Writing Quote by Angel Sáenz-Badillos

“Thus, Sumerian writing came to consist of a complex mixture of three types of signs: logograms, referring to a whole word or name; phonetic…

— Jared Diamond

“It didn’t disturb the Sumerians that their script was ill-suited for writing poetry. They didn’t invent it in order to copy spoken language, but…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“The kings of the First Babylonian Dynasty wrote their votive inscriptions sometimes in Sumerian, sometimes in Semitic Babylonian; at other times they employed both…

— Leonard William King

“M. Halévy started a theory to the effect that Sumerian was not a language at all, in the proper sense of the term, but…

— Leonard William King

“Perhaps the most important single step in the whole history of writing was the Sumerians’ introduction of phonetic representation, initially by writing an abstract…

— Jared Diamond

“Although vowels are indicated in the cuneiform syllabaries, they are lacking from the alphabetic scripts of the Northwest and South.”

— Angel Sáenz-Badillos

“The Sumerian language was originally that of the hunter and fisher peoples, who lived in the marshland and the Eastern Arabia littoral region, and…

— Margarethe Uepermann

Reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at…

— Julian Jaynes

“Besides Sumerian cuneiform, the other certain instance of independent origins of writing in human history comes from Native American societies of Mesoamerica, probably southern…

— Jared Diamond

“The 379 letters from Tell el-Amarna ... are cuneiform tablets ... date from around 1385-1355 BCE ... include Canaanite glosses ... from the scribes'…

— Angel Sáenz-Badillos

“while the examples of their art and the representations of their form and features, which were also afforded by the diggings at Telloh, proved…

— Leonard William King

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

— Margaret Atwood