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![]() ![]() Sometimes cuneiform was formed into prisms, larger tablets and cylinders, but mainly it was written on palm-sized pieces of clay. It looks like a series of lines and triangles, as each sign is comprised of marks-triangular, vertical, diagonal, and horizontal-impressed onto wet clay with a stylus, a long thin instrument similar to a pen. It was used to write at least a dozen languages, just as the alphabet that you are reading now is also (for the most part) used in Spanish, German and many other languages. But not clay, which has proven to be the most durable, and perhaps most sustainable, writing surface humanity has used.Ĭuneiform means "wedge-shaped," a term the Greeks used to describe the look of the signs. Deciding to use clay for a writing surface was ingenious: vellum, parchment, papyrus and paper-other writing surfaces people have used in the past-deteriorate easily. ![]() As remarkable as is the discovery of new bits of millennia-old literature is the story of cuneiform itself, a now obscure but once exceedingly influential writing system, the world’s first examples of handwriting.Ĭuneiform, was invented some 6,000 years ago in what is now southern Iraq, and it was most often written on iPhone-sized clay tablets a few inches square and an inch high. Cuneiform made headlines recently with the discovery of 22 new lines from the Epic of Gilgamesh, found on tablet fragments in Iraq. ![]()
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