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
Ne (cuneiform) actual 'letters'.) The ne (cuneiform) sign has the following uses, besides "ne", in the "Epic of Gilgamesh": The sign is a "two-part" compound sign. The center and left is the sign for "[[am (cuneiform)]]", and the right is the sign for "[[is (cuneiform)]]", [[Image:Sumer gis.jpg|100x24px]], (and listed as [[Giš (cuneiform)]], cuneiform "GIŠ" (the "is" sign) being the use for [[GIŠ (wood Sumerogram)]]). The specific usage numbers for the sign's meaning in the "Epic of Gilgamesh" is as follows: "bil"-(9), "kúm"-(5), "ne"-(1), "pil"-(2), "ṭè"-(13), "BIL"-(3), "NE"-(1). In the Amarna letters, the sign is used for spelling "qabû" in the introduction for