The Evolution of Writing: Cuneiform's Impact on History The development of writing was to facilitate long distance communication and trade and was the beginning of documented history. The alphabetic script of cuneiform was used all throughout Mesopotamia by different cultures but in their own languages such as the Assyrians the Elamites the Akkadians and the Babylonians Great works of literature which survived to us such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and Enhudana's Hymns to Inanna were composed in th

We might finally be able to read clay tablets from the birth of written language. Cuneiform was developed by the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia over 5000 years ago, and whilst there are actually more surviving cuneiform texts than in other ancient languages like Latin and Greek, we have only ever managed to translate a tiny portion of them. Thanks to a revolutionary breakthrough in imaging technology, that could be about to change. Oxford researchers have applied a technique called Reflectance