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95-511: The Murašû Archive is a collection of cuneiform tablets, excavated between 1888 and 1900, from the ruins of Nippur in central Babylonia . Named after the chief member of a single family, the Murašû Archive is a collection of business records that spans four generations. Assembled during the reigns of the Persian kings Artaxerxes I , Darius II , and Artaxerxes II , the Murašû Archive provides

190-517: A d in word final position can be dropped, and an s may be added between two dental consonants and so *ad-tuwari becomes aztuwari ('you all eat') ( ds and z are phonetically identical). There were two grammatical genders : animate and inanimate/neuter. There are two grammatical numbers : singular and plural. Some animate nouns could also take a collective plural in addition to the regular numerical plural. Luwian had six cases : The vocative case occurs rarely in surviving texts and only in

285-401: A completely unknown writing system in 19th-century Assyriology . It was successfully deciphered by 1857. The cuneiform script changed considerably over more than 2,000 years. The image below shows the development of the sign SAĜ "head" (Borger nr. 184, U+12295 𒊕 ). Stages: The cuneiform script was developed from pictographic proto-writing in the late 4th millennium BC, stemming from

380-550: A given sign could have various meanings depending on context. The sign inventory was reduced from some 1,500 signs to some 600 signs, and writing became increasingly phonological . Determinative signs were re-introduced to avoid ambiguity. Cuneiform writing proper thus arises from the more primitive system of pictographs at about that time, labeled the Early Bronze Age II epoch by historians. The earliest known Sumerian king, whose name appears on contemporary cuneiform tablets,

475-577: A language structure typical of the non-Indo-European agglutinative Sumerian language . The first tablets using syllabic elements date to the Early Dynastic I–II periods c.  2800 BC , and they are agreed to be clearly in Sumerian. This is the time when some pictographic element started to be used for their phonetic value, permitting the recording of abstract ideas or personal names. Many pictographs began to lose their original function, and

570-490: A logogram, a determinative or a syllabogram , or a combination thereof. The signs are numbered according to Laroche's sign list, with a prefix of 'L.' or '*'. Logograms are transcribed in Latin in capital letters. For example, *90, an image of a foot, is transcribed as PES when used logographically, and with its phonemic value ti when used as a syllabogram. In the rare cases where the logogram cannot be transliterated into Latin, it

665-641: A phonetic complement. Yet even in those days, the Babylonian syllabary remained a mixture of logographic and phonemic writing. Elamite cuneiform was a simplified form of the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, used to write the Elamite language in the area that corresponds to modern Iran from the 3rd millennium BC to the 4th century BC. Elamite cuneiform at times competed with other local scripts, Proto-Elamite and Linear Elamite . The earliest known Elamite cuneiform text

760-432: A pointed stylus, sometimes called "linear cuneiform". Many of the early dynastic inscriptions, particularly those made on stone, continued to use the linear style as late as circa 2000 BC. In the mid-3rd millennium BC, a new wedge-tipped stylus was introduced which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped cuneiform. This development made writing quicker and easier, especially when writing on soft clay. By adjusting

855-477: A resemblance to Old Japanese , written in a Chinese-derived script, where some of these Sinograms were used as logograms and others as phonetic characters. This "mixed" method of writing continued through the end of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, although there were periods when "purism" was in fashion and there was a more marked tendency to spell out the words laboriously, in preference to using signs with

950-441: A set symbolic value) are rare. Instead, most writing is done with the syllabic characters, where a single symbol stands for a vowel, or a consonant-vowel pair (either VC or CV). A striking feature is the consistent use of 'full-writing' to indicate long vowels, even at the beginning of words. In this system a long vowel is indicated by writing it twice. For example, īdi "he goes" is written i-i-ti rather than i-ti , and ānda "in"

1045-548: A sharpened reed stylus or incised in stone. This early style lacked the characteristic wedge shape of the strokes. Most Proto-Cuneiform records from this period were of an accounting nature. The proto-cuneiform sign list has grown, as new texts are discovered, and shrunk, as variant signs are combined. The current sign list is 705 elements long with 42 being numeric and four considered pre-proto-Elamite. Certain signs to indicate names of gods, countries, cities, vessels, birds, trees, etc., are known as determinatives and were

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1140-559: A slightly different way. From the 6th century, the Akkadian language was marginalized by Aramaic , written in the Aramaic alphabet , but Akkadian cuneiform remained in use in the literary tradition well into the times of the Parthian Empire (250 BC–226 AD). The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in 75 AD. The ability to read cuneiform may have persisted until

