Assyrian Cuneiform inscription

Assyrian Cuneiform inscription. Vatican Museums.... more

by Weston Westmoreland

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Assyrian Cuneiform inscription

Artist

Weston Westmoreland

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Photograph

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Assyrian Cuneiform inscription. Vatican Museums.

Cuneiform Inscription of Sargon II (Assyrian king of the Neo Assyrian Empire from 721 to 705 B.C.) recovered from the ruins of the inner Court of Sargon`s Palace at Khorsabad.

Cuneiform, one of the earliest systems of writing, was invented by the Sumerians in the late fourth millennium BC. Its alphabet consists of combinations of wedge-shaped marks, made with a blunt reed on clay tablets. The name cuneiform means "wedge shaped".

Emerging in Sumer to convey the Sumerian language, cuneiform began as a system of pictograms, as an evolution from an earlier system of shaped tokens created specifically for accounting.

In the third millennium, the pictorial representations became more simplified and abstract as the number of characters grew smaller (Hittite cuneiform). The system consists of a combination of logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic and syllabic signs.

The original Sumerian script was adapted by Assyrian, Babylonians, Hittites and many other civilizations from the Mesopotamian area.

Cuneiform writing was gradually replaced by the Phoenician alphabet during the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–612 BC) and had become extinct by the second century AD, its last traces being found in Assyria and Babylonia, and all knowledge of how to read it was lost until it began to be deciphered in the 19th century.

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Weston Westmoreland

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April 2nd, 2019

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