Cuneiform: The Earliest Form of Writing from Ancient Mesopotamia

Cuneiform is a writing system or script which was developed by the ancient Sumerians in Ancient Mesopotamia between 3500 and 3000 BCE. It is the earliest form of writing in the world and is thought to have developed so people could communicate long-distance in trade. The word cuneiform actually comes from the Latin for wedge, cuneus, since to write cuneiform, scribes would have pressed a triangular-shaped reed stylus into soft clay which produced the wedge-like impressions. Cuneiform was used by all of the great Mesopotamian civilisations until alphabetic scripts became more popular in around 100 BCE. Some of these cultures were; the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Elamites, Hatti, Hittites, Assyrians and the Hurrians. Cuneiform has been found on clay tablets (often referred to ad cuneiform tablets), in a number of different languages including Babylonian cuneiform and Sumerian cuneiform. The earliest form of cuneiform is known as proto-cuneiform. This early script was pictorial, since the tablets