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
An (cuneiform) Babylonian history (and Sumerian): An (cuneiform) The cuneiform an sign, (or sumerogram AN), is a common, multi-use sign, a syllabic for "an", and an alphabetic sign used for "a", or "n"; it is common in both the "Epic of Gilgamesh" over hundreds of years, and the 1350 BC Amarna letters, and other cuneiform texts. It is also used for the designation of a "god", and is sometimes represented as a superscript: , or capitalized: , for "dingir", English language, "god". The example photo at right shows (2nd list), a list of 14 named gods, all with "an"; the first pair