THE BLACKWELL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WRITING SYSTEMS Florian Coulmas “ONT ‘0700715044 . BLACKWELL 22 poserscuneiform writing PO ih BS Figure 26 Cryptograms designed by the earliest Christians who were forced to keep the meetings secret. Many used the chi-tho sign, made from the first two letters of Gk ypnote: Christos, 7 and p cuneiform writing The oldest and most widespread writing system in the ancic~ Middle East which was in active use for a variety of languages for three lenniums sce. The name is a modern coinage first introduced as litterae cuneats from Lat. cuneus ‘wedge’, by Thomas Hyde, a professor of Hebrew and Arab at the University of Oxford, in his book on Persia, published 1700. It refers to wedge-shaped strokes of which cuneiform signs consist. Cuneiform writing owe: this characteristic feature of its outer form to the physical medium on which evolved, namely clay. The writing tool was a pointed stylus cut from reed w1 left wedges of various orientations when impressed upon wet clay (figure Figure 27 Standard writing position of stylus and tablet. Right: the wedge made, oriented in standard reading position Source: Powell 1981 98cuneiform writing Figure 28 Early Sumerian inscription dating from around 3000 ace KK KS Urok Jemdet Nase Sumerian Old Akkadian (3200) (2900) linear cuneiform (2200) (2400) Ae ee ot Old Assyrian Old Babylonian New Assyrian New Babylonian (1900) (1700) (700) (600) Figure 29 Gradual stylization and simplification of the cuneiform sign for both an ‘sky! and dingir ‘god’ (numbers refer to years 8cé) Origin and development of outer form Near the end of the fourth millennium sce the Sumerians who inhabited south- ern Mesopotamia had developed a civilization with food production above sub- sistence level. In addition to major inventions such as the wheel and the plough they also developed a system of recording. Starting out as representations of natural objects, the earliest signs were pictures, then pictograms (figure 28). Styli- zation set in early, leading to a complete loss of the pictorial appearance of cuneiform signs (figure 29). This was an immediate result of the practice of writing on CLay TABLETS. The earliest tablets were rather small and square, and writing was from top to bottom. Later, bigger rectangular tablets were used, which forced the scribes to change the position of their left hand in which the tablets were held for writing. As a result, the signs were rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise and lost their iconic quality (table 17), From around the middle 99