Let's try to answer the question about the origin of the cuneiform icons

What is cuneiform, today, few know, as a rule, these are narrow specialists in the field of culture and the history of philology. And meanwhile, thanks to cuneiform writing, we have the opportunity to write down our thoughts and words on paper. Therefore, in this article, we will try to answer the question of what the origin of cuneiform icons is.

What is cuneiform writing?

Cuneiform is called the ancient form of writing, in which certain marks were placed on clay tablets using a specially sharpened wand.

As a form of writing cuneiform writing arose in the Sumerian culture. This allowed the transfer of knowledge from generation to generation and contributed to the fact that this country took the leading position in the Ancient World.

Also, archaeologists have discovered several more ancient forms of writing, similar to cuneiform. This is the Persian cuneiform, the so-called Ugaritic letter, and also the Kipro-Minoan letter.

The most famous cuneiform country

Answering the question about the origin of the cuneiform icons, we will study the state of writing in the most famous and well-studied Sumerian-Babylonian culture.

The first cuneiform tablets of this country, known to modern scientists, date back to 3500 BC. E.

Between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates the well-known Sumerian kingdom settled down. It was a state with populated cities, with a body of its laws, with a rich book tradition, which was made up of these clay tablets.

On these tablets different information was recorded: from the forerunner of laws to household calculations.

The icons themselves were most close in meaning to the hieroglyphics. However, they already indicated certain verbal combinations and were more conditional in character than the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt.

Hypothesis about the appearance of written cuneiform icons

The origin of cuneiform icons in Mesopotamia has several hypotheses. According to one of the most common of them, cuneiform icons appeared as follows.

Owners of large agricultural and cattle-breeding plots were forced to keep records of their property. For this, from the clay, which was common in those parts, did special figurines, which were called tokens. Tokens were molded in the form of animals or domestic birds, as well as in the form of grain, eggs, etc.

Tokens formed into an earthen vessel, which was sealed with a personal seal of the master, because only he had access to this knowledge.

Further, with the development of human progress, it was customary to draw a conventional inscription of these tokens on the lid of the clay vessel itself, and the vessel itself also changed and turned into a simple clay tablet.

The outline of pictograms also changed. If earlier they had the character of imitative and looked like those animals that they denoted, now they began to be designated conditionally and schematically by squeezing them out on fresh clay or even using special paint with a writing stick.

So, we can understand what the origin of the cuneiform icons is, because these are the former pictograms.

The combination of two different pictograms gave a new word. Thus, the ideography, using symbols, appeared. For example, if two signs meant an egg and a bird, then it meant "fertility and well-being". Ancient cuneiforms quite clearly allow us to consider such a feature.

By the way, cuneiform writing, having arisen in the Sumerian culture, spread quickly enough throughout the Middle East, in contrast to Chinese and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Signs of cuneiform were more understandable, they were easier to remember and write. Therefore, today you can study a fairly large number of clay tablets with these records.

Modern scholars believe that the Sumerian cuneiform had a definite influence on the Phoenician letter, which, in turn, influenced the creation of the ancient Greek alphabet, which is a kind of ancestor of the alphabets of the whole world.

However, later this type of letter was lost. For a long time the clay tablets would have been buried in the earth, if European scientists had not paid close attention to them in the century before last.

History of deciphering cuneiform signs

Studying the question of what the origin of cuneiform icons is, it is impossible to ignore the problem of deciphering them.

Attempts to decipher these signs were made by scientists in the 19th century. Materials they served as inscriptions on the plates of the late era, enumerating the titles of rulers and their merits.

During the archaeological excavations on the territory of Ancient Babylon, not only numerous cuneiform samples were found, but also original dictionaries, according to which the higher classes of this country studied.

Thanks to these findings, most clay tablets were deciphered. Historians have received invaluable data on life in the Ancient Sumerians. To date, only the oldest samples of cuneiform, the so-called Proto-Sumerian letter, remain undeciphered.