1235-607: A stylus. Writing is first recorded in Uruk , at the end of the 4th millennium BC, and soon after in various parts of the Near-East . An ancient Mesopotamian poem gives the first known story of the invention of writing : Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat [the message], the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay. The cuneiform writing system

1330-428: Is Enmebaragesi of Kish (fl. c.  2600 BC ). Surviving records became less fragmentary for following reigns and by the arrival of Sargon, it had become standard practice for each major city-state to date documents by year-names, commemorating the exploits of its king. Geoffrey Sampson stated that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script , and, probably, [were] invented under

1425-445: Is subject-object-verb , but words can be moved to the front of the sentence for stress or to start a clause. Relative clauses are normally before the antecedent , but they sometimes follow the antecedent. Dependent words and adjectives are normally before their head word. Enclitic particles are often attached to the first word or conjunction. Various conjunctions with temporal or conditional meaning are used to link clauses. There

1520-494: Is "closely related" to Cuneiform Luwian. Similarly, Alice Mouton and Ilya Yakubovich separate Luwian into two distinct varieties: cuneiform and hieroglyphic – the latter of a more prestigious and elite use. Cuneiform Luwian (or Kizzuwatna Luwian) is the corpus of Luwian texts attested in the tablet archives of Hattusa ; it is essentially the same cuneiform writing system used in Hittite . In Laroche's Catalog of Hittite Texts,

1615-552: Is a treaty between Akkadians and the Elamites that dates back to 2200 BC. Some believe it might have been in use since 2500 BC. The tablets are poorly preserved, so only limited parts can be read, but it is understood that the text is a treaty between the Akkad king Nāramsîn and Elamite ruler Hita , as indicated by frequent references like "Nāramsîn's friend is my friend, Nāramsîn's enemy is my enemy". The most famous Elamite scriptures and

1710-530: Is an adaptation of the Old Assyrian cuneiform of c. 1800 BC to the Hittite language and was used from the 17th until approximately the 13th century BC. More or less the same system was used by the scribes of the Hittite Empire for two other Anatolian languages , namely Luwian (alongside the native Anatolian hieroglyphics ) and Palaic , as well as for the isolate Hattic language . When the cuneiform script

1805-429: Is called gunû or "gunification"; if signs are cross-hatched with additional Winkelhaken , they are called šešig ; if signs are modified by the removal of a wedge or wedges, they are called nutillu . "Typical" signs have about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of twenty or more (although it is not always clear if a ligature should be considered a single sign or two collated, but distinct signs);

1900-411: Is no coordinating conjunction, but main clauses can be coordinated with the enclitic -ha , which is attached to the first word of the following clause. In narratives, clauses are linked by using the prosecutive conjunctions: a- before the first word of the following clause means 'and then', and pā , can be an independent conjunction at the start of a clause and the enclitic -pa indicates contrast or

1995-409: Is now obsolete. The dialect of Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions appears to be either Empire Luwian or its descendant, Iron Age Luwian. The earliest hieroglyphs appear on official and royal seals, dating from the early 2nd millennium BC, but only from the 14th century BC is the unequivocal evidence for a full-fledged writing system. Dutch Hittitologist Willemijn Waal has argued that Luwian Hieroglyphic

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2090-454: Is rendered through its approximate Hittite equivalent, recorded in Italic capitals, e.g. *216 ARHA . The most up-to-date sign list is that of Marazzi (1998). Hawkins, Morpurgo-Davies and Neumann corrected some previous errors about sign values, in particular emending the reading of symbols *376 and *377 from i, ī to zi, za . Some signs are used as reading aid, marking the beginning of a word,

2185-425: Is written a-an-ta rather than an-ta . Hieroglyphic Luwian ( luwili ) is the corpus of Luwian texts written in a native script, known as Anatolian hieroglyphs . It is recorded in official and royal seals and a small number of monumental inscriptions. Once thought to be a variety of the Hittite language , "Hieroglyphic Hittite" was formerly used to refer to the language of the same inscriptions, but this term

2280-565: The Aegean Sea , the possessive suffix was sometimes considered evidence of a shared non-Indo-European language or an Aegean Sprachbund preceding the arrivals of Luwians and Greeks . It is, however, possible to account for the Luwian possessive construction as a result of case attraction in the Indo-European noun phrase. Adjectives agree with nouns in number and gender. Forms for the nominative and

