WI: Cuneiform Survives

Is there any way that cuneiform could have survived until modern day as a common writing system -- and as a logographic system preferably -- much like Chinese script?
 
I doubt it. Cuneiform has neither the advantages of CHinese (it doesn't translate across language barriers) or of Aramaic script (it's bloody hard to learn). Of course it could survive into modernity as a kind of prestige or ritual form if a cultural substrate continues (both hieroglyphics and cuneiform continued into Roman and Arsacid times in that role). But without removing the competing writing system, it's unlikely it will continue in common use.
 
But without removing the competing writing system, it's unlikely it will continue in common use.

So why not remove the competing writing system? Say that the Phoenicians never developed their alphabet.
 
If you buy into the theory that Ponecian/ProtoSinai writing was inspired by the shapes of Egyptian heiroglyphs, then you could have them develop an alphabetic system inspired by cuneiform instead. That's not exactly "surviving cuneiform," but it would mean the survival of a tradition with cuneiform roots.
 
I doubt it. Cuneiform has neither the advantages of CHinese (it doesn't translate across language barriers)

Wasn't it adopted for Akkadian from entirely unrelated Sumerian?
In fact, I think I've heard somewhere that in most of the 2nd millenium BC, Babylonian-style cuneiform was the main script of most languages in the general area (Hittite, Elamite, etc - basically everyone but Egyptians and Minoans).

If you buy into the theory that Ponecian/ProtoSinai writing was inspired by the shapes of Egyptian heiroglyphs, then you could have them develop an alphabetic system inspired by cuneiform instead. That's not exactly "surviving cuneiform," but it would mean the survival of a tradition with cuneiform roots.

Wasn't this what Achaemenid-era Persian was?
IIRC, in the famous Behistun inscription, all three languages were written using some sort of cuneiform.
It's only those pesky Greeks that got in the way - if Persia won the Greek-Persian wars (and/or wasn't conquered by Alexander), their script might well have survived for a much longer time...
PS: Ugarit also did the same, about a millenium earlier. Persia was much larger, though.
PPS: BTW, if I understand it correctly, it's "Phoenician".
 
Wasn't this what Achaemenid-era Persian was?
IIRC, in the famous Behistun inscription, all three languages were written using some sort of cuneiform.
It's only those pesky Greeks that got in the way - if Persia won the Greek-Persian wars (and/or wasn't conquered by Alexander), their script might well have survived for a much longer time...
PS: Ugarit also did the same, about a millenium earlier. Persia was much larger, though.
PPS: BTW, if I understand it correctly, it's "Phoenician".

Ha, that's one of the worst-spelled posts I've ever made. It was the cap on a long night of insomnia, so there's my excuse.

Of course, the Persian cuneiform script. *smacks head* There's your best chance for survival right there. As the script of a major world empire, it definitely had the opportunity to spread. And it was just about a true alphabet, marking both vowels and consonants, so it theoreically has just as much utility and adaptability as Phoenecian.

Looking more into it, I see that the Achaemenids actually administered their empire using the Aramaic language, written, of course, in a Semitic script derived from the Phoenecian. That, it seems, is what kept Persian cuneiform from spreading, not the Greeks. