cuneiform

/kyooh nee"euh fawrm', kyooh"nee euh-/, adj.

1. having the form of a wedge; wedge-shaped.

2. composed of slim triangular or wedge-shaped elements, as the characters used in writing by the ancient Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and others.

3. written in cuneiform characters: cuneiform inscription.

4. Anat. noting or pertaining to any of various wedge-shaped bones, as of the tarsus.

n.

5. cuneiform characters or writing.

6. a cuneiform bone.

Also, cuniform.

[1670-80; < L cune(us) a wedge + -I- + -FORM]

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▪ writing system

Introduction

 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 (Middle East, ancient). Its active history comprised the last three millennia BC; 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.

Origin and character of cuneiform

      The origins of cuneiform may be traced back approximately to the end of the 4th millennium BC. 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 (logogram) 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).

      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.

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 BC). 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 BC) 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 BC) unified all of southern Mesopotamia. Babylonia thus became the great and influential centre of Mesopotamian culture. The Code of Hammurabi (Hammurabi, Code of) 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 (Assyria) were humbler. Specifically Old Assyrian cuneiform is attested mostly in the records of Assyrian trading colonists in central Asia Minor (c. 1950 BC; 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 BC).

      The expansion of cuneiform writing outside Mesopotamia began in the 3rd millennium, when the country of Elam in southwestern Iran was in contact with Mesopotamian culture and adopted the system of writing. The Elamite sideline of cuneiform continued far into the 1st millennium BC, when it presumably provided the Indo-European Persians with the external model for creating a new simplified quasi-alphabetic cuneiform writing for the Old Persian language. The Hurrians (Hurrian) in northern Mesopotamia and around the upper stretches of the Euphrates adopted Old Akkadian cuneiform around 2000 BC and passed it on to the Indo-European Hittites (Hittite language), who had invaded central Asia Minor at about that time.

      In the 2nd millennium the Akkadian of Babylonia, frequently in somewhat distorted and barbarous varieties, became a lingua franca of international intercourse in the entire Middle East, and cuneiform writing thus became a universal medium of written communication. The political correspondence of the era was conducted almost exclusively in that language and writing. Cuneiform was sometimes adapted, as in the consonantal script of the Canaanite city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast (c. 1400 BC), or simply taken over, as in the inscriptions of the kingdom of Urartu or Haldi in the Armenian mountains from the 9th to 6th centuries BC; the language is remotely related to Hurrian, and the script is a borrowed variety of Neo-Assyrian cuneiform. Even after the fall of the Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, when Aramaic had become the general popular language, rather decadent varieties of Late Babylonian and Assyrian survived as written languages in cuneiform almost down to the time of Christ.

Decipherment of cuneiform

      Many of the cultures employing cuneiform (Hurrian, Hittite, Urartian) disappeared one by one, and their written records fell into oblivion. The same fate overtook cuneiform generally with astonishing swiftness and completeness. One of the reasons was the victorious progress of the Phoenician (Phoenician alphabet) script in the western sections of the Middle East and the classical lands in Mediterranean Europe. To this writing system of superior efficiency and economy, cuneiform could not offer serious competition. Its international prestige of the 2nd millennium had been exhausted by 500 BC, and Mesopotamia had become a Persian dependency. Late Babylonian and Assyrian were little but moribund artificial literary idioms. So complete was the disappearance of cuneiform that the classical Greeks were practically unaware of its existence, except for the widely traveled Herodotus, who in passing mentions Assyria Grammata (“Assyrian characters”).

Old Persian and Elamite

      The rediscovery of the materials and the reconquest of the recondite scripts and languages have been the achievements of modern times. Paradoxically the process began with the last secondary offshoot of cuneiform proper, the inscriptions of the Achaemenid (Achaemenian Dynasty) kings (6th to 4th centuries BC) of Persia. This is understandable, because almost only among the Persians was cuneiform used primarily for monumental writing, and the remains (such as rock carvings) were in many cases readily accessible. Scattered examples of Old Persian inscriptions were reported back to Europe by western travelers in Persia since the 17th century, and the name cuneiform was first applied to the script by Engelbert Kämpfer (c. 1700). During the 18th century many new inscriptions were reported; especially important were those copied by Carsten Niebuhr (Niebuhr, Carsten) at the old capital Persepolis. It was recognized that the typical royal inscriptions contained three different scripts, a simple type with about 40 different signs and two others with considerably greater variations. The first was likely to reflect an alphabet, while the others seemed to be syllabaries or word writings. Assuming identical contents in three different languages, scholars argued on historical grounds that those trilingual inscriptions belonged to the Achaemenid kings and that the first writing represented the Old Persian language, which would be closely related to Avestan and Sanskrit. The recognition of a diagonal wedge as word-divider simplified the segmentation of the written sequences. The German scholar Georg Friedrich Grotefend (Grotefend, Georg Friedrich) in 1802 reasoned that the introductory lines of the text were likely to contain the name, titles, and genealogy of the ruler, the pattern for which was known from later Middle Iranian inscriptions in an adapted Aramaic (i.e., ultimately Phoenician) alphabet. From such beginnings, he was eventually able to read several long proper names and to determine a number of sound values. The initial results of Grotefend were expanded and refined by other scholars.