2375-541: The Bronze Age Aegean. These archaisms are often regarded as supporting the view that the Proto-Indo-European language ( PIE ) had three distinct sets of velar consonants : plain velars , palatovelars , and labiovelars . For Melchert, PIE *ḱ → Luwian z (probably [ts] ); *k → k ; and *kʷ → ku (probably [kʷ] ). Luwian has also been enlisted for its verb kalut(t)i(ya)- , which means "make

2470-591: The Hittite Code the geographical term Luwiya is replaced with Arzawa a western Anatolian kingdom corresponding roughly with Mira and the Seha River Land. Therefore, several scholars shared the view that Luwian was spoken—to varying degrees—across a large portion of western Anatolia, including Troy ( Wilusa ), the Seha River Land ( Sēḫa ~ Sēḫariya , i.e., the Greek Hermos river and Kaikos valley), and

2565-460: The Hittite language , Luwian continued to be spoken in the Neo-Hittite states of Syria , such as Milid and Carchemish , as well as in the central Anatolian kingdom of Tabal that flourished in the 8th century BC. A number of scholars in the past attempted to argue for the Luwian homeland in western Anatolia. According to James Mellaart , the earliest Indo-Europeans in northwest Anatolia were

2660-453: The Iron Age (c. 10th to 6th centuries BC), Assyrian cuneiform was further simplified. The characters remained the same as those of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiforms, but the graphic design of each character relied more heavily on wedges and square angles, making them significantly more abstract: Babylonian cuneiform was simplified along similar lines during that period, albeit to a lesser extent and in

2755-588: The Kurgan hypothesis as applicable to Anatolian). However, kaluti need not imply a wheel and so need not have been derived from a PIE word with that meaning. The IE words for a wheel may well have arisen in those other IE languages after the Anatolian split. Luwian was among the languages spoken during the 2nd and 1st millennia BC by groups in central and western Anatolia and northern Syria . The earliest Luwian texts in cuneiform transmission are attested in connection with

2850-705: The Mira-Kuwaliya kingdom with its core being the Maeander valley. In a number of recent publications, however, the geographic identity between Luwiya and Arzawa was rejected or doubted. In the post-Hittite era, the region of Arzawa came to be known as Lydia (Assyrian Luddu , Greek Λυδία), where the Lydian language was in use. The name Lydia has been derived from the name Luwiya (Lydian * lūda - < * luw(i)da - < luwiya -, with regular Lydian sound change y > d ). The Lydian language , however, cannot be regarded as

2945-729: The Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin , the Louvre , the Istanbul Archaeology Museums , the National Museum of Iraq , the Yale Babylonian Collection (approx. 40,000), and Penn Museum . Most of these have "lain in these collections for a century without being translated, studied or published", as there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world. The decipherment of cuneiform began with

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3040-520: The Winkelhaken impressed vertically by the tip of the stylus. The signs exemplary of these basic wedges are: Except for the Winkelhaken , which has no tail, the length of the wedges' tails could vary as required for sign composition. Signs tilted by about 45 degrees are called tenû in Akkadian, thus DIŠ is a vertical wedge and DIŠ tenû a diagonal one. If a sign is modified with additional wedges, this

3135-535: The present , which is used to express future events as well, and the preterite . The following active voice endings have been attested: The conjugation is very similar to the Hittite ḫḫi conjugation . For the mediopassive , the following endings are attested: A single participle can be formed with the suffix -a(i)mma . It has a passive sense for transitive verbs and a stative sense for intransitive verbs. The infinitive ends in -una . The usual word order

3230-405: The 1930s. Corrections to the readings of certain signs as well as other clarifications were given by David Hawkins, Anna Morpurgo Davies and Günther Neumann in 1973, generally referred to as "the new readings". A more elaborate monumental style is distinguished from more abstract linear or cursive forms of the script. In general, relief inscriptions prefer monumental forms, and incised ones prefer

3325-401: The 23rd century BC ( short chronology ). The Akkadian language being East Semitic , its structure was completely different from Sumerian. The Akkadians found a practical solution in writing their language phonetically, using the corresponding Sumerian phonetic signs. Still, many of the Sumerian characters were retained for their logographic value as well: for example the character for "sheep"

3420-408: The 24th century BC onward and make up the bulk of the cuneiform record. Akkadian cuneiform was itself adapted to write the Hittite language in the early second millennium BC . The other languages with significant cuneiform corpora are Eblaite , Elamite , Hurrian , Luwian , and Urartian . The Old Persian and Ugaritic alphabets feature cuneiform-style signs; however, they are unrelated to

