Modern people's understanding of the history of ancient countries mainly relies on written information. Chinese characters are one of the oldest scripts in the world, with a history of about 6,000 years. There are three main types of ancient scripts found elsewhere in the world: pictorial hieroglyphs used by the Egyptians around 3500 BC, alphabets invented by the Phoenicians more than 1000 BC, and cuneiform scripts used by the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians.
The identification of cuneiform is very similar to the process of identification of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This matter goes back 2500 years.
It was in March 522 BC. At that time, the Persian emperor Cambyses led a large army on an expedition to Egypt. A monk named Gomeda, posing as his brother Baldia, who had been executed by Cambyses, launched a rebellion throughout Persia and in the Medes. The rebellion lasted for half a year. Emperor Cambyses died of a sudden illness on his way back to Persia from Egypt. For a time, the Persian nobles were leaderless. At this time, a nobleman named Darius used conspiracy to obtain the throne. He finally put down the rebellion. In recognition of his exploits, Darius had him quelled, and the course of the rebellion was carved on a large rock near the village of Behiston on the outskirts of the Median capital of Akbatana (present-day Hamadan, Iran). This is the famous Beheston Lady.
Besiston inscription. It is also inscribed in three scripts: cuneiform, Neo-Elamite and Ancient Persian. 18 35 years, by chance, the French scholar Rollinson discovered this inscription and made it into a taupe. In 1843, he translated the Ancient Persian language, and then compared the Ancient Persian with the cuneiform script, and finally read the cuneiform script. Since then, the mystery of cuneiform writing has been solved.
First, the writing is pictographic. If you want to represent a complex meaning, use two symbols together, for example, "day" plus "water" means "rain"; "Eyes" plus "water" means "crying" and so on. Later, it was developed that a symbol can be used to represent multiple meanings, such as "foot" can also mean "walking", "standing", etc., which is the ideographic symbol.
Later, a symbol can also represent a sound, such as the wedge word "star", pronounced "um" in Sumerian, if used to indicate pronunciation, it has nothing to do with the original meaning of the word "star", only the pronunciation, which is the phonetic symbol.
In order to indicate what the relevant wedge should mean and what sound it should mean, the Sumerians invented the radical script. For example, if a person's name is preceded by a special symbol, it means that it is a man's name.
The Sumerians did not yet know how to make paper. They made rectangular clay tablets out of clay, cut them into triangular tips with reeds or wooden sticks and carved them on them, and then dried the clay tablets or roasted them over fire. This is what later people called clay tablets. At first, the Sumerian clay tablets were round or angled cone-shaped, which was not easy to write and store, and later the Sumerians changed the clay plates to square ones. Most of the Sumerian written material was engraved on this square clay tablet and preserved. Up to now, tens of thousands of such clay tablets have been excavated in the Two Rivers Valley.
Because the Sumerians used a "pen" made of reed stalks or wooden sticks with a triangular tip, the imprint at the pen was deep and wide, and the pen was thinner and narrower, and later people called this ancient script in the Two Rivers Valley cuneiform script.
Cuneiform later spread to many parts of western Asia, and it made significant contributions to human civilization. After the fall of the last Sumerian dynasty in 2007 BC, the Babylonian kingdom inherited this cultural heritage and developed it even more.