What did the historians discover by decoding the cuneiform writing?
Answers
Answer:
Cuneiform[note 1] is a logo-syllabic script that was used to write at least fifteen languages of the Ancient Near East.[4][5] The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era.[6] It is named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions (Latin: cuneus) which form its signs. Cuneiform was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Along with Egyptian hieroglyphs, it is one of the earliest writing systems.
Over the course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages linguistically unrelated to Sumerian. Semitic Akkadian texts are attested from the 26th century BC onward and make up the bulk of the cuneiform record.[7][8] Assyrian cuneiform was itself adapted to write the Indo-European Hittite language sometime around the 17th century BC[9][10] The other languages with significant cuneiform corpora are Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, Persian and Urartian.
The latest known date for a cuneiform tablet is from 75 AD in Assyria.[11] The modern study of cuneiform writing begins with its decipherment in the mid-19th century, and belongs to the field of Assyriology. An estimated half a million tablets are held in museums across the world, but comparatively few of these are published. The largest collections belong to the British Museum (approx. 130,000 tablets), the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin, the Louvre, the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, the National Museum of Iraq, the Yale Babylonian Collection (approx. 40,000 tablets), and Penn Museum.[12]