Cuneiform Facts & Worksheets

Cuneiform is a writing system used in the ancient Middle East. The word, derived from Latin and Middle French origins that imply “wedge-shaped,” has been used as the current appellation from the early 18th century. The most common and historically significant writing system in the ancient Middle East was cuneiform.

See the fact file below for more information on Cuneiform, or you can download our 25-page Cuneiform worksheet pack to utilize within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

HISTORY OF CUNEIFORM

• Its active history spanned the previous three millennia BCE, and its extended evolution and geographic spread encompassed several subsequent civilizations and languages. Its total significance as a worldwide graphic medium of civilization is second only to the Phoenician-Greek-Latin alphabet.
• Cuneiform beginnings may be traced back to the end of the fourth millennium BCE. The Sumerians, a people of undetermined ethnic and linguistic affiliations, occupied southern Mesopotamia and the Chaldean region west of the Euphrates during the time. 
• Its active history spanned the previous three millennia BCE, and its extended evolution and geographic spread encompassed several subsequent civilizations and languages. Its total significance as a worldwide graphic medium of civilization is second only to the Phoenician-Greek-Latin alphabet.
• Cuneiform beginnings may be traced back to the end of the fourth millennium BCE. 
• The Sumerians, a people of undetermined ethnic and linguistic affiliations, occupied southern Mesopotamia and the Chaldean region west of the Euphrates during the time. 
• While it does not seem that they were the first occupants of the region or the genuine originators of their writing system, the first recorded traces of cuneiform writing are definitively linked to them.
• The oldest Sumerian written records are pictographic tablets from Uruk (Erech), which are clearly lists or ledgers of goods identifiable by drawings of the things and supplemented by numerals and human names.
• The repetitive use of strokes or circles made it simple to represent numerical concepts. 
• However, the portrayal of proper names, for example, needed an early use of the rebus principle—that is, the employment of pictographic forms to recall in the reader’s mind a primary sound form rather than the basic concept of the drawn thing. 
• This resulted in a shift from pure word writing to a phonetic script. Thus, the image of a hand evolved to represent not only the Sumerian u (“hand”) but also the phonetic syllable u in any appropriate context.
• Because Sumerian words were mostly monosyllabic, the marks typically signified syllables, resulting in a word-syllabic script. 
• With the addition of phonetic complements to the word signs, the Sumerians were able to designate grammatical components for the first time (logograms or ideograms). 
• Because Sumerians had numerous words that sounded identical (homophonous), many logograms commonly had identical phonetic values and are distinguishable in contemporary transliteration—(for example, ba, bá, bà, ba4).
• Because a logogram frequently represents numerous related concepts with distinct names (e.g., “sun,” “day,” “bright”), it might have more than one phonetic value (this feature is called polyphony)
• Throughout the third millennium, writing grew increasingly cursive, and pictographs evolved into conventionalized linear designs. 
• Because clay tablets were commonly used as writing materials (stone, metal, or wood were also used on occasion), the linear strokes acquired a wedge-shaped look by being driven into the soft clay with the slanted edge of a stylus. 
• Curving lines were removed from writing, and the standard sequence of signs was established as running from left to right, with no word divider. Changing from older columns that ran downward required turning the signs to one side.

CUNEIFORM SPREAD AND DEVELOPMENT

• The Akkadians, Semitic invaders who came to Mesopotamia during the middle of the third millennium, adopted the Sumerian writing system before these developments were finished.
• The Akkadians kept Sumerian logograms and combinations of logograms for more complicated conceptions while transferring the script to their entirely new language but pronounced them as matching Akkadian words.
• They retained the phonetic values as well but expanded them well beyond the basic Sumerian inventory of simple kinds (open or closed syllables like ba or ab).
• Many more complicated syllabic values of Sumerian logograms (such as kan, mul, bat) were translated to the phonetic level, and polyphony became a progressively major issue in Akkadian cuneiform (for example, the original pictogram for “sun” may be interpreted phonetically as ud, tam, t, par, la, I
• The Akkadian interpretations of the logograms added more complex values. As a result, the symbol for “land” or “mountain range” (formerly a picture of three mountain peaks) contains not only the phonetic value kur but also mat and ad from Akkadian mtu (“land”) and adû (“mountain range”) (“mountain”).

No effort was made until much later to clear up the mistake, and comparable “graphies” like ta-am and tam coexisted throughout the lengthy history of Akkadian cuneiform.

Written in Old Babylonian cuneiform, which developed into Middle and New Babylonian types throughout the erratic and less spectacular later periods of Babylonian history is the Code of Hammurabi.

