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
Elamite cuneiform and Indo-European languages. Scholars fiercely argue over several hypotheses about its origin, but have no definite theory. Elamite cuneiform comes in two variants, the first, derived from Akkadian, was used during the 3rd to 2nd millennia BCE, and a simplified form used during the 1st millennium BCE. The main difference between the two variants is the reduction of glyphs used in the simplified version. At any one time, there would only be around 130 cuneiform signs in use. Throughout the script’s history, only 206 different signs were used in total. The earliest known Elamite cuneiform text is a treaty between