게시일 : 2019.05.21

[강남YBM토플] 배주은쌤의 토플배경지식 – 수메르의 쐐기문자

수메르 문명의 쐐기문자 sumerian cuneiform를 한번 보시면 왜 쐐기라는 이름이 붙었는지 알 수 있습니다.

쐐기wedge처럼 생겼기 때문이죠.

Sumerian civilization은 근처의 이집트의 파피루스와는 다르게 clay tablet에 글씨는 쓰는

sumerian cuneiform이 있었다고 합니다. 그것의 장점들이 시험에서 나열되었는데요...

1. 불에 구우면 burn ^^;;;하면 더 durable해진다.

2. easily accessilble

3. cheaper to produce

그래서 나중에 assyria와 babylon에서

표음문자화 시키게 되는 얘기가 시험에 나왔다고 합니다.

또 한가지 Cuneiform은 전문 필경사 scriber들만이 사용할 수 있는 언어였다고 하네요.

위키의 내용의 빌려오자면

Cuneiform script is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs. In the three millennia the script spanned, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract as the number of characters in use also grew gradually smaller, from about 1,000 unique characters in the Early Bronze Age to about 400 unique characters in Late Bronze Age.

The original Sumerian script was adapted for the writing of the Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Luwian, Hattic, Hurrian, and Urartian languages, and it inspired the Ugaritic and Old Persian alphabets. Cuneiform writing was gradually replaced by the Phoenician alphabet during the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and by the 2nd century AD, the script had become extinct.

Cuneiform documents were written on clay tablets, by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. The impressions left by the stylus were wedge shaped, thus giving rise to the name cuneiform ("wedge shaped", from the Latin cuneus, meaning "wedge").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform