14 Facts About Cuneiform

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

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

Cuneiform 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.

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

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

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

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

Cuneiform 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.

Cuneiform script was used in many ways in ancient Mesopotamia.