Cuneiform to left-to-right in horizontal rows (rotating all of the pictographs 90° counter-clockwise in the process) and a new wedge-tipped stylus was introduced which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped ("cuneiform") signs; these two developments made writing quicker and easier. By adjusting the relative position of the tablet to the stylus, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions. Cuneiform tablets could be fired in kilns to bake them hard, and so provide a permanent record, or they could be left moist and recycled, if permanence was not needed. Many of the clay tablets found
Cuneiform (Unicode block) there are signs written as ligatures of varying constituent signs, such as KURUM (Borger 2003 no. 729) that was written IGI.NÍG in early times, but later IGI.ERIM. Since there is no code point for KURUM, the sign must be expressed as either IGI.NÍG (U+12146 U+1243C, ) or IGI.ERIM (U+12146 U+1209F, ) depending on the shape of the glyph, in violation of the basic principle of Unicode to encode characters, not glyphs. While those signs can in principle still be added by a "Cuneiform Extended" range in the future, as has been done for a number of other scripts ("Latin Extended"