Cuneiform script (pronounced /kjuːˈniː.ɨfɔrm/ koo-NEE-i-form or /ˈkjuːnɨfɔrm/ KEW-ni-form) is the earliest known writing system in the world.[1] Cuneiform writing emerged in the Sumerian civilization of southern Iraq around the 34th century BC[2] during the middle Uruk period, beginning as a pictographic system of writing. Cuneiform was the most widespread and historically significant writing system in the Ancient Near East.[3]
The development of cuneiform writing was an evolution of an earlier Mesopotamian accounting system that had been used for five thousand years before.[4] Clay tokens had been used for some form of record-keeping in Mesopotamia since as early as 8,000 BC.[5][6] Cuneiform documents were written on clay tablets, by means of a reed stylus. The impressions left by the stylus were wedge shaped, thus giving rise to the name cuneiform ("wedge shaped," from the Latin cuneus, meaning "wedge").
Cuneiform script underwent considerable changes over a period spanning three millennia. In the course of the 3rd millennium BC the script became successively more cursive, and the pictographs developed into conventionalized linear drawings, the number of characters in use also refined from around 1,000 unique characters in the Early Bronze Age to around 400 characters in Late Bronze Age (Hittite cuneiform).
The original Sumerian script was adapted for the writing of the Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Luwian, Hattic, Hurrian, and Urartian languages, and it inspired the Ugaritic and Old Persian alphabets. Cuneiform writing was gradually replaced by the Aramaic alphabet during the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and by the second century of the Common Era, the script had become extinct.
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