Eli Olson
Outline and Running Research Notes on Cuneiform
WORKING DRAFT
9/30/08
What is cuneiform?
6000 years ago: Pictograms are pictures that represent objects, the way we now use icons
(Donoughue). 3300 BC: oldest clay tablets with pictographs of things like fish and grain
to keep track of trading records from Urik a Mesopotamian city (Cunningham: 7).
Sumerians used cueiform to represent the sounds of spoken words (Cunningham: 8). By
2000 BC cueiform had spread throughout the middle east (Cunningham: 8).
How do we know about it?
Archaeological evidence
When was it invented? How long did it last?
Some time before 3000 BC
How was it written?
It was written by specialized scribes. Cut a reed to make a stylus press to make vertical
and horizontal edges and form an arrow mark. (Donoghue). This wedge shape was
originally produced by the shape that a reed makes when pressed sideways into clay and
gives cuneiform it’s name which is based on the Latin word for wedge, cuneus (Walker:
2). Kings sometimes used gold or silver tablets (Cunningham 8)
Samoyault has a useful alphabet to use in making an artifact.
Why was it needed?
Store information
Communicate
Record history
Where was it invented and used?
Mesopotamia -- Ancient Mesopotamian Areas/languages:
Sumerian
Babylonian language is called Akkadian
Ur languages are called Urartian
THIS FIGURE IS A FIRST DRAFT – IT NEEDS TO INCLUDE MORE LANGUAGES
IF I KEEP IT IN THE PAPER.
Mesopotamain cuneiform script was used for many languages of the ancient Near
East, including Sumerian, Elamite, Hurrian, Urartian, Akkadian and Eblaite,
Hittite and Luvian and influenced Ugaritic and Old Persian (Woodard: 15)
By whom?
The Sumerians
Scribes
Examples
Donoughue. p. 6: collection of proverb 1700 BC that boys who wanted to be scribes had
to copy.
Important examples of documents written with cuneiform:
The Code of Hammurabi (Cunningham)
The Eric of Gilgamesh (Cunningham): “
Though the first fragments of the world's oldest story, an epic of a king of Uruk in
Mesopotamia, were discovered inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets in Nineveh in 1850,
they were not translated and recognized for what they were for twenty-five years, and
thereafter many others fragments surfaced to form the text we have today. This
translation into straightforward English brings the epic alive as never before.”
Named Works: Gilgamesh: A New English Version (Book) Book reviews. Source
Citation:"Gilgamesh." History Today 55.11 (Nov 2005): 66(1). General
OneFile. Gale. Beaver Country Day School. 28 Sept. 2008
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>.
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
SO FAR THIS IS ONLY PRINT SOURCES FORM THE LIBRARY. I STILL
HAVE TO GO THROUGH THE ARTICLES I FOUND ONLINE IN THE
GALE DATABASES TO CHOOSE A FEW. I WILL NOT END UP USING
ALL THESE BOOKS.
Cullican, William. 1980. “The Evolution of the Alphabet” in Cotterell, Arthur. (Ed.) The
Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations. New York: Rainbird.
FROM NEWTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
Cunningham, Kevin. 2005. The History of the Written Word. Chanhassen, MN: The
Child’s World.
FROM NEWTON PUBLIC LIBRARY. CHILDREN’S BOOK – USEFUL
PICTURES
Donoughue, Carol. 2007. The Story of Writing. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books.
FROM NEWTON PUBLIC LIBRARY . CHILDREN’S BOOK – USEFUL
PICTURES
Gordon, Cyrus H. 1968. Forgotten Scripts; How They Were Deciphered and their Impact
on Contemporary Culture. New York: Basic Books.
FROM NEWTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
Huenergard, John and Christopher Woods. 2004. “Akkadian and Eblaite,” in Woodard,
Roger D. (Ed.) Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
FROM NEWTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
Jackson, Donald. 1981. The Sory of Writing New York: Taplinger Publishing Company.
FROM NEWTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
Michalowski, Piotr. 2004. “Sumerian,” in Woodard, Roger D. (Ed.) Cambridge
Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages. Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press.
FROM NEWTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
Michalowski, Piotr. 1996. “Mesopotamian Cuneiform,” in Daniels, Peter T. and William
Bright. (Eds.) The World’s Writing Systems. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
FROM NEWTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
Ouaknin, Marc-Alain. 1999. Mysteries of the Alphabet. Translated by Josephine Bacon.
New York: Abbeville Press.
FROM NEWTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
Samoyault, Tiphaine. 1996. Alphabetical Order: How the Alphabet Began. Translated by
Katherine M Pulver, 1998. New York: Viking Penguin.
FROM NEWTON PUBLIC LIBRARY. CHILDREN’S BOOK – USEFUL
PICTURES
Walker, C. B. F. 1987. Reading the Past: Cuneiform. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA:
University of California Press.
FROM NEWTON PUBLIC LIBRARY. KEY SOURCE.