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(a large cuneiform inscription found on the south side of the Van Castle hill, four kilometres west of modern-day Van, in ‘eastern turkey’)
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It’s several metres tall and wide, 25 centuries old and the message comes from the Persian king Xerxes.
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(in Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite, it says (roughly)…)
“Ahuramazda is the great god, the greatest god who created the sky and created the land and created humans
Who gave prosperity to the humans
Who made Xerxes king
King of many kings,
being the only ruler of the totality of all lands
“I am Xerxes,
the great king,
the king of kings,
the king of the lands,
king of all the languages,
king of the great and large land,
the son of king Darius the Achaemenian”
The king Xerxes says:
“the king Darius, my father, praised be Ahuramazda, made a lot of good,
and this mountain, he ordered to work its cliff and he wrote nothing on it
so, me, I ordered to write here.
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(may ‘ahuramazda’ protect me, with all the gods and so my kingdom and what I have done)
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*3000BC*
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(/kjuːˈniːᵻfɔːrm/ kew-nee-i-form or /ˈkjuːnᵻfɔːrm/ kew-ni-form)
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*”cuneiform script” (one of the earliest systems of writing) was invented by the ‘sumerians’*
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(it is distinguished by its ‘wedge-shaped marks’ on ‘clay tablets’, made by means of a ‘blunt reed’ for a ‘stylus’)
(the name cuneiform itself simply means “wedge shaped”)
(emerging in ‘sumer’ in the ‘late 4th millennium BC’ (the ‘uruk IV period’), ‘cuneiform writing’ began as a system of ‘pictograms’)
(in the ‘3rd millennium’, the ‘pictorial representations’ became simplified and more ‘abstract’ as the number of ‘characters’ in use grew smaller (‘hittite cuneiform’))
(the system consists of a combination of ‘logophonetic’, ‘consonantal alphabetic’, and ‘syllabic signs’)
(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 alphabet’ and ‘old persian cuneiform’)
(‘cuneiform writing’ was gradually replaced by the ‘phoenician alphabet’ during the ‘neo-assyrian empire’ (911–612 BC))
(by the ‘second century CE’, the ‘script’ had become extinct, and all knowledge of how to read it was lost until it began to be deciphered in the ’19th century’)
(between half a million and 2 million ‘cuneiform tablets’ are estimated to have been ‘excavated’ in ‘modern times’, of which only approximately 30,000 – 100,000 have been ‘read’ or ‘published’)
(the ‘british museum’ holds the largest collection (c. 130,000), followed by the ‘vorderasiatisches museum berlin’, the ‘louvre’, the ‘istanbul archaeology museums’, the “national museum of iraq’, the ‘yale babylonian collection’ (c.40,000), and ‘penn museum’)
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(most of these have “lain in these collections for a century without being translated/studied/published”, as there are only a few hundred qualified ‘cuneiformists’ in the world)
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👈👈👈☜*“ANCIENT ANTIQUITY”* ☞ 👉👉👉
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💕💝💖💓🖤💙🖤💙🖤💙🖤❤️💚💛🧡❣️💞💔💘❣️🧡💛💚❤️🖤💜🖤💙🖤💙🖤💗💖💝💘
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*🌈✨ *TABLE OF CONTENTS* ✨🌷*
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🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥*we won the war* 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