Which civilization used cuneiform writing

The round tablets are from 7 cm. All of the school exercise tablets in this collection are round. Scribes distinguished these tablets from an official record, which were almost always square or rectangular. Coloration of the clay materials varies from light to dark. Many of the tablets are inscribed on both front and back; two also are inscribed on the side.

The styles of inscription vary with the content or function of the tablet. A few tablets have relief impressions of figures of deities and royal persons made by cylinder seals. Seals were often affixed to transactions that required authorization—for example on records, envelopes, and storerooms.

School Exercise Tablets The student tablets are recognizable by their roundness, deliberately made so by scribes in order not to confuse them with other tablets, which were almost always square or rectangular.

The Library has twelve such tablets; nine are inscribed on both sides. All student tablets were unfired as the intention was to reuse the same tablet. The teacher in the scribal school edubba typically inscribed the lesson, three words or a short sentence, on one side of the tablet, and the student copied and recopied it onto the other side until memorized correctly.

Votive and Commemorative Inscription Tablets This collection contains two votive religious tablets and one commemorative inscription tablet. The two votive inscription tablets are from the period of Gudea of Lagash B. One tablet is a plaque, the other a cone inscription. The above video is an excerpt from the film The Cyrus Cylinder and provides an overview of the origins of cuneiform. In addition to the historical basis for these activities, this lesson is also about the nature of written language, how it evolves and how it serves civilization.

Ask the students the purposes of writing in the world today. You may wish to have them discuss questions such as:. Next, ask them to imagine that in an instant all knowledge of alphabetic writing disappeared.

Only the drawing of simple pictures remained as the means of written communication. Have the class brainstorm: What would be some of the most essential things for which you would need signs? Which objects, concepts and ideas are the ones you would make sure were standardized and learned right away? Review the list of essential signs that the class has compiled.

Have students create a few of them and draw them on the board. Discuss examples of messages relatively easy to communicate with pictographs and others that would be more difficult. Writing in ancient Mesopotamia arose from necessity—specifically, the need to keep records. Gradually, civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley became more urbanized. Eventually, a number of complex systems developed: political, military, religious, legal, and commercial.

Writing developed as well, becoming essential to those systems. Did writing enable those complex systems to arise or did complex systems create the need for a more sophisticated system of writing? Ask students to recall a time they started to do a task and then realized at some point that they should have been writing things down? For example, they might imagine organizing a collection of trading cards by writing down categories.

Did writing change the way they approached the task? For example, they might think of deciding to make lists of the cards by category. Ask students to think about the following questions as they track the evolution of civilization and writing in ancient Mesopotamia:. How is it used?

What does it look like in its natural state? You may wish to sketch barley on the board, or show a photograph of barley, such as this photograph. Barley was a very important crop in ancient Mesopotamia. The first Mesopotamian written representation of barley was a picture. Ask students to think about and discuss the following questions:. Next, navigate with the class, or have students navigate on their own, through The Story of Writing website.

Each page contains information on the history and development of the cuneiform character for the word "barley" over time. Students should complete the quiz Treasure Hunt: Bowling for Barley. Have students answer the following questions in class discussion. For larger classes you may wish to divide the class into small groups and have each group work on answering one of the following questions, which they should share with the rest of the class.

In this activity students will be challenged to make hypotheses about civilization in ancient Mesopotamia. It will be helpful for students to return to the timelines they created in the second activity as a reference point while completing this exercise.

To help them understand the task they will be completing in this activity, begin by asking students to look at one contemporary object on which writing is found, such as a penny. They should imagine they are from the distant future. They know the English language, but they know little else about America in the 21st century. What hypotheses can they make from a penny? The members of this unknown civilization. Cuneiform writing was understood before we knew much about civilization in Ancient Mesopotamia.

How did that happen? In what is now Iran, there is an inscription carved high on a rock face with the same message in three different languages. One is in Persian the language that is still used in Iran today and another is Assyrian cuneiform from Mesopotamia. In , an Englishman—Sir Henry Rawlinson—copied the inscriptions from that rock.

Once he had translated the Persian, he was able to use the Persian as a key to decipher the cuneiform. As a result, people were able, for the first time, to read the writing on clay tablets found in the vicinity of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Ask students to think about the previous lesson in which they learned about how the use of writing might have evolved in Mesopotamia. The first writing recorded agricultural transactions.

What kinds of thoughts, ideas, actions, or things were easiest to put into pictures? What kinds of things did they believe were the most necessary to keep a record of? After thinking about both of these questions ask students to try to imagine why it is that agricultural transactions—the buying and selling of grains or livestock- were among the first written messages on earth.

Next, students should think about what kind of an effect this type of record keeping might have on the rest of society. If there is a record of who bought what kind of grain, how much they bought, and from whom, what else becomes possible? For example, authorities expecting to take a portion of the revenue from taxes might be interested in having a record of the financial transactions which took place. Now instead of trying to guess how much they should tax someone they had a record of how much the transaction was worth.

Having a written record of those transactions would make the collection of taxes both more exact and more efficient. You may wish to begin by working through the model below. For beginning students you may wish to design an additional model in order to make the process explicit to your students. Next, divide the class into small groups of two or three and assign each group of students an artifact from ancient Mesopotamia from the list below.

Then, each group will present its hypotheses about what the object can tell us today about life in ancient Mesopotamia. Presentation to the class will proceed in chronological order, and should try to answer the following questions:. Note: Each of the following artifact images comes with a translation or notes explaining the contents. Instead it used between and 1, characters to write words or parts of them or syllables or parts of them.

The two main languages written in Cuneiform are Sumerian and Akkadian from ancient Iraq , although more than a dozen others are recorded. This means we could use it equally well today to spell Chinese, Hungarian or English.

The first stage used elementary pictures that were soon also used to record sounds. Amazingly, cuneiform continued to be used until the first century AD, meaning that the distance in time that separates us from the latest surviving cuneiform tablet is only just over half of that which separates that tablet from the first cuneiform.

Both of which were freely available in the rivers alongside the Mesopotamian cities where cuneiform was used now Iraq and eastern Syria. It refers to the shape made each time a scribe pressed his stylus made from a specially cut reed into the clay.