lution was to impress another symbol on the outside of the
bulla for each token it contained. In time the documentation
system was simplifi ed by writing transactions on fl at clay tab-
lets of various sizes. Once this became common practice, the
set of signs expanded, enabling people to write longer texts.
Cuneiform is a Greek word meaning “made of wedges”
and is used by modern scholars to describe the Sumerian
script and its off shoots. Although the writing system began
as schematic drawings of things named, the images, called
logograms, were quickly abstracted and reduced to a set of
a few hundred signs, each composed of a unique group of
wedge shapes impressed in the wet clay with the tip of a sty-
lus made from a reed. Typically a sign had a syllabic value,
and a series of signs strung together formed a word. Much
cuneiform literature has survived because the clay tablets on
which it was written were very durable. Even when ancient
cities were burned by enemy armies, tablets survived because
the fi re of the burning libraries actually hardened and pre-
served the clay. Th us, large collections of tablets are preserved
from Nineveh, Assur, Ur, Uruk, Mari, Ebla, Ugarit, and many
other cities that were destroyed by fi re.
Egyptians learned of cuneiform through trade contacts
with Mesopotamia and, aft er 3000 b.c.e., created their own
hieroglyphic script that shared many features with cunei-
form. When Indo-European Hittites and Persians conquered
Mesopotamia, they adopted cuneiform for writing their
languages, which previously had been without any form of
script. Because of the prestige of the Mesopotamian empires,
even the Egyptian court had to maintain an offi ce of scribes
trained in the cuneiform languages to handle diplomatic
correspondence. In the Iron Age (1000–550 b.c.e.) languages
written in alphabetic scripts became predominant, but Ak-
kadian and Sumerian survived as scholarly, religious, and
literary languages until the fi rst century c.e., in much thesame way Latin did in western Europe aft er the fall of the
Roman Empire.
As early as 1900 b.c.e. many people who spoke northwest
Semitic languages developed the fi rst alphabetic writing. Th is
ancestor of the alphabetic scripts used in the modern world is
known as the Proto-Sinaitic script because it was fi rst discov-
ered in graffi ti and other inscriptions left by copper miners
in the Sinai Peninsula. It has since been found in inscriptions
from all over Egypt. Rather than a simple transliteration of
words into hieroglyphs, the Proto-Sinaitic script comprises
roughly 30 hieroglyphs that began with the sound of the con-
sonants in Semitic languages; systems of adding vowels in
Semitic languages were not developed until the Middle Ages
(ca. 1000 c.e.).
Th e city of Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast of mod-
ern Syria was destroyed by invaders about 1200 b.c.e. Sev-
eral surviving clay writing tablets show that many languages
were spoken and written in that cosmopolitan trading city,
but texts in the native language, a northwest Semitic dialectic
called Ugaritic, were written in an alphabetic script that was
adapted from cuneiform and inscribed on clay tablets. Th e
infl uence of the cuneiform script among northwest Semitic
speakers was so great that every city would have had scribes
and scribal schools trained in cuneiform. Th e new form of
writing, therefore, must have been developed in an appeal to
the prestige of cuneiform writing while maintaining the rela-
tive ease of an alphabetic script. Ugaritic also reveals the fi rst
use of alphabetic letter order.
By 1000 b.c.e. the Phoenician cities developed their own
form of alphabetic writing based on both the Proto-Sinaitic
script and the Ugaritic script. Th is was important because
all later alphabetic writing was derived from the Phoenician
script. It was from the Phoenicians that Greeks learned the
alphabet for trading purposes (before 900 b.c.e.), aft er which
they devised their own version of the alphabet to write the
Greek language (no examples of Greek texts survive from
much before 700 b.c.e.). In fact, the term alphabet comes
from the names of the fi rst two letters of the Greek alphabet,
alpha and beta. Needing fewer signs to write their consonants
than did the Phoenicians, the Greeks used the spare signs to
represent vowels, thus completing the development of the
elements associated with the alphabet. Th e Greek alphabet
was passed on to the Etruscans and then the Romans, who
modifi ed it into the Latin alphabet that is still used for many
Western languages.
Th e Phoenician alphabet was adapted by people all
over the Near East and turned into a diff erent alphabet by
the speakers of each Semitic language. Th e most important
language in the Iron Age was Aramaic. People in Mesopota-
mia and many other areas spoke Aramaic, and its alphabetic
script was written on sheets of papyrus or vellum in ink with
reed pens. Because it was more convenient than writing cu-
neiform on clay tablets, most written pieces, such as personal
letters, were probably composed in this way. Because papy-
rus and vellum are highly perishable materials, however, veryClay tablet with Babylonian inscription, found in the treasury of
Persepolis, Persia (modern-day Iran) (Courtesy of the Oriental Institute
of the University of Chicago)1186 writing: The Middle East0895-1194_Soc&Culturev4(s-z).i1186 1186 10/10/07 2:31:23 PM