3515-504: The 3rd millennium Sumerian script. Ugaritic was written using the Ugaritic alphabet , a standard Semitic style alphabet (an abjad ) written using the cuneiform method. Between half a million and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000 –100,000 have been read or published. The British Museum holds the largest collection (approx. 130,000 tablets), followed by

3610-473: The Akkadian period, at the time of the Uruk ruler Lugalzagesi (r. c. 2294–2270 BC). The vertical style remained for monumental purposes on stone stelas until the middle of the 2nd millennium. Written Sumerian was used as a scribal language until the first century AD. The spoken language died out between about 2100 and 1700 BC. The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by the Akkadian Empire from

3705-443: The Anatolian branch. This suggests that these languages formed a sub-branch within Anatolian. Some linguists follow Craig Melchert in referring to this broader group as Luwic, whereas others refer to the "Luwian group" (and, in that sense, "Luwian" may mean several distinct languages). Likewise, Proto-Luwian may mean the common ancestor of the whole group, or just the ancestor of Luwian (normally, under tree-naming conventions , were

3800-452: The Kingdom of Kizzuwatna in southeastern Anatolia, as well as a number of locations in central Anatolia. Beginning in the 14th century BC, Luwian-speakers came to constitute the majority in the Hittite capital Hattusa . It appears that by the time of the collapse of the Hittite Empire ca . 1180 BC, the Hittite king and royal family were fully bilingual in Luwian. Long after the extinction of

3895-605: The Luwian hieroglyphic script, by then aged more than 700 years, falls into oblivion. The first report of a monumental inscription dates to 1850, when an inhabitant of Nevşehir reported the relief at Fraktin . In 1870, antiquarian travellers in Aleppo found another inscription built into the south wall of the Al-Qaiqan Mosque . In 1884, Polish scholar Marian Sokołowski  [ pl ] discovered an inscription near Köylütolu , in western Turkey . The largest known inscription

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3990-484: The Luwian sounds are unlikely to have been pharyngeal. In transcriptions of Luwian cuneiform, š is traditionally distinguished from s , since they were originally distinct signs for two different sounds, but in Luwian, both signs probably represented the same s sound. A noteworthy phonological development in Luwian is rhotacism ; in some cases, d , l , and n become r . For example, * īdi ('he gets') becomes īri and wala- ('die') becomes wara- . Additionally,

4085-542: The Old Persian text. Because Elamite is unlike its neighboring Semitic languages , the script's decipherment was delayed until the 1840s. Elamite cuneiform appears to have used far fewer signs than its Akkadian prototype and initially relied primarily on syllabograms, but logograms became more common in later texts. Many signs soon acquired highly distinctive local shape variants that are often difficult to recognise as related to their Akkadian prototypes. Hittite cuneiform

4180-512: The Persians by Greek writers such as Herodotus show how the armies and practices of the Persians left a very real impression on the western world and shape the classical western view of Asia. Cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo - syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East . The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until

4275-471: The Sumerian signs of the terms in question, added as a guide for the reader. Proper names continued to be usually written in purely "logographic" fashion. The first inscribed tablets were purely pictographic, which makes it technically difficult to know in which language they were written. Different languages have been proposed, though usually Sumerian is assumed. Later tablets dating after c.  2900 BC start to use syllabic elements, which clearly show

4370-510: The Sumerians was not intuitive to Semitic speakers. From the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (20th century BC), the script evolved to accommodate the various dialects of Akkadian: Old Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian. At this stage, the former pictograms were reduced to a high level of abstraction, and were composed of only five basic wedge shapes: horizontal, vertical, two diagonals and

4465-463: The accusative differ only in the animate gender and even then, only in the singular. For the sake of clarity, the table includes only the endings beginning with -a , but endings can also begin with an -i . The forms are largely derived from the forms of the nominal declension, with an -as- before the case ending that would be expected for nouns. In addition to personal pronouns typical of Anatolian languages, Luwian also has demonstrative pronouns ,

4560-580: The beginning of the Common Era . Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions ( Latin : cuneus ) which form their signs . Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system and was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq ). Over the course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages in addition to Sumerian. Akkadian texts are attested from

4655-414: The beginning, similar-sounding words such as "life" [til] and "arrow" [ti] were written with the same symbol (𒋾). As a result, many signs gradually changed from being logograms to also functioning as syllabograms , so that for example, the sign for the word "arrow" would become the sign for the sound "ti". Syllabograms were used in Sumerian writing especially to express grammatical elements, and their use

