transmission function. This app includes a custom cuneiform keyboard. In order to use. NISUS WRITER PRO (MAC only) In Nisus Writer Pro, automatic text is linked with a glossary. A glossary, when loaded, is available for all documents, whatever template is used. The Cuneiform glossary is a file with cuneiform signs and associated entries. For more informations, see the NWP guide. Format: Cuneiform.ngloss.

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Cuneiform

Decipherment of cuneiform

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Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.

Jaan Puhvel

Emeritus Professor of Classics and Indo-European Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.

Cuneiform, system of writing used in the ancient Middle East. The name, a coinage from Latin and Middle French roots meaning “wedge-shaped,” has been the modern designation from the early 18th century onward. Cuneiform was the most widespread and historically significant writing system in the ancient Middle East. Its active history comprised the last three millennia bce, its long development and geographic expansion involved numerous successive cultures and languages, and its overall significance as an international graphic medium of civilization is second only to that of the Phoenician-Greek-Latin alphabet.

For a table illustrating the development of cuneiform, see below.

Origin and character of cuneiform

The origins of cuneiform may be traced back approximately to the end of the 4th millennium bce. At that time the Sumerians, a people of unknown ethnic and linguistic affinities, inhabited southern Mesopotamia and the region west of the mouth of the Euphrates known as Chaldea. While it does not follow that they were the earliest inhabitants of the region or the true originators of their system of writing, it is to them that the first attested traces of cuneiform writing are conclusively assigned. The earliest written records in the Sumerian language are pictographic tablets from Uruk (Erech), evidently lists or ledgers of commodities identified by drawings of the objects and accompanied by numerals and personal names. Such word writing was able to express only the basic ideas of concrete objects. Numerical notions were easily rendered by the repetitional use of strokes or circles. However, the representation of proper names, for example, necessitated an early recourse to the rebus principle—i.e., the use of pictographic shapes to evoke in the reader’s mind an underlying sound form rather than the basic notion of the drawn object. This brought about a transition from pure word writing to a partial phonetic script. Thus, for example, the picture of a hand came to stand not only for Sumerian šu (“hand”) but also for the phonetic syllable šu in any required context. Sumerian words were largely monosyllabic, so the signs generally denoted syllables, and the resulting mixture is termed a word-syllabic script. The inventory of phonetic symbols henceforth enabled the Sumerians to denote grammatical elements by phonetic complements added to the word signs (logograms or ideograms). Because Sumerian had many identical sounding (homophonous) words, several logograms frequently yielded identical phonetic values and are distinguished in modern transliteration—(as, for example, ba, bá, bà, ba₄). Because a logogram often represented several related notions with different names (e.g., “sun,” “day,” “bright”), it was capable of assuming more than one phonetic value (this feature is called polyphony).

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In the course of the 3rd millennium the writing became successively more cursive, and the pictographs developed into conventionalized linear drawings. Due to the prevalent use of clay tablets as writing material (stone, metal, or wood also were employed occasionally), the linear strokes acquired a wedge-shaped appearance by being pressed into the soft clay with the slanted edge of a stylus. Curving lines disappeared from writing, and the normal order of signs was fixed as running from left to right, without any word-divider. This change from earlier columns running downward entailed turning the signs on one side.

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Spread and development of cuneiform

Before these developments had been completed, the Sumerian writing system was adopted by the Akkadians, Semitic invaders who established themselves in Mesopotamia about the middle of the 3rd millennium. In adapting the script to their wholly different language, the Akkadians retained the Sumerian logograms and combinations of logograms for more complex notions but pronounced them as the corresponding Akkadian words. They also kept the phonetic values but extended them far beyond the original Sumerian inventory of simple types (open or closed syllables like ba or ab). Many more complex syllabic values of Sumerian logograms (of the type kan, mul, bat) were transferred to the phonetic level, and polyphony became an increasingly serious complication in Akkadian cuneiform (e.g., the original pictograph for “sun” may be read phonetically as ud, tam, tú, par, laḫ, ḫiš). The Akkadian readings of the logograms added new complicated values. Thus the sign for “land” or “mountain range” (originally a picture of three mountain tops) has the phonetic value kur on the basis of Sumerian but also mat and šad from Akkadian mātu (“land”) and šadû (“mountain”). No effort was made until very late to alleviate the resulting confusion, and equivalent “graphies” like ta-am and tam continued to exist side by side throughout the long history of Akkadian cuneiform.

The earliest type of Semitic cuneiform in Mesopotamia is called the Old Akkadian, seen for example in the inscriptions of the ruler Sargon of Akkad (died c. 2279 bce). Sumer, the southernmost part of the country, continued to be a loose agglomeration of independent city-states until it was united by Gudea of Lagash (died c. 2124 bce) in a last brief manifestation of specifically Sumerian culture. The political hegemony then passed decisively to the Akkadians, and King Hammurabi of Babylon (died 1750 bce) unified all of southern Mesopotamia. Babylonia thus became the great and influential centre of Mesopotamian culture. The Code of Hammurabi is written in Old Babylonian cuneiform, which developed throughout the shifting and less brilliant later eras of Babylonian history into Middle and New Babylonian types. Farther north in Mesopotamia the beginnings of Assur were humbler. Specifically Old Assyrian cuneiform is attested mostly in the records of Assyrian trading colonists in central Asia Minor (c. 1950 bce; the so-called Cappadocian tablets) and Middle Assyrian in an extensive Law Code and other documents. The Neo-Assyrian period was the great era of Assyrian power, and the writing culminated in the extensive records from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (c. 650 bce).

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The expansion of cuneiform writing outside Mesopotamia began in