• The humbler Assur came from northern Mesopotamia. The majority of Old Assyrian cuneiform may be discovered in the writings of Assyrian traders who settled in central Asia Minor (about 1950 BCE; the so-called Cappadocian tablets), while Middle Assyrian is used in a substantial body of literature, including the Law Code.
• The Neo-Assyrian period was the height of Assyrian dominance, and the writing culminated in the massive archives from Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh (c. 650 BCE).
• Cuneiform writing spread outside Mesopotamia in the third millennium when the nation of Elam in southern Iran came into touch with Mesopotamian civilization and adopted the writing system.
• The Elamite cuneiform script survived far into the first millennium BCE when it apparently gave the Indo-European Persians an external model for developing a new streamlined quasi-alphabetic cuneiform writing for the Old Persian language. 
• Around 2000 BCE, the Hurrians of northern Mesopotamia and the upper reaches of the Euphrates acquired Old Akkadian cuneiform and passed it on to the Indo-European Hittites, who had conquered central Asia Minor at the time.
• The Akkadian of Babylonia became a lingua franca of international interchange throughout the whole Middle East in the second millennium, usually in somewhat twisted and primitive variants, and cuneiform writing thus became a worldwide medium of written communication.
• The era’s political correspondence was nearly entirely done in that language and script.
• Sometimes, such as in the phonetic script of the Canaanite city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast (circa 1400 BCE), cuneiform was adopted; other times, it was modified, as in the writings of the kingdom of Urartu or Haldi in the Armenian mountains between the ninth and sixth centuries BCE; the language is related in some way to Hurrian, and the script is a borrowed wide range of Neo-Assyrian cuneiform.
• Even after the Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms fell in the 7th and 6th century BCE, when Aramaic became the generally popular language, relatively degraded variants of Late Babylonian and Assyrian remained as cuneiform written languages virtually until the time of Christ.

CUNEIFORM DECIPHERMENT

• Many of the cuneiform-using cultures (Hurrian, Hittite, Urartian) vanished one by one, and their written records were lost. The same destiny befell cuneiform in general with startling speed and completeness. 
• One of the reasons for this was the successful spread of the Phoenician alphabet in the western Middle East and the Classical regions of Mediterranean Europe.
• Cuneiform could not compete with its greater efficiency and economy writing technique. By 500 BCE, Mesopotamia’s worldwide status of the second millennium had been depleted, and it had become Persian-dependent. 
• Late Babylonian and Assyrian were only dormant literary idioms. The extinction of cuneiform was so thorough that the Classical Greeks were mostly unaware of its existence, with the exception of Herodotus, who mentions Assyria Grammata (“Assyrian characters”) in passing.

IMPACT OF CUNEIFORM

• The major kind of cuneiform is a word-syllabic system like the Egyptian, hieroglyphic Hittite, Minoan-Mycenaean, proto-Elamite, and proto-Indic, with its inventory of ideograms (including “determinatives” or “classifiers”) and phonetic signs. The Sumerian system appears to be the most ancient. 
• The extent to which it encouraged the origin or impacted the development of others is a challenging question related to the monogenesis or polygenesis (common or multiple origins) of writing. The Phoenician consonantal script supplied the new typological structure upon which the Ugaritic and Old Persian systems were built, retaining only the wedge form’s outward similarity.

Cuneiform Worksheets

This fantastic bundle includes everything you need to know about Cuneiform across 25 in-depth pages. These ready-to-use worksheets are perfect for teaching kids about Cuneiform, a writing system used in the ancient Middle East. The most common and historically significant writing system in the ancient Middle East was cuneiform. 

Download includes the following worksheets.

1. Cuneiform Facts
2. Unveiling Knowledge
3. Crack the Quote
4. Remain of the Past
5. Write in the Box
6. Which is History?
7. Story Telling
8. Report On Cam
9. Watch And Learn
10. The Power of Writing 
11. Make Your Own Cuneiform

Frequently Asked Questions

What is cuneiform?

Cuneiform is a system of writing that was used in ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) from around the mid-4th millennium BCE. It is considered the world’s oldest form of writing and was used to record a variety of texts, including religious inscriptions, legal documents, and letters.

How was cuneiform written?

Cuneiform was written using a reed stylus to make wedge-shaped impressions on wet clay tablets. The stylus was pressed into the clay, creating characters that represented words or ideas. The tablets were then left to dry and were sometimes baked to preserve them.

What was the purpose of cuneiform writing?

Cuneiform was used for a variety of purposes, including record-keeping, administration, and communication. It was also used for literary, religious, and scientific texts. Some of the most famous cuneiform texts include the Epic of Gilgamesh, the laws of Hammurabi, and astronomical diaries.

How many different cuneiform signs are there?

There are over 600 cuneiform signs that have been identified and cataloged. However, the number of signs used in any given text was usually much smaller, with only a few hundred signs needed to write the majority of texts.

How was cuneiform deciphered?

Cuneiform was deciphered in the 19th century through a combination of historical, linguistic, and archaeological research. The key to deciphering cuneiform was the realization that it was a form of writing and not simply a series of pictograms. The discovery of cuneiform inscriptions that included Akkadian, a Semitic language, allowed scholars to begin to decode the cuneiform signs and understand their meaning.

Link/cite this page

If you reference any of the content on this page on your own website, please use the code below to cite this page as the original source.

<a href="https://kidskonnect.com/social-studies/cuneiform/">Cuneiform Facts & Worksheets: https://kidskonnect.com</a> - KidsKonnect, March 5, 2023

Link will appear as Cuneiform Facts & Worksheets: https://kidskonnect.com - KidsKonnect, March 5, 2023