4750-427: The branch to be called Luwic, its ancestor should be known as Proto-Luwic or Common Luwic; in practice, such names are seldom used). Luwic or Luwian (in the broad sense of the term), is one of three major sub-branches of Anatolian, alongside Hittite and Palaic . As Luwian has numerous archaisms, it is regarded as important to the study of Indo-European languages ( IE ) in general, the other Anatolian languages, and

4845-431: The compound IGI.A (𒅆𒀀) – "eye" + "water" – has the reading imhur , meaning "foam"). Several symbols had too many meanings to permit clarity. Therefore, symbols were put together to indicate both the sound and the meaning of a symbol. For instance, the word 'raven' (UGA) had the same logogram (𒉀) as the word 'soap' (NAGA), the name of a city (EREŠ), and the patron goddess of Eresh (NISABA). To disambiguate and identify

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4940-494: The corpus of Hittite cuneiform texts with Luwian insertions runs from CTH 757–773, mostly comprising rituals. Cuneiform Luwian texts are written in several dialects, of which the most easily identifiable are Kizzuwatna Luwian, Ištanuwa Luwian, and Empire Luwian. The last dialect represents the vernacular of Hattusan scribes of the 14th–13th centuries BC and is mainly attested through Glossenkeil words in Hittite texts. Compared to cuneiform Hittite, logograms (signs with

5035-447: The cuneiform logo-syllabary proper. The latest known cuneiform tablet dates to 75 AD. Cuneiform was rediscovered in modern times in the early 17th century with the publication of the trilingual Achaemenid royal inscriptions at Persepolis ; these were first deciphered in the early 19th century. The modern study of cuneiform belongs to the ambiguously named field of Assyriology , as the earliest excavations of cuneiform libraries – in

5130-508: The decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform in 1836. The first cuneiform inscriptions published in modern times were copied from the Achaemenid royal inscriptions in the ruins of Persepolis , with the first complete and accurate copy being published in 1778 by Carsten Niebuhr . Niebuhr's publication was used by Grotefend in 1802 to make the first breakthrough – the realization that Niebuhr had published three different languages side by side and

5225-545: The development of Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the suggestion the former influenced the latter. But given the lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing, "no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt". Others have held that "the evidence for such direct influence remains flimsy" and that "a very credible argument can also be made for the independent development of writing in Egypt..." Early cuneiform inscriptions were made by using

5320-598: The direct descendant of Luwian and probably does not even belong to the Luwic group (see Anatolian languages ). Therefore, none of the arguments in favour of the Luwian linguistic dominance in Western Asia Minor can be regarded as compelling, although the issue continues to be debated. Luwian was split into many dialects, which were written in two different writing systems. One of these was the Cuneiform Luwian which used

5415-446: The early Achaemenid rulers from the 6th century BC down to the 4th century BC. Because of its simplicity and logical structure, the Old Persian cuneiform script was the first to be deciphered by modern scholars, starting with the accomplishments of Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802. Various ancient bilingual or trilingual inscriptions then permitted to decipher the other, much more complicated and more ancient scripts, as far back as to

5510-473: The end of a word, or identifying a sign as a logogram. These are not mandatory and are used inconsistently. The reconstruction of the Luwian phoneme inventory is based mainly on the written texts and comparisons with the known development of other Indo-European languages. Two series of stops can be identified, one transliterated as geminate in the cuneiform script. These fortis and lenis stops may have been distinguished by either voicing or gemination. The contrast

5605-619: The extensive Luwian presence in western Anatolia in the late second millennium BC. In the Old Hittite version of the Hittite Code , some, if not all, of the Luwian-speaking areas were called Luwiya . Widmer (2007) has argued that the Mycenaean term ru-wa-ni-jo , attested in Linear B , refers to the same area. but the stem * Luwan- was recently shown to be non-existent. In a corrupt late copy of

5700-678: The firm. In addition, the Murašû firm converted the produce from the lands they managed into specie—silver ., which was lent on the basis of real security, or collateral. The Murašû firm provides a greater insight into the economic strength and stability of the Persian-ruled provinces. Marc Van De Mieroop argues that, through such business practices as the Murašû firm, the Persians were able to draw upon their resources throughout their provinces and vassal states to pull together enormous armies with which to intimidate and conquer their enemies. Descriptions of

5795-550: The form of Old Babylonian cuneiform that had been adapted for the Hittite language . The other was Hieroglyphic Luwian , which was written in a unique native hieroglyphic script. The differences between the dialects are minor, but they affect vocabulary, style, and grammar. The different orthographies of the two writing systems may also hide some differences. According to Hittitologist Alwin Kloekhorst , Hieroglyphic Luwian may also be known as Empire Luwian or Iron Age Luwian, and

