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
Pa (cuneiform) Pa (cuneiform) The cuneiform pa sign, (as sumerogram, PA), has many uses in both the 14th century BC Amarna letters and the "Epic of Gilgamesh". It is routinely and commonly used to spell the Akkadian language word "pānu", "face, presence", and with a preposition (ex. ana pānu), "before". In the photo of the obverse of EA 364, it is used to spell Akkadian "eperu", 'dust', (EA 364, lines 7,8: "...and (ù dust (IŠ (sumerogram)=dust)) and (u)\ dust "-(a-pa-ru). (The two ""and""-s are u-(no. 3), then u-(no. 1)-(u (cuneiform))(the bottom half).) The alphabetic/syllabic uses and sumerograms of the 'pa' sign from