Cuneiform Research Paper

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In this assignment, I will be answering question number 2, which in short asks: What exactly is cuneiform in all aspects of the written language? Cuneiform is in simple terms is the writing system of the ancient Middle east. It encompasses consonantal alphabetics, syllabic systems, and logophonetics. The Sumerians wedge-shaped strokes influenced that area of the world for over 3000 years. The creation of cuneiform began long before any writing system was even thought about in Mesopotamia. The Sumerians, like said, started putting impressions onto clay containers to help them remember how many tokens, clay objects with agricultural and manufactured goods importance, were in a particular container. Over time they stopped using the clay objects and just impressed wet clay with the impressions of what the clay tokens represented. If they had more than one of a particular item, instead of impressing the same impression, they used marks to identify how many of that item were present.…show more content…
Pictograph is pretty much what it sounds like, it is a picture of what it is supposed to represent. Linear style was primarily used. What I mean by linear is the use of lines and curves in the picture. Over time though, pictographs went from being primarily linear to more wedge-shaped. This is what we see in cuneiform. It is not linear but uses wedge-shaped strokes to present its picture. In the earlier stages of cuneiform, primarily pictograms, we see that people mainly kept records or ways to communicate information about their agricultural output or taxes. When the style changed from pictograms to cuneiform, we see a major shift in things that they recorded. Over hundreds of years, people kept records of daily events, astronomy, trade, and literature. One of the first pieces of literature is “The Epic
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