Cuneiform Cuneiform Cuneiform or Sumerian cuneiform, one of the earliest systems of writing, was invented by the Sumerians. It is distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, made by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. The name "cuneiform" itself simply means "wedge shaped". Emerging in Sumer in the late fourth millennium BC (the Uruk IV period) to convey the Sumerian language, which was a language isolate, cuneiform writing began as a system of pictograms, stemming from an earlier system of shaped tokens used for accounting. In the third millennium, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract as
Cuneiform (Unicode block) there are signs written as ligatures of varying constituent signs, such as KURUM (Borger 2003 no. 729) that was written IGI.NÍG in early times, but later IGI.ERIM. Since there is no code point for KURUM, the sign must be expressed as either IGI.NÍG (U+12146 U+1243C, ) or IGI.ERIM (U+12146 U+1209F, ) depending on the shape of the glyph, in violation of the basic principle of Unicode to encode characters, not glyphs. While those signs can in principle still be added by a "Cuneiform Extended" range in the future, as has been done for a number of other scripts ("Latin Extended"