Thus if LUGAL immediately preceded a personal name, we’d know
that the person in question was a king, and if a name was preceded
by URU, we’d know it was the name of a city. When texts were read
out, the determinatives were not said aloud.
From all this, it won’t surprise you to learn that syllabic scripts
could be made up of an enormous number of signs–when you
think of all the possible combinations of vowels and consonants.
Indeed the most developed cuneiform syllabic scripts contained
over 700 sign groups! And if you look at Figure 1.2, you’ll see that
some sign groups, each representing a single syllable, consist of
three or four or more separately impressed ‘wedge’ imprints.
So acquiring even basic competency in the reading and writing
of these scripts must have meant years of learning. How much
simpler an alphabetic script would have been. I recall as a student
taking just under an hour to learn the Greek alphabet – all
24 letters of it, many of them close to the letters of the Roman
alphabet. By contrast, it took me a year to master even the basics of
the Hittite script, which was mercifully much shorter than some
syllabic cuneiform scripts, with just over 300 sign groups.
By thefirst millennium BC, several alphabetic scripts had
developed in the Near East, most notably the Aramaic script, which
was so much easier to learn and must help explain the widespread
use of this script. Aramaic became the lingua franca of the age.
And along the Syro-Palestinian coast the Phoenicians devised an
alphabet from which the Greek alphabet and by extension the
Roman one were derived. These alphabets were made up of
linear signs; that is, signs produced by drawing them on writing
surfaces suitable for this purpose, such as papyrus and leather. But
already by the end of the fourteenth or early thirteenth century, the
people of the kingdom of Ugarit in northwestern Syria had devised
an alphabetic script, written on clay using cuneiform symbols
impressed onto its surface.
THE SCRIBES AND THEIR TABLETS
The obvious question is, since an alphabet is much easier to learn
and use than a syllabic script, why did the syllabic cuneiform scripts
HOW DO THE HITTITES TELL US ABOUT THEMSELVES? 17