      Next the second script of the trilinguals was attacked. It contained more than 100 different signs and was thus likely to be a syllabary. Mainly by applying the sound values of the Old Persian proper names to appropriate correspondences, a number of signs were gradually determined and some insight gained into the language itself, which is New Elamite (Elamite language); the study of it has been rather stagnant, and considerable obscurity persists. The same holds true for the Old Elamite of the late 2nd millennium.

Akkadian and Sumerian

      The third script of the Achaemenian trilinguals had in the meantime been identified with that of the texts found in very large numbers in Mesopotamia, which obviously contained the central language of cuneiform culture, namely Akkadian (Akkadian language). Here also the proper names provided the first concrete clues for a decipherment, but the extreme variety of signs and the peculiar complications of the system raised difficulties which for a time seemed insurmountable. The serious external divergencies between older and newer types of Akkadian cuneiform, the distribution of ideographic and syllabic uses of the signs, the simple (ba, ab) and complex (bat) values of the syllables, and especially the bewildering polyphony of many notations were only gradually surmised by scholars. Once the Semitic character of the language had been established, the philological science of Assyriology developed rapidly from the closing decades of the 19th century onward, especially because of scholars like Friedrich Delitzsch and, later, Benno Landsberger and Wolfram von Soden.

      Once Akkadian had been deciphered, the very core of the system was intelligible, and the prototype was provided for the interpretation of other languages in cuneiform. Until the 20th century Sumerian (Sumerian language) was not definitely recognized as a separate language at all but rather as a special way of noting Akkadian. Even when its independent character was established, the difficulties of interpretation were appalling because of its strange and unrelated structure. After Sumerian finally died out as a living language toward the middle of the 2nd millennium, it lingered on as a cult idiom of Babylonian religion. To facilitate its artificial acquisition by the priesthood, grammatical lists and vocabularies were compiled and numerous religious texts were provided with literal translations into Babylonian. These have facilitated the penetration of unilingual Sumerian texts, and Sumerian studies advanced greatly through the efforts of such scholars as Delitzsch, François Thureau-Dangin, Arno Poebel, Anton Deimel, and Adam Falkenstein.

Hittite and other languages

      An important new dimension was added to cuneiform studies in the early years of the 20th century, through the discovery in 1906 of the royal archives of the Hittites (Hittite language) at the ancient capital site of Hattusas, near the Turkish village of Boğazköy, east of Ankara. Some years earlier the existence of an Indo-European idiom in some cuneiform letters found in the Egyptian diplomatic archives of the 18th dynasty at Tell el-Amarna had been suspected by Johan Knudtzon. This unlikely surmise was confirmed by Friedrich Hrozný (Hrozný, Bedřich) during World War I, when his initial interpretation of the Boğazköy materials proved that the predominant language in the thousands of tablets was that of the Indo-European Hittites, whose rule in central Asia Minor filled most of the 2nd millennium. The tablets offered no serious cryptological problems, being edited in a type of borrowed Akkadian cuneiform. The interpretation of the unknown language was aided by the partial ideographic nature of the script, which revealed elements of meaning independent of linguistic factors. Even more important was a series of bilingual parallel texts, in which the Akkadian versions served as a clue to the analysis of linguistic structure.

      In the absence of close affinity to known languages, which vouches adequate safeguards against the notoriously misleading comparative method of interpretation, inner analysis of the unknown language is the only trustworthy procedure. Hurrian and Urartian (Urartian language) are definitely related languages, but neither may yet be safely used to explain the other. Urartian has been solved to some extent with the help of its rather free use of ideograms and the Assyrian versions of two bilingual inscriptions.

      Excavations at Ras Shamra in 1929 unearthed the remains of Ugarit (Ugaritic alphabet). Inscriptions in an unknown simple system of cuneiform were found; the low number of 30 different signs pointed to an alphabetic type. The use of a vertical stroke as word-divider facilitated the decipherment, which was based on the correct assumption that an early North Semitic Canaanite dialect was involved. Thus the script was solved with astonishing speed by Hans Bauer, Edouard Dhorme, and Charles Virolleaud, yielding a Semitic dialect named Ugaritic, closely related to Old Phoenician. Hurrian inscriptions in the same script were also found, as were texts in conventional Middle Babylonian cuneiform.

Influence of cuneiform

      The main type of cuneiform, with its inventory of ideograms (including “determinatives” or “classifiers”) and phonetic signs, is a word-syllabic system like the Egyptian, hieroglyphic Hittite, Minoan-Mycenaean, proto-Elamite, and proto-Indic. The Sumerian system seems to be the oldest. To what extent it stimulated the origin or influenced the development of the others is a difficult problem connected with the monogenesis or polygenesis (common or multiple origin) of writing. The Phoenician consonantal script provided the new typological pattern on which the Ugaritic and Old Persian systems were constructed, keeping only the outer likeness of the wedge form.

Jaan Puhvel Ed.

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