20 Facts About Cuneiform script

Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East.

The Cuneiform script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era.

Cuneiform script was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia.

The Cuneiform script fell totally out of use soon after and was forgotten until its rediscovery and decipherment in the 19th century.

Cuneiform script writing system was in use for more than three millennia, through several stages of development, from the 31st century BC down to the second century AD.

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Cuneiform script was developed from pictographic proto-writing in the late 4th millennium BC, stemming from the near eastern token system used for accounting.

Cuneiform script writing proper thus arises from the more primitive system of pictographs at about that time.

Archaic cuneiform script was adopted by the Akkadian Empire from the 23rd century BC.

Semitic languages employed equivalents for many signs that were distorted or abbreviated to represent new values because the syllabic nature of the Cuneiform script as refined by the Sumerians was not intuitive to Semitic speakers.

Many signs in the Cuneiform script were polyvalent, having both a syllabic and logographic meaning.

Cuneiform script guessed, correctly, that they represented not letters or hieroglyphics but words and syllables, and were to be read from left to right.

Cuneiform script published his results in 1793 in Memoire sur diverses antiquites de la Perse.

Cuneiform script discovered that series of characters in the Persian inscriptions were divided from one another by an oblique wedge and that these must be individual words.

Cuneiform script found that a specific group of seven letters was recurring in the inscriptions, and that they had a few recurring terminations of three to four letters.

Cuneiform script suggested that the long word appearing with high frequency and without any variation towards the beginning of each inscription must correspond to the word "King", and that repetitions of this sequence must mean "King of Kings".

Cuneiform script correctly guessed that the sequence must be pronounced kh-sha-a-ya-th-i-ya, a word of the same root as the Avestan xsaTra- and the Sanskrit ksatra- meaning "power" and "command", and now known to be pronounced xsaya?iya in Old Persian.

Cuneiform script equated the letters with the name d-a-r-h-e-u-sh for Darius, as known from the Greeks.

The Egyptian inscription on the vase was in the name of King Xerxes I, and the orientalist Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin, who accompanied Champollion, was able to confirm that the corresponding words in the cuneiform script were indeed the words which Grotefend had identified as meaning "king" and "Xerxes" through guesswork.

Cuneiform script succeeded in fixing the true values of nearly all the letters in the Persian alphabet, in translating the texts, and in proving that the language of them was not Zend, but stood to both Zend and Sanskrit in the relation of a sister.

Finally, Sumerian, the oldest language with a Cuneiform script, was deciphered through the analysis of ancient Akkadian-Sumerian dictionaries and bilingual tablets, as Sumerian long remained a literary language in Mesopotamia, which was often re-copied, translated and commented in numerous Babylonian tablets.