What name is given to the wedge-shaped writing of the Sumerian and Hittite civilisations?
"between slashes //, with plain text used for the standard Assyriological transcription of Sumerian. Most of the following examples are unattested. Modern knowledge of Sumerian phonology is flawed and incomplete because of the lack of native speakers, the transmission through the filter of Akkadian phonology and the difficulties posed by the cuneiform script. As I.M. Diakonoff observes, ""when we try to find out the morphophonological structure of the Sumerian language, we must constantly bear in mind that we are not dealing with a language directly but are reconstructing it from a very imperfect mnemonic writing system which had not been"
"the phonology and syntax of the Sumerian language. In Egypt hieroglyphic writing was developed using pictures as well, appearing on art such as the Narmer Palette (3,100 BCE). The Indus Valley Civilization sculpted seals with short texts and decorated with representations of animals and people. Meanwhile, the Olmecs sculpted colossal heads and decorated other sculptures with their own hierglyphs. In these times, writing was accessible only for the elites. Mesopotamian art was developed in the area between Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern-day Syria and Iraq, where since the 4th millennium BCE many different cultures existed such as Sumer, Akkad,"
"the number of characters in use grew smaller (Hittite cuneiform). The system consists of a combination of logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic and syllabic signs. The original Sumerian script was adapted for the writing of the Semitic Akkadian (Assyrian/Babylonian), Eblaite and Amorite languages, the language isolates Elamite, Hattic, Hurrian and Urartian, as well as Indo-European languages Hittite and Luwian; it inspired the later Semitic Ugaritic alphabet as well as Old Persian cuneiform. Cuneiform writing was gradually replaced by the Phoenician alphabet during the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–612 BC). By the second century AD, the script had become extinct, its last traces being found"
"Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Persian, until it was superseded, after the conquests of Alexander, by Greek. An independent hieroglyphic system, which also developed into various linear scripts, existed in Crete during the Middle and Late Minoan periods, from about 3000, probably, to the fall of Knossos, about 1500 BC. The Hittite hieroglyphs correspond to the period of the Hittite empire in northern Syria and Asia Minor from about 2000 to 800 BC; from it, according to one theory, arose the Cypriot syllabary, which continued in use until the 4th century BC or later. The earliest Phoenician inscriptions known date from"
"home to the earliest known civilisation, the Sumerian civilisation, which arose in the fertile Tigris-Euphrates river valley of southern Iraq in the Chalcolithic (Ubaid period). It was here, in the late 4th millennium BC, that the world's first writing system and recorded history itself were born. The Sumerians were also the first to harness the wheel and create City States, and whose writings record the first evidence of Mathematics, Astronomy, Astrology, Written Law, Medicine and Organised religion. The language of the Sumerians is a language isolate. The major city states of the early Sumerian period were; Eridu, Bad-tibira, Larsa, Sippar,"
"than two millennia. The image below shows the development of the sign SAG ""head"" (Borger nr. 184, U+12295 ). Stages: The first documents unequivocally written in Sumerian date to c. 3000 BC at Jemdet Nasr. Originally, pictographs were either drawn on clay tablets in vertical columns with a sharpened reed stylus or incised in stone. This early style lacked the characteristic wedge shape of the strokes. Certain signs to indicate names of gods, countries, cities, vessels, birds, trees, etc., are known as determinatives, and were the Sumerian signs of the terms in question, added as a guide for the reader."
