Cuneiform to left-to-right in horizontal rows (rotating all of the pictographs 90° counter-clockwise in the process) and a new wedge-tipped stylus was introduced which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped ("cuneiform") signs; these two developments made writing quicker and easier. By adjusting the relative position of the tablet to the stylus, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions. Cuneiform tablets could be fired in kilns to bake them hard, and so provide a permanent record, or they could be left moist and recycled, if permanence was not needed. Many of the clay tablets found
Early Dynastic Cuneiform Early Dynastic Cuneiform Early Dynastic Cuneiform is the name of a Unicode block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP), at U+12480–U+1254F, introduced in version 8.0 (June 2015). It is a supplement to the earlier encoding of the cuneiform script in the two blocks U+12000–U+123FF "Cuneiform" and U+12400–U+1247F "Cuneiform Numbers and Punctuation". "Early Dynastic Cuneiform" is designed to provide cuneiform signs used during one of the earliest phases of cuneiform writing, the Early Dynastic Period (c. 2900–2350 BC), also known as archaic cuneiform, but discontinued in the Ur III period. The original Cuneiform block, introduced in version 5.0 (July 2006) is