Ancient writing system

Usage examples of cuneiform.

Chaldeo-Babylonian edition, which the lamented George Smith was the first to decipher on the cuneiform tablets exhumed at Nineveh, and now in the British Museum.

Chinese language is clearly related to the Chaldean, and that both the Chinese characters and the cuneiform alphabet are degenerate descendants of an original hieroglyphical alphabet.

Gradually, cuneiform developed a consonantal base, and finally became more similar to how it is today.

Man-made, surely, although its characters were unfamiliar save in their faint hinting at cuneiform shapes.

This is what Professor Maspero has done, and it must be no slight satisfaction to him to find that on the whole his system of transliteration is confirmed by the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna.

The cuneiform system of writing was syllabic, each character denoting a syllable, so that we know what were the vowels in a proper name as well as the consonants.

The cuneiform script was an inheritance from the non-Semitic predecessors of the Semites in Babylonia, and in this script the characters represented words as well as sounds.

Here he has found numberless historical inscriptions, besides a text in hieroglyphics which may cast light on the origin of the cuneiform characters.

It is even possible that in the Madyes of Herodotos, we have a reminiscence of the Manda of the cuneiform inscriptions.

Around the lip of this bowl were inlaid sixteen symbols, cuneiform, scarlet.

Banners fell from them on which in woven silk ran the cuneiform letters that told their goods.

But one of the valuable contributions of these tablets is that they provide evidence that cuneiform writing had spread to north Syria before 2300 B.

He used to copy the inscriptions in the cuneiform writing and then translate them into English.

Stephen has just told us that his uncle was something of an expert in cuneiform writing.

I have read with very keen interest the wonderful history of the decipherment of the cuneiform writing, and I happen to recollect one or two of the main facts that seemed to me to be worth remembering.