Cuneiform is used by many ancient civilizations to write their languages, but these languages do not necessarily belong to the same related language family. For example, the Hittites and the Persian Empire also used cuneiform, but both languages are Indo-European languages and have nothing to do with Sumerian. In addition, Akkadians also use cuneiform as a writing tool, but Akkadians are very different from Sumerians. Because most of them are carved on clay tablets, the lines are straight and wedge-shaped, and they are engraved on clay tablets with reed poles or wooden sticks to facilitate writing. Therefore, most of the characters and strokes are river line, and hieroglyphics gradually changed from changeable hieroglyphics to syllabic symbols with the evolution of civilization.
English cuneiform comes from Latin and is a compound word composed of cuneus and forma, which Arabs call "?" (huh? Mismari, meaning "nail head writing")
1472, an Italian named Balot, while traveling in ancient Persia, which is today's Iran, saw a strange and unprecedented font on the broken walls of some ancient temples near Shiraz. Almost all these fonts have triangular tips, which look like nails and wooden wedges. Some of them are lying on their sides, some are pointing up or down, some are inclined, and they look like sharp nails. Balot was very surprised. Is this writing? Or something else? He returned to Italy with this question. However, no one was interested in his discovery in West Asia at that time, and people soon forgot about it. What Europeans don't know is that this is cuneiform.
More than a hundred years later, another Italian visited Shiraz. This is Valle. Valle is more diligent than Balot. He copied down the fonts on these ruins. Later, he found this font carved on the clay tablet in the ancient ruins of Iraq today, so he decided that it must be the writing of ancient West Asians. Valle brought his discovery back to Europe. He introduced Europeans to such strange writing for the first time.
Through nearly 200 years of archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia and the successful translation and reading of a large number of clay tablets by linguists, people finally know that cuneiform is the oldest known writing in the world. This is a unique writing system, which was invented by ancient Sumerians and inherited and reformed by Akkadians. Babylonians and Assyrians also successively inherited this valuable cultural heritage and spread it to other parts of West Asia. The earliest cuneiform seen by westerners is the cuneiform modified by Persians in the Iranian plateau, which is very different from the cuneiform used by Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians.
Western scholars believe that Sumerians invented this kind of writing.
The King of Enmeka and Alata: In Sumerian epic The King of Enmeka and Alata, it is recorded that Enmeka, the king of uruk, was the one who created cuneiform characters. The book was written in the Third Ur Dynasty (265438 BC+065438 BC+02 BC-2004 BC). So far, western scholars have identified Enmeka as the creator of cuneiform through this poem. However, the poem does not explicitly explain or imply whether King Enmeka had written before, but only emphasizes that "the king wrote words on the clay tablet" and "such a thing has never happened". Moreover, there are also illogical places: King Enmeka wrote his words on the clay tablet and asked the messenger to show them to King Alata. It is obviously illogical for King Alata to understand the newly created words. Therefore, it can only be said that the creation of cuneiform by King Enmeka is a legend. Inanna and Keane This is the myth that Inanna, the patron saint of uruk, went to Elidu, the residence of Keane, the god of wisdom of her father, to defraud "cultural property (me)" and returned to uruk to celebrate. There is a saying "Nam-dub-sarma"-but because the historical records are unknown, the original text is incomplete, the writing date is controversial, and no early figures of Eli have been found in reality. Other legends: In the Babylonian Card written by Belloso, an ancient Greek priest, the Onni people came out of the sea in the morning to teach the Babylonians writing, farming and architecture, and returned to the sea at night. According to Assyrian legend, Naboo, son of Marduk, educated fools, including writing.
Around 3000 BC, Sumerians in the Bronze Age used clay tablets to record accounts in the form of pictures. Gradually, these symbols have evolved into ideographic symbols, and those things that cannot be described are expressed in any specified way. At first, this kind of writing was hieroglyphics. Gradually, this kind of hieroglyphics developed into Sumerian ideographs, which were combined by one or several symbols to express a new meaning. For example, "mouth" is the action "speaking"; Use symbols representing "eyes" and "water" to express "crying" and so on. With the popularization of writing, Sumerians simply used a symbol to represent a sound. For example, "arrow" and "life" are the same word in Sumerian, so they are represented by the same symbol "arrow". Later, some restrictive radical symbols were added, such as adding an "inverted triangle" before a person's name to indicate that it is a man's name. In this way, this writing system is basically completed. Moreover, Sumerians also use it to represent sounds, and several ideograms together can represent a complex word or phrase, which makes many symbols redundant. Cuneiform characters were written straight from top to bottom at first, and then horizontally from left to right, so all cuneiform symbols turned 90, from upright to horizontal. Because the right hand holds the pen and writes horizontally from left to right, the thick end of the wedge-shaped stroke is on the left and the thin end (nail tail) is on the right. Sumerian cuneiform intentional consonant. After being used and reformed by Babylonians, Assyrians and Arameans, it became a semi-syllabic writing. There are about 500 kinds of cuneiform symbols * * *, many of which have multiple meanings, and their "exact meanings" can only be determined according to the upper and lower contents, which makes the cuneiform writing system more difficult to master than the later pinyin writing system. However, for two thousand years, cuneiform was the only writing system in Mesopotamia. By about 500 BC, this kind of writing had even become a common commercial communication medium in most parts of West Asia. Archaeologists have discovered a large number of cuneiform tablets or inscriptions, which have been translated since the19th century, thus forming a new discipline to study ancient history-Assyrian studies.
Sumerian characters were formed step by step. During this period, it took 1000 years to express an idea with the help of the appearance of graphics and characters. Around 3500 BC, Sumerians began to carve images on stones or clay as a sign of owning something: either a stone represents a "stone heart" or a tree represents a house. About 500 years later, the evolution speed from graphics to characters has been greatly accelerated. At that time, the managers of Sumerian temple combined many standardized sketches to save the temple's property files and business transaction files. Although there are hieroglyphics in this period, it has gone beyond the stage of expressing people and concrete things with pictures, and developed into expressing abstract things with pictures, such as a bowl representing food and a bowl on a person's head representing eating. After another 500 years, mature characters completely replaced the old characters, because by then the original pictures had become so systematic that people no longer regarded them as pictures, but as pure symbols; Many of these symbols no longer represent specific words, but become syllable symbols which can be combined with other similar symbols to form words. Around 2500 BC, this writing system in Sumer reached a stage of complete development. There are about 500 kinds of cuneiform symbols, many of which have multiple meanings, which makes cuneiform writing system more difficult to master than later pinyin writing system. Nevertheless, cuneiform has been the only writing system in Mesopotamia for two thousand years; Archaeological findings confirm that in ancient Mesopotamia, the original appearance of words was not like a wedge, but just some flat pictures. Obviously, ancient Mesopotamian characters, called cuneiform by later generations, originated from hieroglyphics. Archaeologists once found clay tablets engraved with this pictographic symbol in the ancient city of uruk, and the textual research time was around 3200 BC.
The spread of cuneiform characters is mainly in West Asia and Southwest Asia. During the reign of Babylon and Assyria, cuneiform characters developed greatly, vocabulary was enlarged and complete, and calligraphy was more exquisite and beautiful. With the spread of culture, other ethnic groups in the two river basins also adopted this writing method. Around 1500 BC, cuneiform characters invented by Sumerians had become a common writing system for ethnic exchanges at that time, and even cuneiform characters were used in diplomatic exchanges or treaties between Egypt and countries in the two river basins. Later, due to the development of commerce, Persians in the Iranian plateau improved the cuneiform in Mesopotamia and gradually turned it into an advanced alphabet.