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
A (cuneiform) A (cuneiform) The cuneiform sign for a, and in the "Epic of Gilgamesh" the sumerogram A, Akkadian for "mû", "water", which is used in the "Gilgamesh flood myth", Chapter XI of the Epic, or other passages. The sign is also used extensively in the Amarna letters. Cuneiform "a" is the most common of the 4-vowels in the Akkadian language, "a", "e", "i", and "u". All vowels can be interchangeable, depending on the scribe, though spellings of Akkadian words in dictionaries, will be formalized, and typically: unstressed, a 'long-vowel', or thirdly, a 'combined' vowel (often spelled with two signs (same vowel,