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
Ab (cuneiform) AB, Akkadian language for "šību", "elder". In the corpus of the Amarna letters, which is another common use place for 'ab/ap', the name of some of the authors of letters to the Pharaoh, are for example Labaya, and Ayyab. In both cases the use is syllabic for "ab". The usage numbers for the "ab" cuneiform sign in the twelve, Tablets I-XII, of the "Epic of Gilgamesh", are as follows: ab-(11), ap-(28), and sumerogram AB-(12); for "šību", Akkadian language for "elder", only two spellings use "AB"; six other spelliings of "šību" are syllabic/alphabetic. Ab (cuneiform) The cuneiform ab, and ap sign,