A few weeks ago, we hosted a two-day symposium on “Deviant Readings: Local and Communal Variation in the Sumerian Reading Tradition” here at the MSH Mondes in Nanterre: for those interested, you can find the program here. As the Marie Curie project ScriPTS draws to a close, the symposium was specifically meant to address what variation in cuneiform readings look like once we leave the big centers in Nippur or Nineveh, and whether that variation give us evidence of something like a localized reading community, or a community of practice. I can’t thank the participants enough for the time and effort they put into their papers.
Though the papers of the symposium were looking specifically at Sumerian, the topic does take me back to one of the big questions of first millennium Mesopotamian writing. Posed roughly à la Baldrick from Blackadder Goes Forth, this might go something like this:
“So the thing is, the way I see it, these days people don’t write in cuneiform, but ages ago, people did write in cuneiform. So there must have been a moment when writing cuneifom went away, right, and not-writing cuneiform came along. So what I want to know is, how did we get from one case of affairs to the other case of affairs?”
Maybe more simply: How did cuneiform disappear? One way to think of the answer is to look at the languages involved: across the long arc from the Neo-Assyrian and Babylonian empires to the Hellenistic-Parthian period, spoken Akkadian was progressively replaced by Aramaic and other West Semitic language. While the use of Aramaic as an administrative language under the Achaemenid empire will have accelerated this process considerably, personal names and place names give us some clue that it took off first in the Babylonian countryside in the first centuries of the first millennium BC. Loanwords from West Semitic also start to show up in Akkadian in the 8th century. One of the earliest candidates is Akkadian kiništu “assembly,” from the same cognate that gives us the modern Israeli Knesset. People thus would have stopped writing cuneiform because they stopped speaking Akkadian.

Another way to look at the problem of the shift from Akkadian to Aramaic is to look more closely at practices of writing. What particular writing systems were used for what sort of content, by whom, where, and when? Are there changes in how these systems were used? Since its origins in the late 4th millennium, syllabic cuneiform writing remained a pillar of Mesopotamian administration and cultural identity until at least the first centuries of the 1st millennium AD. The use of a West Semitic alphabet in Babylonia is in turn first attested on individual alphabetic epigraphs on the Sealand Tablets from the late 16th and early 15th century. This means that both systems were used side by side for well over a millennium. A number of Assyrian reliefs and wall paintings, for example, show two scribes working together, one writing on a clay tablet, the other on parchment.

How did these two writing systems – syllabic cuneiform and the alphabet – interact? Particularly for Babylonia, one obstacle to answering this question is how little direct evidence for the alphabet is actually preserved. Under Mesopotamian conditions, unlike in Egypt, parchment and leather disappear quickly from the archaeological record. Alphabetic epigraphs on clay tablets first appear astonishingly early, in the Sealand Tablets from the late 16th and early 15th centuries, but seem largely to disappear again from Babylonia for the next 800 years. Only in the 6th century do we find not only epigraphs, but hundreds of Aramaic stamp impressions on the bricks used to build Nebuchadnezzar II’s Babylon. From southern Babylonia we have the Ashur Ostrakon, a letter written by an Assyrian officer to Ashur on the eve of the rebellion of Šamaš-šuma-ukīn, ca. 651 BC. From the area of the Egipar Temple at Ur we have a Phoenician dedicatory inscription to goddess Ashtarte, written on the ivory lid of a box, dated to roughly the 7th century BC. Beneath the pavement of the Enunmah Temple in the same city we also have a brick with a “Dispersed Oasis North Arabian” inscription, a catch-all term used to describe a scattered family of related North Arabian scripts in use during the 1st millennium BC. This lack of Aramaic alphabetic texts means that it’s harder to trace how these two writing systems in the 10th–7th centuries relate, in the time when we think these big changes start to really take off.

