0 of a form of writing used for over 3,000 years until the 1st century BC in the ancient countries of Western Asia
1 pointed at one end and wide at the other:
cuneiform bones
2 a form of writing used for over 3,000 years until the 1st century BC in the ancient countries of Western Asia:
3 an ancient Mesopotamian and Persian form of writing in which thin wooden sticks with triangular ends are pressed into wet clay.
He taught himself to read Assyrian cuneiform during lunch hours in the British Museum.
This tale was written 4,000 years ago, but was only translated from cuneiform in the 1970s.
The early chapters deal with hieroglyphic and cuneiform systems - the "seedbed from which the alphabet sprang" (p. 57).
Classicists were uninterested, theologians were hostile, and even other orientalists usually treated the discipline's new subfield with suspicion if not contempt (most liberal-era orientalists did not learn cuneiform).
Cuneiform texts were written on clay tablets, on which symbols were drawn with a blunt reed used as a stylus.
Cuneiform literally means wedge-shaped, due to the triangular tip of the stylus used for impressing signs on wet clay.
Its contents consisted of 70 cuneiform tablets comprising 7,000 celestial omens.
