The Development Stages of Cuneiform and Its Relationship with Sumerians

Abstract

The cornerstone of the transition to scientific and cultural development is the event of finding writing. The writing did not appear suddenly in the developed form. The ideographic writings recorded in the form of carving, drawing and painting of various symbols on the rocks, on the walls of the caves developed after a while and evolved into pictographic writing. In this respect, the beginning of writing is considered as pictures. Since each of the characters or pictures looks like wedges, this writing style is called cuneiform or wedge writing. Cuneiform script is a type of writing belonging to ancient times used by the peoples in Mesopotamia. Those who came and settled in Mesopotamia used this writing form. Besides Mesopotamia, Assyrians, Hittites, Iranians also used this script. However, since Sumerian was the first language to be written, it was also the Sumerians who first used cuneiform. Cuneiform first appeared in a character of pictogram in commercial records about 5500 years ago. The writing drawn on the Sumerian tablets, one of the oldest known written documents in history, has a very important place in terms of history. Symbols that could be regarded as pictograms evolved over time and turned into syllabic writing, which is called cuneiform due to its form. In the study, the opinions of researchers who have different views on the analysis of cuneiform are evaluated. Afterwards, the determiners with important grammatical structure that are used to resolve the confusion in the Sumerian writing system are explained. In addition, the content and formal developments of the Sumerian cuneiform are given in detail by dividing them into various phases. As a result of the research, it was found that the development of the Sumerians in cuneiform writing was holistic and descriptive until b.c. 2200 years, and in the following periods, they followed a process in the form of writings with only linear characters In previous periods, the Sumerians used some objects as the semantic value of signs, like people before them. However, unlike their predecessors, they also showed every part of the objects and the combination between them.