Cuneiform characters are also called "nails" or "arrows". The script used in ancient West Asia. Write more on stones and clay tablets (clay bricks). The strokes are wedge-shaped like nails or arrows. It was created by Sumerians in the two river basins around 3000 BC. Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, etc. Everyone uses this kind of writing to write their own language. It is also a common language for exchanging diplomatic documents between ancient countries. Archaeologists have discovered a large number of cuneiform tablets or inscriptions, which have been translated since the19th century, thus forming a new discipline to study ancient history-Assyrian studies.
Both the Euphrates River and the Tigris River originate from the Armenian Plateau in West Asia. Around 4000 BC, there were the earliest residents here-Sumerians. They created a splendid Sumerian civilization, and what best embodies the characteristics of this civilization is their writing-cuneiform.
At first, this kind of writing was a pictorial writing. Gradually, this kind of pictorial writing developed into Sumerian ideographic writing, which combined one or several symbols to express a new meaning. For example, "mouth" is the action "speaking"; Use symbols representing "eyes" and "water" to express "crying" and so on. With the popularization of characters, Sumerians simply use a symbol to represent a sound. For example, "arrow" and "life" are the same in Sumerian, so they use the same symbol "arrow" to represent it. Later, some restrictive radical symbols were added, such as adding an "inverted triangle" before a person's name to indicate that it is a man's name. In this way, this writing system is basically completed.
Sumerians used reed poles, bone sticks and triangular wooden sticks as pens to write on clay tablets made of wet clay, and the fonts naturally formed cuneiform, so this kind of writing was called cuneiform writing.
In order to preserve clay tablets for a long time, it is necessary to dry them before firing. This kind of fired clay tablet document is not afraid of moth-eaten, nor will it rot, and can withstand fire. But the fly in the ointment is that the clay tablets are very heavy, each weighing about one kilogram, and it is difficult to move around every time you look at one. Up to now, nearly one million clay tablets have been unearthed, the largest of which is 2.7 meters long and 1.95 meters wide, which is a giant book!
Cuneiform writing is the original creation of Sumerian civilization, which can best reflect the characteristics of Sumerian civilization. Cuneiform writing has had an important influence on the formation and development of many national languages in West Asia. Babylonia, Assyria, Hittites, Syria and other West Asian countries have slightly modified cuneiform as their own writing tools. Even the letters created by Phoenicians contained cuneiform elements. Cuneiform writing is the earliest writing in the world. However, due to its extreme complexity, it completely disappeared in 1 century.
In ancient Sumer, it was often seen that someone wrote on the clay tablet with a triangular stylus made of reeds or wooden sticks. This kind of character is written horizontally from left to right, and each stroke is always from thick to thin, like a wooden wedge. This is one of the three precious gifts that Sumerians left to later western civilization.
Sumerian characters were formed step by step. As we know now, Sumerian characters took 65,438+0,000 years to form. Around 3500 BC, Sumerians began to carve images on stones or clay as a sign of owning something: either a stone represents a "stone heart" or a tree represents a house.
About 500 years later, the evolution speed from graphics to characters has been greatly accelerated. At that time, the managers of Sumerian temple combined many standardized sketches to save the temple's property files and business transaction files.
Although there are hieroglyphics in this period, it has gone beyond the stage of expressing people and concrete things with pictures, and developed into expressing abstract things with pictures, such as a bowl representing food and a bowl on a person's head representing eating.
After another 500 years, mature characters completely replaced the old characters, because by then the original pictures had become so systematic that people no longer regarded them as pictures, but as pure symbols; Many of these symbols no longer represent specific words, but become syllable symbols which can be combined with other similar symbols to form words.
Around 2500 BC, this writing system in Sumer reached a stage of complete development. There are about 500 kinds of cuneiform symbols, many of which have multiple meanings, which makes cuneiform writing system more difficult to master than later pinyin writing system. Nevertheless, cuneiform has been the only writing system in Mesopotamia for two thousand years; By about 500 BC, this kind of writing had even become a common commercial communication medium in most parts of West Asia.
Cuneiform documents that survived Sumerian times and were excavated in modern times were copied on clay tablets. About 90% of these clay tablets are commercial and administrative records, and the remaining 65,438+00% are the remnants of dialogues, proverbs, hymns and myths and legends.
The Sumerian dialogue took the form of two characters standing on opposite sides of the debate, arguing with each other-summer versus winter, axe versus plow, or farmer versus shepherd. Because both sides have many bases to stand on, the debate usually doesn't win or lose. On the other hand, Sumerian proverbs handed down to this day provide a clear point of view.
A charming Sumerian proverb goes like this: "Where servants stay, there will be quarrels;" Where the barber stays, there is slander. "
Cuneiform characters spread to many places in West Asia, bringing the "fire" of civilization to mankind. In 2007 BC, after the decline of the last Sumerian dynasty, the Kingdom of Babylon inherited this legacy and made new progress.