There does, however, seem to be more indirect evidence for the relationship if we look instead at how the use of cuneiform changes over time. As first clearly described by Elimelekh Rimalt in 1932, what we see is a progressive breakdown of the syllabic cuneiform system by which vowel quality is no longer consistently distinguished. For CVC-signs (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant), this often means using a phonetic complement to emphasize a particular reading. In the sequence ta-BI-áš-šá-du, the sign <áš> is used to make sure both that BI will be read kaš for ta-kašáš-šá-du or /takaššadu/ “(before) it arrives,” and that the /a/-vowel in the CVC sign is really meant. In writing the syllabic CV (Consonant-Vowel) signs in the sequences ta-ga-mu-ru for /tagmuru/ “you incurred (the expenses)” or te-te-ti-ri for /tēteṭir/ “you paid back,” the scribe is using ta–ga– and –ti–ri-, respectively, where we would expect *ta-ag- and -ti-ir for the closed syllables /tag/ and /tir/: the vowels of -ga- and -ri- are superfluous. There is a converse to this in the use of the sign for -aʾ/iʾ/eʾ/uʾ to reinforce that a written vowel should be taken seriously, as in id-di-nu-uʾ for /iddinū/ “they gave.”
How do we explain what is happening here? To some degree, this orthography serves to disambiguate a system where each sign is inherently associated with numerous readings. Following Rimalt, however, it’s hard not to notice that this way of using cuneiform brings an originally syllabic system into closer alignment with the alphabets. The two systems seem to converge in an “alphabetization” of cuneiform. The strong version of this argument is directly causal. Cuneiform changes in particular ways, losing many of its syllabic qualities in expressing vowels, because the scribes were growing used to thinking in terms of an alphabet and not a syllabary. We can be cautious here. If this holds true, this lets us identify a positive echo of alphabetic writing even when the writing itself is no longer there. It also lets us push the question of change and disappearance from the mechanics of writing to a more social dimension. Do particular regions, social groups, or scribes show more evidence of alphabetization than others?
In any case, I think the symposium could certainly have gone worse, and hope the speakers are equally happy with the results. The plans for publishing the proceedings should be finalized reasonably soon, and I’ll post updates here as soon as I can.
Bibliography
- Amadasi Guzzo, Maria Giulia. Two Phoenician Inscriptions Carved in Ivory: Again the Ur Box and the Sarepta Plaque. Orientalia Nova Series 59 (1990): 58–66.
- Hamidović, David. “Alphabetical Inscriptions from the Sealand.” Studia Mesopotamica 1 (2014): 137–155.
- Hess, Christian W. “(Early) Neo-Babylonian.” In History of the Akkadian Language, Volume 2: The Second and First Millennia BCE. Afterlife, ed. Juan-Pablo Vita, 1396–1430. HdO 152/2. Leiden: Brill, 2021.
- Lindenberger, James M. Ancient Aramaic and Hebrew Letters. 2nd Edition. Writings from the Ancient World 14. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003.
- Radner, Karen. “Schreiberkonventionen im assyrischen Reich: Sprachen und Schriftsysteme.” In Assur – Gott, Stadt und Land: 5. Internationales Colloquium der Deutschen Orient-Gesesllschaft, 18.–21. Februar 2004 in Berlin, ed. Johannes Renger, 385–403. Colloquien der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 5. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011.
- Rimalt, E. S. “Wechselbeziehungen zwischen dem Aramäischen und dem Neubabylonischen.” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 39 (1932): 99–122.
- Sass, Benjamin. Studia Alphabetica: On the Origin and Early History of the Northwest Semitic, South Semitic, and Greek Alphabets. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 102. Freiburg: Universitätsverlag Freiburg, 1991.
- Sass, Benjamin, and Joachim Marzahn. Aramaic and Figural Stamp Impressions on Bricks of the Sixth Century B.C. from Babylon. Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 127. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010.
- Streck, M. P. “Keilschrift und Alphabet.” In Hieroglyphen, Alphabete, Schriftreformen: Studien zu Multiliteralismus, Schriftwechsel und Orthographieneuregelungen, ed. D. Borchers, F. Kammerzell, and S. Weninger, 77–97.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Christian W. Hess (21 juin 2024). The Alphabetization of Cuneiform. ScriPTS. Consulté le 13 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/11vc3
