Dr. Irving Finkel

So you can write numbers and you can write picture signs to create a message without any grammar or syntax involved in it, just a simple kind of accounting system.

And it must be that the very earliest signs worked this way, and very gradually it occurred to them that signs could be pressed into different kinds of function.

One of them would be to express grammar, the particles of grammar, the elements of grammar, and like using the word for beer, to write its, which otherwise is a difficult problem.

So this is an ongoing system that you have a very stark and simple pictographic level which in one way or another evolves into the situation where the individual signs are drawn with straight edges and the straight edges themselves at the beginning

are very pictograph-like.

So when you look at early cuneiform, you can see what they come from.

You can see it's the head of a boar with a horn or something like that.

You can tell that they are pictographic.

But what happens over a long period of time is that the drawing of the signs

stylizes and stylizes to the point that the innate pictographic quality disappears from view that the signs become in a sense abstracted from their origin this is an important matter because when you start to learn cuneiform you never start with the pictures you only start with the developed cuneiform signs of which there are about 900 or a thousand something like that

And as time goes by, abandoning their artistic curvy forms into straightedge and straightedge and rigor and system, then they become further and further divorced from their origins.

So that, for example, if you have a tablet written 500 years after the beginning of cuneiform, nobody could tell you what it was about by looking at the signs.

and saying, oh, this is a chap, this is a that, this is that, oh, it must be this, like people used to do with Egyptian hieroglyphs before they knew how they functioned.

So this is an ongoing process from curvy pictographic signs

drawn with a point into mature cuneiform.

And if you look through the millennia, because we have proper cuneiform by 2800 all the way down to the first century AD, this is a very, very long process.

Gradually, over this process, two things happened.

One is that the way people wrote their signs in Babylonia in the south was slightly different from the way they wrote them in the north.

And this is interesting because the Akkadian language, which we know at the beginning of this writing nearly, the Akkadian tongue, sharpens out into an Assyrian dialect, as we said, and a Babylonian dialect.

So the language...