"they were absorbed or displaced by the Hittites. Sacred and magical texts from Hattusa were often written in Hattic, Hurrian and Luwian even after Hittite had become the norm for other writings. The Hittite language has traditionally been stratified into Old Hittite (OH), Middle Hittite (MH) and New or Neo-Hittite (NH, not to be confused with the ""Neo-Hittite"" period, which is actually post-Hittite), corresponding to the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms of the Hittite Empire (ca. 1750–1500 BC, 1500–1430 BC and 1430–1180 BC, respectively). The stages are differentiated on both linguistic and paleographic grounds. Hittite was written in an adapted"
"drawn from archaeological evidence is that in the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, in the vast majority of cases, the bodies were not formally deposited within the settlement area. The mainstream academic theory is that writing first appeared during the Sumerian civilisation in southern Mesopotamia, around 3300–3200 BC. in the form of the Cuneiform script. This first writing system did not suddenly appear out of nowhere, but gradually developed from less stylised pictographic systems that used ideographic and mnemonic symbols that contained meaning, but did not have the linguistic flexibility of the natural language writing system that the Sumerians first conceived. These earlier"
"long ago as 5500 BC, the time of the early Eridu phase of the Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia. Still, this is disputed in the light of apparently contradictory stratigraphic evidence. If the symbols are indeed a form of writing, then writing in the Danubian culture would far predate the earliest Sumerian cuneiform script or Egyptian hieroglyphs. They would thus be the world's earliest known form of writing. This claim remains controversial. A problem is that there are no independent indications of literacy existing in the Balkans at this period. Sarunas Milisauskas comments that ""it is extremely difficult to demonstrate archaeologically"
"a king from the early Dynastic II period named Gilgamesh or ""Bilgamesh"" in Sumerian. The story is based around the fictional adventures of Gilgamesh and his companion, Enkidu. It was laid out on several clay tablets and is claimed to be the earliest example of a fictional, written piece of literature discovered so far. The Sumerian language is generally regarded as a language isolate in linguistics because it belongs to no known language family; Akkadian, by contrast, belongs to the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. There have been many failed attempts to connect Sumerian to other language families. It"
"(Sumerian logograms or ""Sumerograms"") as a phonetic representation of the locally spoken Ebla language. The latter script was initially identified as proto-Canaanite by professor Giovanni Pettinato, who first deciphered the tablets, because it predated the Semitic languages of Canaan, like Ugaritic and Hebrew. Pettinato later retracted the designation and decided to call it simply ""Eblaite"", the name by which it is known today. The purely phonetic use of Sumerian logograms marks a momentous advance in the history of writing. From the earlier system developed by Sumerian scribes, employing a mixed use of logograms and phonetic signs, the scribes at Ebla"
"Melchert (2008). Hittite is one of the Anatolian languages and is known from cuneiform tablets and inscriptions that were erected by the Hittite kings. The script formerly known as ""Hieroglyphic Hittite"" is now termed Hieroglyphic Luwian. The Anatolian branch also includes Cuneiform Luwian, Hieroglyphic Luwian, Palaic, Lycian, Milyan, Lydian, Carian, Pisidian and Sidetic. Unlike other Indo-European languages, Hittite does not distinguish between masculine and feminine grammatical gender, and it lacks subjunctive and optative moods as well as aspect. Various hypotheses have been formulated to explain those differences. Some linguists, most notably Edgar H. Sturtevant and Warren Cowgill, have argued that"
"inscriptions with Aramaic, Phoenician or Akkadian versions. The Early Iron Age in Northern Mesopotamia also saw a gradual spread of alphabetic writing in Aramaic and Phoenician. During the cultural interactions on the Levantine coast of Syro-Palestine and North Syria in the tenth through 8th centuries BC, Greeks and Phrygians adopted the alphabetic writing from the Phoenicians. Syro-Hittite states The states that are called Neo-Hittite or, more recently, Syro-Hittite were Luwian-, Aramaic- and Phoenician-speaking political entities of the Iron Age in northern Syria and southern Anatolia that arose following the collapse of the Hittite Empire in around 1180 BC and lasted"
"Proto-Sinaitic script Proto-Sinaitic, also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite, Old Canaanite, or Canaanite, is a term for both a Middle Bronze Age (Middle Kingdom) script attested in a small corpus of inscriptions found at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, and the reconstructed common ancestor of the Paleo-Hebrew, Phoenician and South Arabian scripts (and, by extension, of most historical and modern alphabets). The earliest ""Proto-Sinaitic"" inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th (early date) and the mid-16th (late date) century BC. ""The principal debate is between an early date, around 1850 BC, and a late date, around 1550"
"still purely pictographic, and represents a transitional stage between proto-writing and the emergence of the partly syllabic writing of the cuneiform script proper. The ""proto-literate period"" of Egypt and Mesopotamia is taken to span about 3500 to 2900 BC. The administrative texts of the Jemdet Nasr period (3100–2900 BC), found among other places at Jemdet Nasr and Tell Uqair represent a further stage in the development from proto-cuneiform to cuneiform, but can still not be identified with certainty as being written in Sumerian, although it is likely. Kish tablet The Kish tablet is a limestone tablet found at Tell al-Uhaymir,"
"an intermediate stage of proto-writing before they used proper writing. The ""Slavic runes"" from the 7th and 8th centuries AD, mentioned by a few medieval authors, may have been such a system. The quipu of the Incas (15th century AD), sometimes called ""talking knots,"" may have been of a similar nature. Another example is the pictographs invented by Uyaquk before the development of the Yugtun syllabary (c. 1900). Writing emerged in many different cultures in the Bronze Age. Examples are the cuneiform writing of the Sumerians, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Cretan hieroglyphs, Chinese logographs, Indus script, and the Olmec script of Mesoamerica."