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5890-748: The forms given in the table, Luwian also had a demonstrative pronoun formed from the stem za-/zi- , but not all cases are known, and also a relative pronoun , which was declined regularly: kwis (nominative singular animate), kwin (accusative singular animate), kwinzi (nominative/accusative plural animate), kwati (ablative/instrumental singular), kwanza (dative/locative plural), kwaya (nominative/accusative plural inanimate). Some indefinite pronouns whose meanings are not entirely clear are also transmitted. Like many other Indo-European languages, Luwian distinguishes two numbers (singular and plural) and three persons . There are two moods : indicative and imperative but no subjunctive . There are two tenses :

5985-408: The genitive plural. In hieroglyphic Luwian, as in Hittite, the classical Indo-European suffixes -as for the genitive singular and -an for the plural are used. The special form of possessive adjectives with a plural possessor is restricted to Kizzuwatna Luwian and probably represents a calque from Hurrian . Because of the prevalence of -assa place names and words scattered around all sides of

6080-768: The horse-riders who came to this region from the north and founded Demircihöyük ( Eskişehir Province ) in Phrygia c. 3000 BC. They were allegedly ancestors of the Luwians who inhabited Troy II, and spread widely in the Anatolian peninsula. He cited the distribution of a new type of wheel-made pottery, Red Slip Wares, as some of the best evidence for his theory. According to Mellaart, the proto-Luwian migrations to Anatolia came in several distinct waves over many centuries. The recent detailed review of Mellaart's claims suggests that his ethnolinguistic conclusions cannot be substantiated on archaeological grounds. Other arguments were advanced for

6175-413: The influence of the latter", and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia". There are many instances of Egypt-Mesopotamia relations at the time of the invention of writing, and standard reconstructions of the development of writing generally place the development of the Sumerian proto-cuneiform script before

6270-478: The largest and most illuminating view into the business activities and conditions of Persian-ruled Babylonia during the last hundred and fifty years of the Achaemenid kingship. In a series of excavations directed by John Henry Haynes , the Murašû Archive was discovered six meters under a mound on the floor of a small room. The original collection comprised 330 whole tablets, 400 or more damaged tablets and fragments, and 20 small clay tags with seal impressions. After

6365-407: The ligature KAxGUR 7 consists of 31 strokes. Most later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary , together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs in the script were polyvalent, having both a syllabic and logographic meaning. The complexity of the system bears

6460-463: The linear form, but the styles are in principle interchangeable. Texts of several lines are usually written in boustrophedon style. Within a line, signs are usually written in vertical columns, but as in Egyptian hieroglyphs , aesthetic considerations take precedence over correct reading order. The script consists of the order of 500 unique signs, some with multiple values; a given sign may function as

6555-443: The meaning and the other the pronunciation (e.g. 𒅗 ka 'mouth' was combined with the sign 𒉣 nun 'prince' to express the word 𒅻 nundum , meaning 'lip', formally KA×NUN; cf. Chinese phono-semantic compounds ). Another way of expressing words that had no sign of their own was by so-called 'Diri compounds' – sign sequences that have, in combination, a reading different from the sum of the individual constituent signs (for example,

6650-560: The mid-19th century – were in the area of ancient Assyria . An estimated half a million tablets are held in museums across the world, but comparatively few of these are published . The largest collections belong to the British Museum ( approx. 130,000 tablets), the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin , the Louvre , the Istanbul Archaeology Museums , the National Museum of Iraq , the Yale Babylonian Collection ( approx. 40,000 tablets), and Penn Museum . Writing began after pottery

6745-463: The near eastern token system used for accounting. The meaning and usage of these tokens is still a matter of debate. These tokens were in use from the 9th millennium BC and remained in occasional use even late in the 2nd millennium BC. Early tokens with pictographic shapes of animals, associated with numbers, were discovered in Tell Brak , and date to the mid-4th millennium BC. It has been suggested that

6840-470: The ones that ultimately led to its decipherment are the ones found in the trilingual Behistun inscriptions , commissioned by the Achaemenid kings. The inscriptions, similar to that of the Rosetta Stone 's, were written in three different writing systems. The first was Old Persian , which was deciphered in 1802 by Georg Friedrich Grotefend . The second, Babylonian cuneiform, was deciphered shortly after

