CUNEIFORM WRITING. The cuneiform or « wedge-shaped” system of writing takes its name from the wedgelike form of its characters, which were once extensively used over Western Asia. It has sometimes been called “arrow-headed” from the supposed resemblance of the several strokes which compose a character to the head of an arrow. The characters were originally hieroglyphics, each denoting an object or idea, and, like the Chinese, were gradually corrupted into the forms we see on the Assyrian monuments. They were invented by the primitive Accadian population of Chaldea, who spoke an agglutinative language, and were borrowed from them by their Semitic conquerors, the Babylonians and Assyrians. The characters had come to be used phonetically as well as ideographically even in Accadian times; but they were not redacted into a systematic syllabary until the Semites changed the Accadian words they represented into as many phonetic values. The abundance of clay in Babylonia caused this material to be largely employed for writing purposes, and the impress of the metal style upon it gave the characters their wedge-like appearance. The Semites carried the new syllabary with them into Assyria, and, as in Babylonia, continued to employ it both as a syllabary and as a collection of ideographs; that is to say, a character might not only denote a mere unmeaning syllable, but an idea as well. As each character had answered to several different Accadian words, the Assyrian syllabary by changing these words into phonetic values became necessarily polyphonous. In the 9th century b.c. the Alarodian tribes of Armenia borrowed a selected number of characters and ideographs from the Assyrian syllabary, giving to each character one value only. At a subsequent date the “Turanian” ...