1186 writing: The Middle East lution was to impress another symbol on the outside of the bulla for each token it contained In time the documentation system was simplified by writing transactions on flat clay tablets 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 offshoots 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 stylus 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 fire of the burning libraries actually hardened and preserved the clay Thus, large collections of tablets are preserved from Nineveh, Assur, Ur, Uruk, Mari, Ebla, Ugarit, and many other cities that were destroyed by fire Egyptians learned of cuneiform through trade contacts with Mesopotamia and, after 3000 b.c.e., created their own hieroglyphic script that shared many features with cuneiform 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 office 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 Akkadian and Sumerian survived as scholarly, religious, and literary languages until the first century c.e., in much the Clay tablet with Babylonian inscription, found in the treasury of Persepolis, Persia (modern-day Iran) (Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago) same way Latin did in western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire As early as 1900 b.c.e many people who spoke northwest Semitic languages developed the first alphabetic writing This ancestor of the alphabetic scripts used in the modern world is known as the Proto-Sinaitic script because it was first discovered in graffiti 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 consonants in Semitic languages; systems of adding vowels in Semitic languages were not developed until the Middle Ages (ca 1000 c.e.) The city of Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast of modern Syria was destroyed by invaders about 1200 b.c.e Several 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 The influence of the cuneiform script among northwest Semitic speakers was so great that every city would have had scribes and scribal schools trained in cuneiform The new form of writing, therefore, must have been developed in an appeal to the prestige of cuneiform writing while maintaining the relative ease of an alphabetic script Ugaritic also reveals the first 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 This 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.), after 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 first 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 The Greek alphabet was passed on to the Etruscans and then the Romans, who modified it into the Latin alphabet that is still used for many Western languages The Phoenician alphabet was adapted by people all over the Near East and turned into a different alphabet by the speakers of each Semitic language The most important language in the Iron Age was Aramaic People in Mesopotamia 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 cuneiform on clay tablets, most written pieces, such as personal letters, were probably composed in this way Because papyrus and vellum are highly perishable materials, however, very