6935-580: The original discovery, a portion of the tablets was shipped to Istanbul for analysis, where Hermann Vollrat Hilprecht first identified the texts as records of a late Babylonian business house called “Murašû Sons of Nippur”. Over the years, the Murašû Archive was scattered around the world, to museums and private collections in London , Istanbul, Philadelphia , Jena , and California . The Murašû Archive comprises business records regarding legal issues, loans, rents, transactions, trips to various capital cities, and

7030-609: The recognition of the word "king". Luwian language The two varieties of Proto-Luwian or Luwian (in the narrow sense of these names) are known after the scripts in which they were written: Cuneiform Luwian ( CLuwian ) and Hieroglyphic Luwian ( HLuwian ). There is no consensus as to whether these were a single language or two closely related languages. Several other Anatolian languages – particularly Carian , Lycian , and Milyan (also known as Lycian B or Lycian II) – are now usually identified as related to Luwian – and as mutually connected more closely than other constituents of

7125-449: The relative position of the stylus to the tablet, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions. For numbers, a round-tipped stylus was initially used, until the wedge-tipped stylus was generalized. The direction of writing was from top-to-bottom and right-to-left. Cuneiform clay 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

7220-414: The rounds of" and is probably derived from *kalutta/i- "circle". It has been argued that this derives from a proto-Anatolian word for " wheel ", which in turn would have derived from the common word for "wheel" found in all other Indo-European families. The wheel was invented in the 5th millennium BC and, if kaluti does derive from it, then the Anatolian branch left PIE after its invention (so validating

7315-404: The singular. In the animate gender, an -i- is inserted between the stem and the case ending. In hieroglyphic Luwian, the particle -sa/-za is added to the nominative/accusative inanimate case ending. In the genitive case, cuneiform and hieroglyphic Luwian differ sharply from each other. In cuneiform Luwian the possessive suffix -assa is used for the genitive singular and -assanz- is used for

7410-658: The stress and word position. For example, annan occurs alone as an adverb as ānnan ('underneath') but as a preposition , it becomes annān pātanza ('under the feet'). The characters that are transliterated as -h- and -hh- have often been interpreted as pharyngeal fricatives [ħ] and [ʕ] . However, they may have instead been uvular [χ] and [ʁ] or velar fricatives [x] and [ɣ] . In loans to Ugaritic, these sounds are transcribed with <ḫ> and <ġ>, while in Egyptian they are transcribed with 𓐍 ḫ and 𓎼 g. As both of these languages had pharyngeal consonants,

7505-415: The syllable [ɡu] had fourteen different symbols. The inventory of signs was expanded by the combination of existing signs into compound signs. They could either derive their meaning from a combination of the meanings of both original signs (e.g. 𒅗 ka 'mouth' and 𒀀 a 'water' were combined to form the sign for 𒅘 nag̃ 'drink', formally KA×A; cf. Chinese compound ideographs ), or one sign could suggest

7600-472: The third century AD. The complexity of cuneiforms prompted the development of a number of simplified versions of the script. Old Persian cuneiform was developed with an independent and unrelated set of simple cuneiform characters, by Darius the Great in the 5th century BC. Most scholars consider this writing system to be an independent invention because it has no obvious connections with other writing systems at

7695-432: The time, such as Elamite , Akkadian, Hurrian , and Hittite cuneiforms. It formed a semi-alphabetic syllabary, using far fewer wedge strokes than Assyrian used, together with a handful of logograms for frequently occurring words like "god" ( 𐏎 ), "king" ( 𐏋 ) or "country" ( 𐏌 ). This almost purely alphabetical form of the cuneiform script (36 phonetic characters and 8 logograms), was specially designed and used by

7790-652: The token shapes were the original basis for some of the Sumerian pictographs. Mesopotamia's "proto-literate" period spans roughly the 35th to 32nd centuries BC. The first unequivocal written documents start with the Uruk IV period, from circa 3,300 BC, followed by tablets found in Uruk III, Jemdet Nasr , Early Dynastic I Ur and Susa (in Proto-Elamite ) dating to the period until circa 2,900 BC. Originally, pictographs were either drawn on clay tablets in vertical columns with

7885-585: The two languages are related, their writing systems seem to have been developed separately. For Hurrian, there were even different systems in different polities (in Mitanni , in Mari , in the Hittite Empire). The Hurrian orthographies were generally characterised by more extensive use of syllabograms and more limited use of logograms than Akkadian. Urartian, in comparison, retained a more significant role for logograms. In