"in his ""Makers of Civilization"" (1929) published an alternative translation of the fragments: His translation and work has never been taken serious by Assyriologists. Waddell also identified Hamazi (fragment line 7) with Carchemish in Syria, but this location is improbable. Bowl of Utu The Bowl of Utu also known as the Bowl of Udu, Uhub, Utug, U-tug, Utuk or Utu(k) is an ancient Sumerian bowl from the early 3rd millennium BC. Fragments of the bowl contain eight lines of an inscription. Controversy has surrounded its translation since the 1920s but it is agreed by scholars the fragments contain the earliest"
"into two groups: a northern group where Hittite rulers remained in power, and a southern group where Aramaeans came to rule from about 1000 BC. These states were highly decentralised structures; some appear to have been only loose confederations of sub-kingdoms. The northern group includes: The southern, Aramaic, group includes: Luwian monumental inscriptions in Anatolian hieroglyphs continue almost uninterrupted from the 13th-century Hittite imperial monuments to the Early Iron Age Syro-Hittite inscriptions of Karkamish, Melid, Aleppo and elsewhere. Luwian hieroglyphs were chosen by many of the Syro-Hittite regional kingdoms for their monumental inscriptions, which often appear in bi or tri-lingual"
"they are called ""šešig""; if signs are modified by the removal of a wedge or wedges, they are called ""nutillu"". ""Typical"" signs have about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of twenty or more (although it is not always clear if a ligature should be considered a single sign or two collated, but distinct signs); the ligature KAxGUR consists of 31 strokes. Most later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary, together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs"
"from Latin ""cuneus"" = wedge. The linear writings of Crete in the first half of the second millennium BC which were made on clay tablets that were left to dry in the sun until they became ""leather"" hard before being incised by the stylus. The linear nature of the writing was also dictated by the use of the stylus. In Western Europe styluses were widely used until the late Middle Ages. For learning purposes the stylus was gradually replaced by a writing slate. From the mid-14th century improved water-powered paper mills produced large and cheap quantities of paper and the"
"and well preserved late one. The Protoliterate, or Uruk period, named after the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, (ca. 4000 to 3100 BC) existed from the protohistoric Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age period, following the Ubaid period and succeeded by the Jemdet Nasr period generally dated to 3100–2900 BC. It saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia, the beginnings of Sumerian civilization, and also the first ""great creative age"" of Mesopotamian art. Slightly earlier, the northern city of Tell Brak, today in Syria, also saw urbanization, and the development of a temple with regional significance. This is called"
"values, names, and descendants of the Phoenician letters. Proto-Sinaitic script Proto-Sinaitic, also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite, Old Canaanite, or Canaanite, is a term for both a Middle Bronze Age (Middle Kingdom) script attested in a small corpus of inscriptions found at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, and the reconstructed common ancestor of the Paleo-Hebrew, Phoenician and South Arabian scripts (and, by extension, of most historical and modern alphabets). The earliest ""Proto-Sinaitic"" inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th (early date) and the mid-16th (late date) century BC. ""The principal debate is between an early date, around"
"today either descended from this one innovation, many via the Phoenician alphabet, or were directly inspired by its design. In Italy, about 500 years passed from the early Old Italic alphabet to Plautus (750 to 250 BC), and in the case of the Germanic peoples, the corresponding time span is again similar, from the first Elder Futhark inscriptions to early texts like the ""Abrogans"" (c. AD 200 to 750). The original Sumerian writing system derives from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millennium BC, this had evolved into a method of"
"alphabet. Hismaic is the name given to texts carved largely by nomads in the Ḥismā desert of what is now southern Jordan and north-west Saudi Arabia, though they are occasionally found in other places such as northern Jordan and parts of northern Saudi Arabia outside the Ḥismā. They are thought to date from roughly the same period as the Safaitic, i.e. first century BC to fourth century AD, though there is even less dating evidence in the case of Hismaic. Safaitic is the name given to an alphabet used by tens of thousands of ancient nomads in the deserts of"
