What was cuneiform writing

Literacy was not widespread in Mesopotamia. Understanding of life in Babylonian schools is based on a group of Sumerian texts of the Old Babylonian period. These texts became part of the curriculum and were still being copied a thousand years later. Apart from mathematics, the Babylonian scribal education concentrated on learning to write Sumerian and Akkadian using cuneiform and on learning the conventions for writing letters, contracts and accounts. Scribes were under the patronage of the Sumerian goddess Nisaba.

In later times her place was taken by the god Nabu whose symbol was the stylus a cut reed used to make signs in damp clay. The decipherment of cuneiform began in the eighteenth century as European scholars searched for proof of the places and events recorded in the Bible. Travelers, antiquaries and some of the earliest archaeologists visited the ancient Near East where they uncovered great cities such as Nineveh. They brought back a range of artifacts, including thousands of clay tablets covered in cuneiform.

Scholars began the incredibly difficult job of trying to decipher these strange signs representing languages no-one had heard for thousands of years. Gradually the cuneiform signs representing these different languages were deciphered thanks to the work of a number of dedicated people.

Confirmation that they had succeeded came in The Royal Asiatic Society sent copies of a newly found clay record of the military and hunting achievements of King Tiglath-pileser I reigned B. Fox Talbot. They each worked independently and returned translations that broadly agreed with each other.

What we have been able to read, however, has opened up the ancient world of Mesopotamia. It has not only revealed information about trade, building and government, but also great works of literature, history and everyday life in the region.

Map of the World: I. Sign up for our newsletter! Receive occasional emails about new Smarthistory content. Scribes Literacy was not widespread in Mesopotamia. Through cuneiform we hear the voices not just of kings and their scribes, but children, bankers, merchants, priests and healers — women as well as men. To find out more, click here. Sign in. Back to Main menu Virtual events Masterclasses. Here, Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor share six lesser-known facts about the history of the ancient script… Advertisement.

The script—not itself a language—was used by scribes of multiple cultures over that time to write a number of languages other than Sumerian, most notably Akkadian, a Semitic language that was the lingua franca of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires. After cuneiform was replaced by alphabetic writing sometime after the first century A. One important early key to deciphering the script proved to be the discovery of a kind of cuneiform Rosetta Stone, a circa B.

Written in Persian, Akkadian, and an Iranian language known as Elamite, it recorded the feats of the Achaemenid king Darius the Great r. Called Assyriologists, these specialists were eventually able to translate different languages written in cuneiform across many eras, though some early versions of the script remain undeciphered.

Today, the ability to read cuneiform is the key to understanding all manner of cultural activities in the ancient Near East—from determining what was known of the cosmos and its workings, to the august lives of Assyrian kings, to the secrets of making a Babylonian stew. Not until , two years after British army officer Henry Rawlinson copied down inscriptions from the steep cliffs of Behistun could anyone know what the marks said.

He had to climb up cliffs on a very narrow ledge in the middle of an enormous mountain in order to copy down what he saw. And how those marks were made continues to defy logic or explanation: the angle and height of the incisions seem to preclude the possibility of a chiseler on a ladder. Rawlinson at least figured out how to copy the marks, by making paper impressions as he stood, perilously, on the ledge.

Then he took them home, and studied them for years to determine what each line stood for, what each group of symbols meant. Eventually, he decoded the markets that had sat in the open for some 5, years, thereby cracking the cuneiform code. The inscriptions describe the life of Darius the Great, king of the Persian Empire in the 5th century B. As with the Rosetta Stone, on which the same text is written in hieroglyphics, demotic, and Greek, Rawlinson discovered the cliffs of Behistun also contained the same words written three times in three different languages: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian.

Since the other languages had been translated, he could thus translate cuneiform. Fifteen other languages developed from cuneiform, including Old Persian, Akkadian and Elamite. It was taught as a classical or dead language for generations after it ceased to be a living language. It was taught to those who spoke Aramaic and Assyrian, but who read, copied and recopied Sumerian literary works.