Understanding Cuneiform: How to Write in Ancient Mesopotamia with Dr. Irving Finkel

The Dawn of Writing: Cuneiform's Origins

• 💡 Cuneiform, the world's earliest known writing system, emerged over 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, primarily on clay tablets.
• 🔑 The earliest evidence dates to around 4,000 BC, though its true origins may be even older, potentially evolving from earlier, unrecorded systems.
• 🌍 The script was initially used to write Sumerian, a unique language with no known relatives, and later adapted for Akkadian (including Babylonian and Assyrian dialects).

The Evolution of Cuneiform Script

• ✍️ Early cuneiform signs were drawn with a point on wet clay, resembling pictograms of everyday objects like jars of beer.
• 🛠️ Over time, these pictographic signs evolved into wedge-shaped marks made by pressing a stylus into the clay, simplifying the forms.
• 📈 This evolution from curvilinear drawings to straight-edged wedges occurred around the beginning of the third millennium BC, leading to a more abstract script.

Cuneiform as a Tool for Administration and Trade

• 📊 The invention of cuneiform is strongly linked to the rise of city-states and the need for bookkeeping, accountability, and control over resources.
• 🍺 Early tablets often recorded administrative documents, listing items like beer with precise quantities, demonstrating impeccable bookkeeping practices.
• 🔢 The development of cuneiform was closely tied to numeracy, with a sophisticated sexagesimal (base-60) mathematical system emerging alongside the writing system.

The Behistun Inscription and Decipherment

• ⛰️ The Behistun Inscription, a trilingual inscription in Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite cuneiform, was crucial for unlocking the code of cuneiform.
• 🔑 By deciphering the Old Persian portion, scholars were able to use it as a key to understand the other cuneiform scripts, much like the Rosetta Stone for Egyptian hieroglyphs.
• 📜 This inscription demonstrated the adaptability of cuneiform, with Old Persian using a simplified, alphabet-like system derived from cuneiform wedges.

The Enduring Legacy of Cuneiform

• ⏳ Cuneiform endured for over 3,000 years, with the latest dated tablet from the 1st century AD, an astronomical almanac.
• 🗣️ Its decline was gradual, with Aramaic eventually supplanting Babylonian as the spoken language, and alphabetic scripts offering a simpler alternative.
• 🕰️ The legacy of cuneiform persists today in our division of time into 60 seconds and 60 minutes, a direct inheritance from the Mesopotamian sexagesimal system.

Writing Cuneiform: Strokes and Multi-Valency

• ⚡ To write cuneiform, only three basic strokes are needed: horizontal, vertical, and diagonal wedges.
• 🧩 A single cuneiform sign could have multiple meanings and phonetic values, a concept known as multi-valency, which also applied to determinatives (unpronounced signs indicating word category).
• 📚 Mastering cuneiform required extensive study, with scholars often taking around 25 years to read fluently, immersing themselves in the Babylonian scribe's way of thinking.