Concept in Definition ABC

The term cuneiform refers to wedge figure, meanwhile, the wedge is that piece of wood or metal finished in a very acute dihedral angle, which is used to adjust, break or hold things, among other possibilities.

And on his side, the writing cuneiform, a concept closely linked to the term, is that type of writing used by some ancient and primitive peoples of Asia and whose characters were shaped like a wedge or nail, hence the name.

According to record of archaeological remains, cuneiform writing is considered to be the oldest form of expression.

Cuneiform writing was originally written on wet clay splints, from a wedge-shaped beveled vegetable stem, it turned out from this question that it was named this way. Meanwhile, during the period called Akkadian or Akkadian Empire, as a great kingdom of Mesopotamia which lasted about 140 years, between the XXIV centuries BC. and XXII B.C., the metal and stone.

It should be noted that the tablets were written in columns that indicated: the series and the tablet number corresponding to that series to be able to be cataloged later; the

text and the colophon, which contained the first line of the following tablet, its owner, the corresponding reign and year, the titles, the city and the school, among others. Later, the tablets were conserved in primitive libraries that served for the learning of future scribes.

In some of the sets of tablets found, such is the case of Uruk, an ancient city in Mesopotamia, were counted up to 2,000 different cuneiform signs, of course, in future cultures the aforementioned variety was reduced, until in the language Akkadian, a maximum of 600 were used regularly.

As a consequence, the writing that is based on pictograms was not adequate at the time of writing. to write abstract concepts, verbs and their corresponding tenses, certain symbols with syllabic phonetic value began to be used.

The extension of the cuneiform writing was fabulous since it was adopted by several languages ​​such as the aforementioned Akkadian, Elamite, Luwian, Hittite and would also serve as inspiration for the alphabets of the ancient Persian and Ugaritic.

Themes in Cuneiform