What Impacts Did Cuneiform Writing Have?

560 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Writing in Egypt and Mesopotamia

Imagine you are sitting down, you are one of the few people who can read and write. You are a scribe. Your job is to write and record daily events, trades between people and other things to. This writing is called cuneiform. It was one of the first to be found and it came from Mesopotamia. Now you might be asking what is cuneiform writing? How else did Mesopotamians use cuneiform? Who could become a scribe? How? Cuneiform writing is very important in how it contributes to writing today. It is also filled with amazing facts and history about Mesopotamia.
Cuneiform was one of the first writings to be found, it began in Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE. 3500 BCE was a very long time but that is just when cuneiform began which was writings with symbols. Before that it was just pictures that represented words like, water was two squiggly lines then it became three sticks with arrows that each pointed a certain way. Then, overtime, writing pictures for certain words became hard. That is when writing with symbols became more frequent ( "The Cuneiform Writing System in Ancient Mesopotamia: Emergence and Evolution | EDSITEment.", 2013 ). Cuneiform was written with a stylus, which was a stick of reed, they would then write on a clay tablet that was damp so that the stylus would easily carve symbols, after they were done writing, the clay tablet would be stuck out in the sun ( "Harry Ransom CenterThe University of Texas at Austin." , 2013 ).
Cuneiform was very important in Mesopotamia. It was used for recording daily events, trades between people, different things about the sky they would observe, also literature. They would record all of this and they could also transfer different types of information ( "Writing." 2013 ). Scribes are the p...

... middle of paper ...

... other civilizations took ideas from them and they carried it out to our modern day records. Scribes were kind of like our modern day authors, but keeping records instead of writing books. Next time you are writing or even reading, think about were writing started from, like cuneiform and Mesopotamia.

Works Cited

"Harry Ransom CenterThe University of Texas at Austin." Harry Ransom Center RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Nov. 2013.

"How Writing Changed the World." LiveScience.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.

"The Cuneiform Writing System in Ancient Mesopotamia: Emergence and Evolution | EDSITEment." The Cuneiform Writing System in Ancient Mesopotamia: Emergence and Evolution | EDSITEment. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Nov. 2013.

"The Flow of History." FC7: The Birth of Writing and Its Impact -. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2013.

"Writing." Writing. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2013.

Show More
Related

  • Sumerian DBQ: Contribution Of Mesopotamians To Society

    368 Words  | 1 Pages

    Without the Mesopotamians we would not have all the luxury we have today. Could you ever imagine a world without writing? You may think, life would not be so bad without it, but without writing we would not have stories, we could not write to the bank, we could not text. Two major contributions made to society were the first forms of writing known as Cuneiform and Hammurabi’s Code.

    Read More

  • The Epic of Gilgamesh and Sumerian Culture

    805 Words  | 2 Pages

    Gilgamesh is introduced as knowing all things and countries including mysteries and secrets that went on a long journey and had his story engraved on stone. This gives us a little information on the writing technique in Sumeria. Sumerian art was complex. Clay was the Sumerians' most widely used material. Sumerian available because of the invention of cuneiform writing before 3000 B.C. The characters consist of wedge-like strokes, impressed on clay tablets. This system of writing developed before the last centuries of the 4th millennium B.C. in the lower Tigris and Euphrates valley, probably by the Sumerians The history of the script is strikingly like that of the Egyptian hieroglyphic. This must have been the technique that Gilgamesh uses in order to transcribe his story onto these clay tablets. It was reinforced in the story by mentioning it at the beginning and end of the Epic.

    Read More

  • Civilization is Connected from the Mesopotamians to the Powerful Roman Empire

    833 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Mesopotamians and Egyptians are among the first civilizations to make a valuable contribution to Western Civilization. Both Babylonians and Egyptians managed to produce written systems of communicating ideas. The Babylonians created wedge-shaped cuneiform, and the Egyptians made pictographic hieroglyphics. This invention even allowed for Hammurabi’s Code of law to be written and preserved through the ages. The Phoenicians took this concept another step forward and fashioned the alphabet. The ability to record history is an exceptional achievement. Another development of the Ancient Near East was architecture. The Egyptian pyramids, and the Babylonian ziggurats stand as testimony to their society’s technological and architectural achievements. The Assyrians left a lasting impact on civilization with the advent of the idea of conquest which they took to ruthlessly brutal ends. Later the Persians would add a degree of tolerance into the conquest equation. The concept of conquest would leave an indelible mark on the West, for better or worse. These developments still play a role in contemporary society.

