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) , connected (ligatured, attached to "a")-, ligatured to cuneiform "a" is the ia (cuneiform)--. It has usages in the Akkadian language for words starting with "ia", for example "iā'u", (English "mine"), "iāši", (English "(to) me"), and "iāti", (English "me"). In the Amarna letters "ia" is also used as a suffix: -ia, for example Amarna letter EA 325, ""To King (Pharaoh)-Lord-mine" (-ia), "God-mine", "Sun-God-mine", ..." ("A-na Lugal-bēlu-ia, An-meš-ia, An-UTU-ia, ...") The Amarna letter usage of cuneiform "a" has the same high usage for Akkadian language "ana" (a-na) as does the "Epic of Gilgamesh". Two other high usages for "a" and typical