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
Tur (cuneiform) Tur (cuneiform) The cuneiform sign for tur, is used to denote one syllabic usage, "tur", or the sign's sumerograms; it is used in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the 14th century BC Amarna letters. The sign is based on the i (cuneiform) sign, with the one small added vertical stroke. Besides "tur", it is for sumerograms (logograms) BÀN, DUMU, and TUR. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is used in the following numbers: "tur"-(11 times), "BÀN"-(3), "DUMU"-(25), "TUR"-(2). The large usage of "DUMU" in the Epic is for the sumerogram being the equivalent of "son", Akkadian language "māru". In the