History of Europe, ancient and medieval: Earliest man, the Orient, Greece and Rome . (p. 24, n. i). Trade and government led these people to make records,scratched in rude pictures with the tip of a reed on a flat pieceof soft clay. Speed in writing simplified these pictures intogroups of wedge-shaped marks, once the lines of the picture(Fig. 21). Hence these signs are called cuneiform, meaningwedge-form, writing (Latin cuneus, wedge). This writingwas phonetic, but did not possess alphabetic signs. The Sumerian system of numerals was not based on tens, buthad the unit sixty as a basis. A large
History of Europe, ancient and medieval: Earliest man, the Orient, Greece and Rome . (p. 24, n. i). Trade and government led these people to make records,scratched in rude pictures with the tip of a reed on a flat pieceof soft clay. Speed in writing simplified these pictures intogroups of wedge-shaped marks, once the lines of the picture(Fig. 21). Hence these signs are called cuneiform, meaningwedge-form, writing (Latin cuneus, wedge). This writingwas phonetic, but did not possess alphabetic signs. The Sumerian system of numerals was not based on tens, buthad the unit sixty as a basis. A large number was given as somany sixties, just as we employ a score (fourscore, fivescore).From this unit of sixty has descended our division of the circle(six sixties) and of the hour and minute. 1 Probably earlier than the wheel in the Swiss lake-villages of the Late StoneAge (§10). 44 History of Europe 65. The Sumerian Temple-Towers, Houses, and Towns. Almost in the center of the Plain of Shinar rose a tall tower. Itwas of sun-dried brick, for there was no stone in all Fig. 21. Early Sumerian Clay Tablet with Cuneiform, orWedge-Form, Writing (Twenty-eighth Century ) This tablet was written toward the close of the early period of the city-kings(§ 66), a generation before the accession of Sargon I (§ 67). It containsbusiness accounts. The scribes writing-reed, or styhi-s, was usually square-tipped. He pressed a corner of this square tip into the soft clay for each lineof the picture sign. Lines so produced tended to be broad at one end andpointed at the other, that is, wedge-shaped. Each picture sign thus becamea group of wedges, as shown in Ancient Times, Fig. 80. When the clay driedit was hard enough to make the tablet a fairly permanent record. Suchtablets were sometimes baked and thus became as hard as pottery.(By permission of Dr. Hussey) It was the dwelling of Enlil, the great Sumerian god of the tower served as an artificial mountain, probably buil
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