What is Sumerian writing like?

Even experts find it difficult to understand Sumerian writing. Especially the early Sumerian characters are very difficult, because they usually do not contain all the grammatical structures that modern people are familiar with or familiar with. Both the Euphrates River and the Tigris River originate from the Armenian Plateau in West Asia.

Around 4000 BC, there were early residents here, namely Sumerians. They created a splendid Sumerian civilization, and what can reflect the characteristics of this civilization is their writing, that is, cuneiform writing. At first, this kind of writing was a kind of picture writing, and gradually developed into an ideographic writing in Sumerian, which combined one or several symbols to express a new meaning. For example, "mouth" means the action of "speaking"; Use symbols representing "eyes" and "water" to express "crying" and so on. With the popularization of writing, Sumerians simply used a symbol to represent a sound. For example, "arrow" and "life" are the same sound in Sumerian, so they are represented by the same symbol "arrow". Later, some restrictive radical symbols were added, such as putting an "inverted triangle" in front of a person's name to indicate that it is a man's name. In this way, the writing system is basically completed.

Sumerians used reed poles, bone sticks and wooden sticks with triangular tips as pens to write on clay tablets made of wet clay, and the fonts naturally formed cuneiform, so this kind of writing was called cuneiform by later generations.

In order to preserve clay chips for a long time, it is necessary to dry them before firing. This kind of fired clay tablet document is not afraid of moth-eaten, nor will it rot, and it can withstand fire. But the fly in the ointment is that the clay tablets are very heavy, each weighing about 1000 grams, and it is difficult to move around every time you look at one. Up to now, there are millions of clay tablets unearthed, the largest of which is 2.7 meters long and 1.95 meters wide, which can be described as giant books.

Cuneiform writing is the original creation of Sumerian civilization, which can reflect the characteristics of Sumerian civilization. Cuneiform writing has had an important influence on the formation and development of many national languages in West Asia.

Babylonia, Assyria, Hittites, Syria and other countries in West Asia used cuneiform as their writing tools after a slight modification. Even the letters created by Phoenicians had cuneiform elements. Cuneiform is an early script in the world, but due to its extreme complexity, it was completely extinct in 1 century.