CUNEIFORM, VI-WI-form (from Lat. C11 ?ICUS, wedge + forma, shape) INSCRIPTIONS. Cuneiform writing, one of the oldest systems of the alphabet which is known, originated in Meso potamia, and spread, through the influence of Babylonia, even to Armenia and to Egypt. The earliest texts in cuneiform writing are at least six thousand years old, and the latest inscrip tions are dated in the reign of Soter, in the third century B.C. The script receives its name from the peculiar wedge-shaped characters of which it is composed. These consist of combi nations of the five elements: which become in many cases exceedingly com plex. The difficulty of deciphering the charac ters is complicated by the fact that many of them are polyphonic, so that one cuneiform group may represent several entirely different combinations of solinds. In addition to their polyphonous character, all the varieties of cunei form writing, with the exception cif the Old Per sian, are syllabic instead of alphabetic. That is. each character represents not a letter, but an entire syllable, or even a word. Furthermore, there are ninny ideograms in the script, con ventionalized characters which do not denote the sounds for which they would naturally be sup posed to stand, or which have no real phonetic value whatever. In the same way English pos sesses certain ideograms, such as lb., which is read pound; viz., pronounced namely; $. which is dollar in speech ; ''(the head and horns of the bull) as the astronomical sign for Taurus; and the like. It would seem that originally the
cuneiform letters, like the Egyptian, Chinese, and Mexican alphabets, were pictorial, as, for instance, the older form of the character for sun (which may have been regarded as a complete circlet of time) „ which later became . On the other hand, it is doubtful whether the entire body of the extremely complex charac tens which make up the bulk of the cuneiform texts can be resolved into such simple elements. The form of the signs was undoubtedly influenced by the material on which the texts were in scribed. As the Germanic runes, which were carved on wood, are angular in shape and avoid curves, or as the Singhalese, which was written on palm-leaves, has almost no straight lines, which would split the leaf, but is composed of curves, so the cuneiform received its character istic shape from the substance on which it was written. On the soft clay tablets, which were the ordinary writing material of Mesopotamia, the straight line was the easiest stroke, while the triangularly prismatic stylus by its heavy initial touch to the clay formed the peculiar arrow-shaped head of the wedge. These clay bricks, after the writing was finished, were care fully baked or dried in the sun. A chisel was of course employed for the longer inscriptions which were carved in the rock. The cuneiform text, unlike most other Semitic alphabets, as the Hebrew; Syriac, and Arabic, runs from left to right.