What was cuneiform used for in mesopotamia

The Library of Ashurbanipal is the oldest surviving royal library in the world. British Museum archaeologists discovered more than 30, cuneiform tablets and fragments at his capital, Nineveh modern Kuyunjik. Alongside historical inscriptions, letters, administrative and legal texts, were found thousands of divinatory, magical, medical, literary and lexical texts.

This treasure-house of learning has held unparalleled importance to the modern study of the ancient Near East ever since the first fragments were excavated in the s. The best known piece of literature from ancient Mesopotamia is the story of Gilgamesh, a legendary ruler of Uruk, and his search for immortality. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a huge work, the longest piece of literature in Akkadian the language of Babylonia and Assyria. This, the eleventh tablet of the Epic, describes the meeting of Gilgamesh with Utnapishtim.

Like Noah in the Hebrew Bible, Utnapishtim had been forewarned of a plan by the gods to send a great flood. He built a boat and loaded it with all his precious possessions, his kith and kin, domesticated and wild animals and skilled craftsmen of every kind.

Utnapishtim survived the flood for six days while mankind was destroyed, before landing on a mountain called Nimush. He released a dove and a swallow but they did not find dry land to rest on, and returned. Finally a raven that he released did not return, showing that the waters must have receded. This Assyrian version of the Old Testament flood story is the most famous cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia.

On reading the text he … jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself. Map of the World , Babylonian, c. This tablet contains both a cuneiform inscription and a unique map of the Mesopotamian world.

Babylon is shown in the center the rectangle in the top half of the circle , and Assyria, Elam and other places are also named. The cuneiform text describes these regions, and it seems that strange and mythical beasts as well as great heroes lived there, although the text is far from complete.

The regions are shown as triangles since that was how it was visualized that they first would look when approached by water. The map is sometimes taken as a serious example of ancient geography, but although the places are shown in their approximately correct positions, the real purpose of the map is to explain the Babylonian view of the mythological world.

Thanks to Assyrian records, the chronology of Mesopotamia is relatively clear back to around B. During the 2nd millennium BC, Babylonian was adopted all over the Near East as the language of scholarship, administration, commerce and diplomacy. Later in the 1st millennium BC it was gradually replaced by Aramaic , which is still spoken in some parts of the Middle East today. Babylonian was deciphered in the mid nineteenth century.

As there was controversy over whether the decipherment had been achieved or not, in the Royal Asiatic Society sent drawings of the same inscription to four different scholars, who were to translate without consulting one another.

A committee including no less than the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral was set up to compare the translations.

The committee's report, available here , is still fascinating reading after over years. Several websites give original texts and English translations: Sources of Early Akkadian Literature , the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature not always reliable on a word-by-word basis, but excellent for an overview ,. John Huehnergard, A Grammar of Akkadian 3rd ed. The first edition is accessible here. The International Association for Assyriology. The British Institute for the Study of Iraq.

Undergraduates in the Department of Archaeology can study Babylonian in all three years, and Sumerian and Assyrian in their third year. MPhil students can study Babylonian at introductory or advanced level, and also Sumerian normally only if they already have some Babylonian. After the introductory level it may also be possible to study Assyrian.

In the next stage of development, pictographs simple pictures of an object were drawn into wet clay, and these images replaced the tokens. Scribes no longer drew four sheep pictographs to represent four sheep.

Instead, the numeral for four was written beside one sheep pictograph. Through this process writing was becoming disentangled from direct depiction. More complicated number systems began to develop. The pictographic symbols were refined into the writing system known as cuneiform. Eventually, writing became phonetic as well as representational. Once the writing system had moved from being pictographic to phonetic writing could communicate abstractions more effectively: names, words, and ideas.

With cuneiform, writers could tell stories, relate histories, and support the rule of kings. Cuneiform was used to record literature such as the Epic of Gilgamesh—the oldest epic still known. Explain points of agreement experts have about interpretations and applications of disciplinary concepts and ideas associated with a compelling question. Explain how changes in transportation and communication technology influence the spatial connections among human settlements and affect the diffusion of ideas and cultural practices.

