Irving Finkel

So you had the range of things clustered around what we call a consonant.

So they had all those for all the letters, which gave them a basic system.

There was much more to it than that, and it was more complicated than that.

We don't have to really go into it.

But basically, if you are a Babylonian,

And we want to write the word museum, which of course is one of the most important words in the English language and other languages too.

So what you would do is you would write the syllable moo and then the sign z and then the sign um.

So you split the word up into its component syllables.

When you read it in your mind, you squash them together into museum.

That's the basic system.

They had other signs which gave you a clue as to the meaning and bits around the edge, but it's basically syllabic writing.

So when you go to university to study cuneiform,

What you have to learn is all the signs and all their values.

Because, unfortunately, they didn't just have one for each.

They had multiple ones.

And the reason is not that they were mad or they wanted to make life hell, but because the syllables derive from the writing of Sumerian words.

So the Sumerian vocabulary had a lot of words that were probably differentiated by tone.

So you might have bar, and then a rising R, and then a lowering.

And these signs all retain the bar value, even though there were no tones.

So it means if you look at a sign list, there's a lot of signs.