Cuneiform Reflection

What difficulties did you have? Was it easier or harder than using English? Was it hard to read your partners cuneiform, how?

Since a few weeks we have been studying the beginning of civilizations and writing. Every city/country has some differences from the other with writing; the oldest form of writing is cuneiform. This type of writing includes only symbols and it is understandable in nearly every language but might seem different every time you translate it. As my class and I were doing this activity, the hardest part about writing and drawing the symbols was that you could not outline nor make a mistake, if you did then you just had to go with it because in the ancient times, when one would write on clay, he couldn’t erase. In my perspective writing in English and with normal writing is much more easier, this might be because I am used to it and I use I every day, however if I were to only write cuneiform I might get used to it. I noticed that writing with symbols takes much more space than writing with letters and that they get confusing when you try to put them apart to figure out a sentence. While writing, I could not memorize one symbol so I kept on looking back to make sure I wrote the right letters, but imagining people in the olden days memorizing these symbols and writing them on soft clay must have been hard because if you messed up one symbol you messed up the whole sentence. I was going to start out with my sentence being: “The Sumerians were smart people who created these weird symbols you are reading so they could communicate,” now imagine that sentence in a format 6times bigger, and with symbols which take up a lot of space, because of the paper we received I decided to shorten my sentence down to: “Sumerians created these weird symbols.”  The hardest part of writing in cuneiform was making all the symbols the same size and keeping distance between them so they look like one word if they weren’t. However, because I didn’t have enough time, I had to rush which might have changed the symbols a bit, but my partner understood most of the sentence.

                When it came to reading my partners sentence, all the fun began.  It was hard to read my partners sentence because some of the symbols were totally different from the box with the alphabet the teacher gave us, however after asking her I understood what she meant. The good thing about cuneiform is that it doesn’t matter what type of handwriting one has, because it’s all just symbols. The thing about reading cuneiform is that a lot of the symbols are similar because they have triangular shaped symbols and they intersect. My partner’s sentence was: “Trade of four horses at ur city.” I was lucky that the sentence was short otherwise I would have messed up and been frustrated from the fact that there are many symbols. However I am happy that writing was invented and developed into letters instead of symbols.