"date to the late fourth millennium BC, slightly earlier than the Jemdet Nasr Period. By the time of the Jemdet Nasr Period, the script had already undergone a number of significant changes. It originally consisted of pictographs, but by the time of the Jemdet Nasr Period it was already adopting simpler and more abstract designs. It is also during this period that the script acquired its iconic wedge-shaped appearance. At the end of the Jemdet Nasr period there was a major archaeologically attested river flood in Shuruppak and other parts of Mesopotamia. Polychrome pottery from a destruction level below the"
"education. The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered to be the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400–3200 BC with the earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion. A similar debate exists for the"
"and into the second, several language groups already existed in the region. These included: Links between Hurro-Urartian and Hattic and the indigenous languages of the Caucasus have frequently been suggested, but are not generally accepted. Fertile Crescent The Fertile Crescent is a crescent-shaped region in the Middle East where agriculture and early human civilizations such as Sumer flourished. Technological advances in the region include the development of writing, glass, the wheel, agriculture, and the use of irrigation. It has been called the ""cradle of civilization"". The Fertile Crescent lies in all of Iraq (Mesopotamia), and parts of Israel/Palestine, Syria, Lebanon,"
"Ugaritic alphabet The Ugaritic script is a cuneiform abjad used from around either the fifteenth century BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages (particularly Hurrian) were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, although not elsewhere. Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the North Semitic and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the reduced Phoenician alphabet and its descendants (including Greek and Latin)"
"wedge or wedges, they are called ""nutillu"". ""Typical"" signs have usually in the range of about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of twenty or more (although it is not always clear if a ligature should be considered a single sign or two collated but still distinct signs); the ligature KAxGUR7 consists of 31 strokes. Most later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary, together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs in the script were polyvalent, having both"
"several languages are involved. A related proposal by Gordon Whittaker is that the language of the proto-literary texts from the Late Uruk period ( 3350–3100 BC) is really an early Indo-European language which he terms ""Euphratic"". The Sumerian language is one of the earliest known written languages. The ""proto-literate"" period of Sumerian writing spans c. 3300 to 3000 BC. In this period, records are purely logographic, with phonological content. The oldest document of the proto-literate period is the Kish tablet. Falkenstein (1936) lists 939 signs used in the proto-literate period (late Uruk, 34th to 31st centuries). Records with unambiguously linguistic"
"Sumer Sumer () is the earliest known civilization in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia, modern-day southern Iraq, during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze ages, and one of the first civilizations in the world along with Ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley. Living along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, Sumerian farmers were able to grow an abundance of grain and other crops, the surplus of which enabled them to settle in one place. Proto-writing in the prehistory dates back to c. 3000 BC. The earliest texts come from the cities of Uruk and Jemdet Nasr and date back"
"were still used in temples for some centuries. The last Akkadian texts date from the late 1st century AD. Early in Mesopotamia's history (around the mid-4th millennium BC) cuneiform was invented for the Sumerian language. Cuneiform literally means ""wedge-shaped"", due to the triangular tip of the stylus used for impressing signs on wet clay. The standardized form of each cuneiform sign appears to have been developed from pictograms. The earliest texts (7 archaic tablets) come from the É, a temple dedicated to the goddess Inanna at Uruk, from a building labeled as Temple C by its excavators. The early logographic"
"Hismaic Hismaic is a variety of the Ancient North Arabian script and the language most commonly expressed in it. The Hismaic script may have been used to write Safaitic dialects of Old Arabic, but the language of most inscriptions differs from Safaitic in a few important respects, meriting its classification as a separate dialect or language. Hismaic inscriptions are attested in the Ḥismā region of Northwest Arabia, dating to the centuries around and immediately following the start of the Common Era. There are clear instances of ""d"" being used for /ḏ/ in the variant spellings of the divine name Ḏū"