    Read More

  • The Persistence Of The Word Summary

    502 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the article "the persistence of the word" written by James Gleick, he argues that writing is the hardest technology to erase from our mind. Writing made knowledge more durable stuff, which represented the roots of human history. The author used one-to-one correspondence methods, link examples with explanations to introduced writing into three categories. First, the way of writing. Writing as a technology requires premeditation and special art, it is a competence forever bodying itself in a series of concrete performance. In ancient times writing usually exists on paper or stone, show our respect to the culture, paper and stone is a kind of tools which can inspired immediate detractors, writing on stone is

    Read More

  • Jared Diamond What Makes The World Unequal

    1106 Words  | 3 Pages

    Writing is one of the many factors which can lead to an unequal world. Writing was “One of the most important inventions in human history” (Prososki, “Writing”). It was believed to come from the Fertile Crescent called Sumer around 5,000 years ago. Over the years, writing has advanced as people created writing and printing systems, which were able to reach

    Read More

  • The Development of Writing and Social Hierarchies

    1128 Words  | 3 Pages

    Writing is perhaps the most important building block of communication - after verbal speech, of course. Writing, like most of human civilization, has its roots in ancient Mesopotamia. The first writing systems began in a style known as cuneiform (Cuneiform, 2013). These wedge-shaped markings have their roots in Sumerian culture and were used predominantly for record keeping and accounting. At the archaeological site of Uruk in what is modern day Iraq, a great wealth of knowledge has been gained from the artifacts located there. Uruk was a ceremonial site and is home to the world’s oldest known documented written documents (Price and Feinman, 2013). The documents discovered list quantities of goods that may have been stored at Uruk, leading archaeologists to believe that writing in this part of the world was developed primarily to keep lists of transactions and stockpiled quantities of goods located at the site.

    Read More

  • Similarities in the Artwork of Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, the Aegean cultures, and Ancient Greece

    955 Words  | 2 Pages

    Mesopotamia’s first invention was a form of writing called cuneiform which was written on clay tablets with a sharp reed called a stylus. This permitted for recording events and writing formal laws. The Sumerians, a civilization in Mesopotamia designed the wheel which was used to help transfer heavy objects to and from places. They also began constructing daggers, spears and chariots, which has led to their successful wars. The Mesopotamians were also responsible for the first laws and the discoveries of glass, sailboats, and ziggurats. With interest high in religion and mythology, Sumerians and their successors worshiped gods and goddesses just like Egyptians, Greeks, and Aegean cultures.

    Read More

  • River Valley Civilization Dbq

    242 Words  | 1 Pages

    To start out, the Sumerians invented cuneiform, which had a major impact on the future. It was invented 5,000 years ago (Doc. 1). They used it to keep records about their crops, business dealings, and occasionally love letters (OI). They also used cuneiform to write myths (OI). Cuneiform was written on clay tablets, then baked

    Read More

  • How Writing Affects The Brain Essay

    1547 Words  | 4 Pages

    Writing is the process of recording ideas by the means of using characters or marks forming a type of communication (The Ency.). There is no specific time of the origin of writing, though early writings go as far back 3000 BC mostly because this was the earliest known form of logographic writing. Logograms are signs that represent complete words, so the writing at this time was only read in vague terms, but they could later be translated by use of the principle of phonetic transfer. Which basically, takes logograms and makes them into words (“Writing).

    Read More

  • Why Is Ancient Egypt A Civilization

    744 Words  | 2 Pages

    The ancient Egyptians believed that it was important to record and communicate information about religion and government. Thus, they invented written scripts that could be used to record this

    Read More

  • Cuneiform

    469 Words  | 1 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Rise and Fall of Early Civilizations

    824 Words  | 2 Pages

    That was an act of human creation of the Near Eastern river valleys of Sumer and Egypt. Cuneiform writing in Sumer and the hieroglyphics in Egypt was developed in this time period. Such things as the Code of Hammurabi and the fall of the Assyrian Empire, The Persian wars, assassination of Julius Caesar, it was also the start of the Greco-Roman Age, and the end of the Roman Empire in the West.

    Read More

  • Essential factors to produce a successful civilization

    871 Words  | 2 Pages

    ... helped the architecture to have accurate measurements . Another civilization that also developed a system of writing was China. The written language could be easily to read and understand, but when they spoke it it was difficult to understand. This civilization had a big advantage with the system of writing because all parts of china everyone could learn the language even if they already spoke a different language. This helped make a great civilization because it unifies a large and diverse land and this helped to control it easier. One disadvantage it has is that the writing system has a lot of things to memorize. So if you were a wealthy kid and went to a good school you could memorize the major part of the language, but if you were in the lower class and went to a cheap school then you had trouble learning the language because they didn’t teach the whole language

    Read More

  • The Contributions of Ancient Civilizations to History

    867 Words  | 2 Pages

    The first primary civilization was located in Southern Mesopotamia, known as Sumer. The Sumerians invented the first writing known as Cuneiform. We are left with tens of thousands of written records on many aspects of the Sumerians, the most notable of these being the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is an a...

    Read More

  • Internet Research

    1020 Words  | 3 Pages

    Webster P. (2003, September/October). Expanded library electronic reference collections. Online,27(5), 24-27. Retrieved July 18, 2006 from the Academic Search Premier database. (AN: 10687963)

    Read More

More about What Impacts Did Cuneiform Writing Have?

Open Document