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
Ib (cuneiform) "eb"--(4) times, "ep"--(9), "ib"--(114), "ip"--(45), and "URTA"--(4) times. The cuneiform "ib" cuneiform character (no. 535) is built in a 'rectangular box form', sitting upon a long horizontal stroke. It contains the 2-verticals at right and 1-vertical at left. Three other signs are similarly built, cuneiform "ur" is the mirror image of "ib"/"ip", but with the two verticals at left. The "lu (cuneiform)" sign is identical to "ib", but instead of 1-short vertical in the center, "lu" contains 3-short verticals in the center. Another sign is similar to "lu", but has only 1-vertical, left and right, ku (cuneiform), and the Amarna