#history
Origins of Writing.
The earliest known writing emerged in southern Mesopotamia around 3400 BC, originating as a system of pictographs that evolved by 2600 BC into the distinctive wedge-shaped script we call “cuneiform.”
It was used initially to record the Sumerian language, and from about 2400 BC Akkadian, which split into two dialects, Assyrian and Babylonian, around 2000 BC.
Over the next two thousand years, the use of cuneiform scripts – both the Mesopotamian version and new forms adapted or invented to write some fifteen other languages – spread to Iran, Armenia, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt.
For much of this period, Babylonian remained the international diplomatic language between the region’s “great kings.”
Cuneiform finally died out in the late first century AD, overtaken by the simpler alphabetic scripts of Aramaic and Greek.
The vast majority of cuneiform writing was inscribed on clay tablets, which could also be impressed with a seal that acted like a signature. The hundreds of thousands of texts discovered by archaeologists include royal inscriptions, law codes, treaties, and literature, as well as everyday records such as receipts, contracts, letters, and incantations that reveal the intimate details of Mesopotamian social, religious, and economic life to an extent unmatched by any other ancient culture.
Extensive libraries of cuneiform texts were kept in temples and palaces, where scribes copied and recopied canonical compositions for millennia. Some kings, such as Shulgi of Ur (ruled 2094-2047 BC) and Ashurbanipal of Assyria (ruled 668-627 BC), claimed to read many languages and to be able to write cuneiform themselves.
