Unfortunately, we are at a great disadvantage being so temporally removed from early Sumerian, as well as not really understanding Sumerian itself, making early decipherment even more tricky.īy 2100 BC or so, we see a complete and fully-formed writing system - nothing like the clunky logographs of the past. There is a lot of work yet to be done on this topic - but very important work! Writing has only developed independently four or five times in the course of human civilization, and we really would like to understand that process better. It is still very difficult to know what all these artifacts mean, or even how we should interpret many of the individual symbols. By 3000 BC, we start seeing more interesting symbols being written down, and more complex ideas being represented. Our best guess is that this kind of visual symbology lead, eventually, to the desire to express more abstract ideas in clay as well. We have some artifacts from circa 3500 BC that show things like sheep and oxen, with rudimentary counts and numbers. To the best of our knowledge, people started using symbols on small clay objects to represent legal contracts between people. But what does that mean, exactly? How does cuneiform work? Who invented cuneiform? You probably know that Sumerian is written in cuneiform. Now that you've learned a bit about the Sumerian language, you're probably wondering how to read it. A lot more can be said, but as this is a course on Sumerian I won't spend too much time on the topic. A few of these details are laid out below. General Comments on Sumerian Cuneiform īefore we get into the nitty gritty of reading Sumerian in cuneiform, we should probably first take a look at some of the concepts and issues involved with cuneiform in general, and Sumerian cuneiform in particular. 1.2 Problems with Cuneiform and Sumerian.1 General Comments on Sumerian Cuneiform.
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