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Cuneiform Vs Hieroglyphics

Decent Essays

Cuneiform and hieroglyphics were both writing systems that emerged at the dawn of humanity, but their legacy and impact were vastly different. The two systems not only demonstrate the early concept of writing but show contrasting elements of civilization in globalism vs nationalism, internal vs external, connection vs isolation. The two systems certainly diverged from one another, but to understand this, the origins of the two writing systems must be examined. Around the dawn of civilization, in the last half of the third millennium, abstract symbols (meaning letters, numbers, and other things that represent abstract thought) started to form from proto-writing that had been present for millennia in the Nile valley before the first abstract …show more content…

Like hieroglyphs, the exact time that cuneiform changed from pictograms (rough illustration of physical things) and nonlinguistic symbols to a full-fledged script are unclear. The lead up to the mature system spanned almost 400 years, with some early “proto-cuneiform” being unearthed in the ancient city of Kish. Most of the cuneiform documents, early and later, were merely administrative and financial documents, and said things such as “two sheep for a bundle of sticks” and “one goat for three chickens.” Many of these documents showed the workings of a primitive barter economy. Cuneiform was much more advanced than its contemporaries such as hieroglyphics, or Chinese oracle bone script. By the year 2600 BCE cuneiform was a syllabary, meaning that each symbol represented a syllable. With this system, any word could be read without prior knowledge of logographs (like in hieroglyphs), and words could be written with one or two characters. It was easily more efficient and easier to read, or at least when it was written in the Sumerian language. Cuneiform was adopted by the Akkadians who lived in the city of Akkad up the Tigris from Sumer (or possible the Euphrates, its exact location is unknown.) When the Akkadians started to write in cuneiform they, for the most part, spelled their words in Akkadian, but because Akkadian and Sumerian were such different languages, the Akkadians spelled some of their …show more content…

But it is undeniable that hieroglyphics had more influence on history than cuneiform did, in spite of the fact that cuneiform was more advanced for its time. This is the first way that these systems contrast; sophistication. Cuneiform was a more advanced system than hieroglyphics simply because cuneiform was more abstract and it was far quicker to write Sumerian with it. Hieroglyphics was, for much of its existence, a logographic system, making it in some ways closer to drawing than to abstract writing such as cuneiform. However, in the Neolithic times, sophistication had an inverse relationship with influence, that is to say, that less advanced writing systems had more influence and clout with other cultures. This may have been because it is hard to teach an illiterate culture who may adopt a writing system, a complex, writing scheme, or a system that doesn’t work in their language. Or, it may because the more advanced a writing system is, the fewer people in your culture understand how to use it. This can be seen with cuneiform and hieroglyphics in a very stark way. Not many cultures used cuneiform, and when they did it worked poorly with the language it was being used in, while hieroglyphs informed many other writing systems, such as Hebrew, Greek, and Phoenician; it cannot be understated the

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