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
Ma (cuneiform) Ma (cuneiform) The cuneiform ma sign, is found in both the 14th century BC Amarna letters and the "Epic of Gilgamesh". In the Epic it is also used as the sumerogram MA, (for Akkadian language "mina", "manû", a weight measure, as MA.NA, or MA.NA.ÀM). The usage of cuneiform "ma" in the "Epic of Gilgamesh", is only exceeded by the usage of a (cuneiform) (1369 times, and 58, A (sumerogram), versus 1047 times for "ma", 6 for MA (sumerogram)). The high usage for "a" is partially a result of the prepositional use for "a-na"-(Akkadian "ana", "to, for", etc.); ""i"", also has