Cuneiform

The earliest writing in Mesopotamia was a picture writing invented by the Sumerians who wrote on clay tablets using long reeds. The script the Sumerians invented and handed down to the Semitic peoples who conquered Mesopotamia in later centuries, is called cuneiform, which is derived from two Latin words: cuneus , which means "wedge," and forma , which means "shape." This picture language, similar to but more abstract than Egyptian hieroglyphics, eventually developed into a syllabic alphabet under the Semites (Assyrians and Babylonians) who eventually came to dominate the area.

In Sumer, the original writing was pictographic ("picture writing"); individual words were represented by crude pictorial symbols that resembled in some way the object being represented, as in the Sumerian word for king, lu-gal :

The Akkadians The first symbol pictures "gal," or "great," and the second pictures "lu," or "man." Eventually, this pictorial writing developed into a more abstract series of wedges and hooks. These wedges and hooks are the original cuneiform and represented in Sumerian entire words (this is called ideographic and the word symbols are called ideograms, which means "concept writing"); the Semites who adop

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" Hammurabi counsels the downtrodden in these ringing words: "Let any oppressed man who has a cause come into the presence of my statue as king of justice, and have the inscription on my stele read out, and hear my precious words, that my stele may make the case clear to him; may he understand his cause, and may his heart be set at ease!"

Aknowledgment: These paragraphs were excerpts taken from Microsoft Encarata

. Roll out Sculpey clay onto a 4x6 card. The signs in row 1 were pronounced gi-gur which translates "reed basket. While most of the tablets that have been found are such things as contracts, sales receipts, and tax records, a number of very important literary texts have been found as well, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Code of Hammurabi. This means that an analysis of the script can be used as a means of provenancing and dating tablets, or indeed any types of artefactual material (door sills, vases, statues) which happen to be inscribed with cuneiform writing. Bake the clay pieces in an ordinary oven (instructions on Sculpey boxes) until brown and ancient looking!

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Cecilia Wondergem

St. He extended his empire northward through the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys and westward to the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. 5 heactares) of land by a person or temple household of a deity. Throughout his long reign he personally supervised navigation, irrigation, agriculture, tax collection, and the erection of many temples and other buildings. These libraries were smashed to pieces when his palace was sacked and burned down some two and a half decades after his death.

An example of an extreme case is the libraries of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668-627 BC) in Nineveh. " He describes the laws in his compilation as enabling "the land to enjoy stable government and good rule," and he states that he had inscribed his words on a pillar in order "that the strong may not oppress the weak, that justice may be dealt the orphan and the widow. The basis of criminal law is that of equal retaliation, comparable to the Semitic law of "an eye for an eye.

Cuneiform was written on clay tablets, and then baked hard in a kiln.

Approximate Word count = 4102
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page double spaced)

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