Cuneiform (language)

Cuneiform
Trilingual cuneiform inscription of Xerxes at Van Fortress in Turkey, written in Old Persian, Akkadian and Elamite
Type	Logographic and syllabic
Languages	Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hattic, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Sumerian, Urartian, Old Persian
Time period	c. 31st century BC to 1st century AD
Parent systems	(Proto-writing) Cuneiform
Child systems	None; influenced shape of Ugaritic; apparently inspired Old Persian
Direction	Left-to-right
ISO 15924	`Xsux, 020`
Unicode alias	Cuneiform
Unicode range	U+12000 to U+123FF Cuneiform U+12400 to U+1247F Cuneiform Numbers and Punctuation

Cuneiform script, one of the earliest systems of writing, was invented by the Sumerians. It is distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, made by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. The name cuneiform itself simply means "wedge shaped".

Emerging in Sumer in the late fourth millennium BC to convey the Sumerian language, which was a language isolate (the Uruk IV period), cuneiform writing began as a system of pictograms, stemming from an earlier system of shaped tokens used for accounting. In the third millennium, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract as the number of characters in use grew smaller (Hittite cuneiform). The system consists of a combination of logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic and syllabic signs.

The original Sumerian script was adapted for the writing of the Semitic Akkadian (Assyrian/Babylonian), Eblaite and Amorite languages, the language isolate Elamite and for the language isolate Hattic, Hurrian and Urartian languages, as well as Indo-European languages Hittite and Luwian, and it inspired the later Semitic Ugaritic alphabet as well as Old Persian cuneiform. Cuneiform writing was gradually replaced by the Phoenician alphabet during the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–612 BC). By the second century AD, the script had become extinct, its last traces being found in Assyria and Babylonia, and all knowledge of how to read it was lost until it began to be deciphered in the 19th century.

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