Founding America

Scratching wedges into clay served civilization through thousands of years.

The first fully developed writing system appeared in history along with the oldest known spoken language – but it lasted much longer. The earliest known language is Sumerian, and the wedge-like characters the Sumerian people scratched onto clay tablets were called cuneiform. And while Sumerian was replaced, cuneiform lived on, being used by a dozen more languages.

Cuneiform Through the Ages

Think English is an old language? Well, it is – but not nearly as old as Sumerian or cuneiform. As a spoken language, “modern” English, the language more or less how we speak it today, has been around for a few hundred years. Old English, which has more in common with German than modern English, stretches back more than a thousand years. And when it comes to writing, our modern 26-letter alphabet is about 700 years old.

But what’s a few centuries or even a millennium in the grand scheme of things? Sumerian and cuneiform appeared around 3,400 to 3,300 BC, about five and a half thousand years ago. And they lasted for thousands of years as well. Sumerian was replaced by Akkadian in everyday use after a thousand years or so, but it lived on in official and religious ceremonies until about AD 400. That’s a stretch of more than 3,600 years.

While cuneiform was developed specifically to write Sumerian, and while it fell out of use a few centuries before Sumerian did, it spread much further and was used by as many as 13 languages.

When the kingdom of Akkad, the world’s first empire, conquered Sumer, it gradually replaced Sumerian with Akkadian as a spoken language but adopted cuneiform for its writing system. Sumerian is what historians call a language isolate, meaning it has no linguistic relatives. Akkadian, which includes the dialects Babylonian and Assyrian, however, belonged to the Semitic family of languages (though it isn’t believed to be the parent language of any modern ones).

Under the Akkadian empire, cuneiform spread around what we today call the Middle East. It was adapted for the Semitic languages Eblaite in the region of the ancient city of Ebla (near modern Aleppo in Syria), Elamite in the region of Elam (modern Iran), Amorite in what today is northern Syria and parts of Iraq, and Ugaritic in Syria. The Anatolian languages Hittite, Luwian, Kalašma, Kaskian, and Palaic, which spread across what today we call Turkey, also used it. So did Hurrian and Uratian, which belonged to a language family all their own and were found scattered between the Semitic and Anatolian groups.

The Aramaic Shift

So, cuneiform spread through a known total of 13 languages – 15 if you count Babylonian and Assyrian as their own – and at least four language families all around the Near and Middle East. But the modern Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, have some form of alphabet – most of which are abjads, which primarily represent consonant sounds without letters for vowels. How did this happen?

Around 750 BC, the Akkadian-speaking cuneiform-writing Assyrian Empire adopted Aramaic as an official second language. By the next century, Aramaic and its simpler-to-write alphabet almost entirely replaced Akkadian and cuneiform in the empire – and, as such, it was spread across the Near and Middle East, becoming the new “lingua franca,” or commercial language of the region. While cuneiform lived on in ceremonial writing until about the first century AD, scratching wedge-shaped characters onto dried clay tablets just couldn’t compete with the new system of writing.

When we continue our journey through the history of language, we’ll look at Aramaic – a 3,000-year-old language still spoken by more than 400,000 people today.

1. The wedge-like characters the Sumerian people scratched onto clay tablets called cuneiform appeared around 3,400 to 3,300 BC.
2. While cuneiform was developed specifically to write Sumerian, that language fell out of use but cuneiform spread, adapted by as many as 13 other languages.
3. Cuneiform lived on in ceremonial writing until about the first century AD.