Analyze connections among events and developments in broader historical contexts. Use questions generated about individuals and groups to analyze why they, and the developments they shaped, are seen as historically significant.

Identify evidence that draws information from multiple sources to support claims, noting evidentiary limitations. This Crash Course World History video on Mesopotamia provides a quick, but comprehensive background to get students ready to investigate the materials and activities provided below. This first activity will introduce students to the part of the world where writing first developed- the area once called Mesopotamia, which was located in what is today the country of Iraq.

The earliest cities known today arose in Mesopotamia, an area that is part of what is sometimes called the Fertile Crescent. Then use the Geography: Explore feature to investigate a variety of maps of the region by choosing them from the pull down menu. In this activity students will be introduced to the time period in which the first writing developed, and the major events which coincided with this development in ancient Mesopotamia.

The National Geographic. Note that the timeline covers an extended period, not all of which will be covered in detail in this lesson. This activity will give students who have not had readings about the history of the Middle East, and specifically about Mesopotamia, the opportunity to gain some contextual understanding of the development of cuneiform writing. For students who have had the opportunity to learn about Mesopotamia this exercise will remind them of some of the major events in the history of the area.

If practical you may wish to project the timeline onto a screen or redraw the timeline on the board. As a class, look through the labels. Divide the class into small groups of three or four and assign each group one of the labels.

These timelines of key events can be used by students to determine where each label should be placed and to indicate when certain innovations became important. Note: Cuneiform continued to be used in Mesopotamia well into the first millennium BCE, however, as this lesson is concentrating on the early development of the writing system the timeline in this activity will end before cuneiform writing ceased to be used.

Moving in chronological order, place the labels on the timeline. Each group should work together to provide any additional information about the development that was in the event summary. Challenge students to put together a simple narrative of developments in the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley based on the events in the timeline.

What developments in the civilization would have been facilitated by or even require a system of writing? In this activity students will begin to think about the development and urbanization of Mesopotamian civilization by thinking about the kinds of occupations that developed over time. Students will also begin to think about the relationship between the evolution of civilization in Mesopotamia and how writing enhanced its development. Students have probably already studied in their classes about the shift of human societies from the nomadic pursuit of game and wild vegetation, to settled cultivation, and eventually towards settled villages, towns, and cities.

As societies became, first, more settled as farmers, and then in certain places more urbanized as some populations became townsfolk, what kinds of new tasks and jobs would need to be done? Ask students to return to their timeline worksheets. Based on what students learned from the timeline activity, what do they think are some jobs that probably existed in ancient Mesopotamia: Farmer?

Divide the class into small groups and have each group work together to create a list of jobs they believe might have existed in ancient Mesopotamia. Ask each group to contribute one job to a running list that will be written on the board.

You may wish to go around the room two or three times. You can download a list of some occupations which were part of life in ancient Mesopotamia. This is not a comprehensive list, but it will give your class an idea of what life in ancient Mesopotamia was like.

You can use this list as a point of comparison with the list that the class has compiled. Students may be surprised to discover which occupations were and were not part of life in ancient Mesopotamia. Cuneiform as a robust writing tradition endured 3, years. The script—not itself a language—was used by scribes of multiple cultures over that time to write a number of languages other than Sumerian, most notably Akkadian, a Semitic language that was the lingua franca of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires.

After cuneiform was replaced by alphabetic writing sometime after the first century A. One important early key to deciphering the script proved to be the discovery of a kind of cuneiform Rosetta Stone, a circa B. Written in Persian, Akkadian, and an Iranian language known as Elamite, it recorded the feats of the Achaemenid king Darius the Great r.

Called Assyriologists, these specialists were eventually able to translate different languages written in cuneiform across many eras, though some early versions of the script remain undeciphered.