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Course: Ancient Mediterranean + Europe > Unit 2
Lesson 1: The Ancient Near East, an introductionWriting Cuneiform
Excerpt from the film The Cyrus Cylinder.
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How did historians know how each combination of strokes is pronounced when this is a long gone language?(15 votes)
Probably thanks to the many languages that used Cuneiform. I guess not all of them are dead and because every Cuneiform-symbol represents a sound you can "translate" the sounds between different languages that use Cuneiform.(12 votes)
What is the origin of the word "Semetic"? I am pretty sure it refers to the middle east, but where does it come from?(9 votes)
The word ultimately derives from the Hebrew "Shem", which was the name of Noa's eldest son (see Genesis). "Shem" turned into "Sem" in Latin. The corresponding Latin adjective was "semiticus", and from there it was only a short distance to the English "Semitic". Source: Oxford English Dictionary (sadly not available online).(18 votes)
How was the cunieform decifered ?(4 votes)
Okay, this does answer the question;
to add to the inquiry is there anything that can show us how decipherment is done so that transliteration followed by translation may be attempted by an individual researcher such as myself?(1 vote)
So instead of letter by letter it was more the sounds that were made while writing ?(1 vote)
Cuneiform passes through multiple developmental phases. At its origin in the 4th millennium BCE the language was pictographic (=a pictorial symbol stood for an object or idea). Over time it became more abstracted by simplifying and then abstracting the pictograms. Early on cuneiform employed ca. 1,000 characters, but by the Late Bronze Age (end of the 2nd millennium BCE) it only employed about 400.(5 votes)
Why did they have both base 10 and base 60 once it got past 60? Why not just keep the base 60 since base 60 is very efficient if you consider the number of digits compared to the same thing in base 10?(3 votes)- Some numbers or situations are easier to deal with in base 60 versus base 10, so they may have chosen to use one system or the other based on convenience. To this day, we still use base 60 for time and degrees of a circle because we have found it to be more convenient in those cases.(1 vote)
How did they make the tools to write the words? And what did they use to make the writing surface? Also what is the process of making the writing surface?(3 votes)
looking at the video, I noted that the tool for writing was a smooth stick with a tapered end. You could make one of those by rubbing a piece of wood against a rock. The writing surface, it was noted in the video, was clay that was "nearly dry". I suppose one would make that by digging up clay from a riverbank, kneading it to get the impurities and bubbles out, then making it into cylinders, slabs and other shapes and laying them out to get "nearly dry" before writing on them.
That's kind of what I got from the video. What did YOU get?(1 vote)
- why did the sumerians call cuneiform cuneiform(3 votes)
How do you know all these stuff when I researched it and I couldn't find it(1 vote)- They researched and put all the information together(4 votes)
Was cuneiform invented by the sumerians(2 votes)- How do historians know whether they deciphered the cuneiform correctly? Or are they not certain what is truly written in cuneiform and are just merely guessing?(2 votes)
Video transcript
- Because the Cyrus Cylinder
was meant for a Babylonian audience, it was written
in the Babylonian language, which is a Semitic tongue
related to the modern languages of Hebrew and Arabic and Aramaic. The writing system which
Cyrus' officials used was the traditional cuneiform
script which had been invented in ancient Iraq well before
3,000 B.C., which is written by pressing a stylus, something
a bit like a chopstick, into the surface of the
clay which is nearly dry and the signs which convey
the sound of the language consist of different
arrangements of these strokes. They are written one by one,
and the reader has to join them up and the sound emerges from the clay. This is the line that says,
"I am Kurash (mumbling) "King of the World, the
Great King, King of Babylon," and so it goes on. So we begin to write
Kurash, so the first sign Ku has the big vertical,
two small horizontals, one bigger horizontal, a
little vertical, and another horizontal like a box, this is Ku. Then Ra, we have three
strong horizontals to begin, one big one next to it, and
then one little vertical wedge and one bigger vertical wedge, Ku, Ra. Now we do Ash, which is three
long horizontals comme ça and then a vertical in the middle. So we can read this, Ku
Ra Ash, the name of Cyrus. (lively music)