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
An (cuneiform) or UTU, refers to the "sun-god", using Ud (cuneiform), as the sumerogram, namely UTU (sun Sumerogram). Cuneiform "an" can also be found in compound form with another cuneiform sign, an example being DAGAL, . The older version of DAGAL used the 'god symbol' as a star within the sign: ; (older version of DAGAL, incorporating "star": ). In the "Epic of Gilgamesh", Tablets I-XII, ""an"" is used for the following meanings by the following numbers: an-(120) times, -(593), AN-(27), and DINGIR-(76) times. From Budge's revised book on "Babylonian Life and History," a list of many of the major gods from