7980-448: The use of agents and subordinates to manage affairs. In essence, the Murašû Archive was the business repository of the Murašû firm - a business house dealing mainly with the management of agriculture . The Murašû firm would lease land and water from its owners, farm the land to produce crops, pay rents and taxes to the owners, and even sublet the leased lands to tenants, who would work the land with livestock, seeds, and equipment provided by

8075-487: The which are formed from apa- and za-/zi- . The case endings are similar those of Hittite, but not all cases are attested for personal pronouns. In the third person, the demonstrative pronoun apa- occurs instead of the personal pronoun. Possessive pronouns and demonstrative pronouns in apa- are declined as adjectives. All known forms of the personal pronouns are given, but it is not clear how their meanings differed or how they changed for different cases. In addition to

8170-565: The word more precisely, two phonetic complements were added – Ú (𒌑) for the syllable [u] in front of the symbol and GA (𒂵) for the syllable [ga] behind. Finally, the symbol for 'bird', MUŠEN (𒄷) was added to ensure proper interpretation. As a result, the whole word could be spelt 𒌑𒉀𒂵𒄷, i.e. Ú.NAGA.GA (among the many variant spellings that the word could have). For unknown reasons, cuneiform pictographs, until then written vertically, were rotated 90° counterclockwise, in effect putting them on their side. This change first occurred slightly before

8265-561: Was adapted to writing Hittite, a layer of Akkadian logographic spellings, also known as Akkadograms, was added to the script, in addition to the Sumerian logograms, or Sumerograms, which were already inherent in the Akkadian writing system and which Hittite also kept. Thus the pronunciations of many Hittite words which were conventionally written by logograms are now unknown. The Hurrian language (attested 2300–1000 BC) and Urartian language (attested 9th–6th century BC) were also written in adapted versions of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. Although

8360-526: Was already used for writing on wooden writing boards from the early second millennium BC onwards , but the argument has not been widely accepted. The first monumental inscriptions confirmed as Luwian date to the Late Bronze Age , c. 14th to 13th centuries BC. After some two centuries of sparse material, the hieroglyphs resume in the Early Iron Age , c. 10th to 8th centuries BC. In the early 7th century BC,

8455-473: Was excavated in 1970 in Yalburt, northwest of Konya . Luwian hieroglyphic texts contain a limited number of lexical borrowings from Hittite , Akkadian , and Northwest Semitic ; the lexical borrowings from Greek are limited to proper nouns, although common nouns borrowed in the opposite direction do exist. A decipherment was presented by Emmanuel Laroche in 1960, building on partial decipherments proposed since

8550-406: Was further developed and modified in the writing of the Akkadian language to express its sounds. Often, words that had a similar meaning but very different sounds were written with the same symbol. For instance the Sumerian words 'tooth' [zu], 'mouth' [ka] and 'voice' [gu] were all written with the original pictogram for mouth (𒅗). Words that sounded alike would have different signs; for instance,

8645-448: Was in use for more than three millennia, through several stages of development, from the 31st century BC down to the second century AD. The latest firmly dateable tablet, from Uruk, dates to 79/80 AD. Ultimately, it was completely replaced by alphabetic writing , in the general sense, in the course of the Roman era , and there are no cuneiform systems in current use. It had to be deciphered as

8740-478: Was invented, during the Neolithic , when clay tokens were used to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities. In recent years a contrarian view has arisen on the tokens being the precursor of writing. These tokens were initially impressed on the surface of round clay envelopes ( clay bullae ) and then stored in them. The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with

8835-411: Was lost initially and finally, suggesting that any voicing only appeared intervocalically. The following table provides a minimal consonant inventory, as can be reconstructed from the script. The existence of other consonants, which were not differentiated in writing, is possible. There are only three vowels , a , i , and u , which could be short or long. Vowel length is not stable but changes with

8930-451: Was not needed. Most surviving cuneiform tablets were of the latter kind, accidentally preserved when fires destroyed the tablets' storage place and effectively baked them, unintentionally ensuring their longevity. The script was widely used on commemorative stelae and carved reliefs to record the achievements of the ruler in whose honor the monument had been erected. The spoken language included many homophones and near-homophones, and in

9025-406: Was retained, but was now pronounced immerum , rather than the Sumerian udu . Such retained individual signs or, sometimes, entire sign combinations with logographic value are known as Sumerograms , a type of heterogram . The East Semitic languages employed equivalents for many signs that were distorted or abbreviated to represent new values because the syllabic nature of the script as refined by

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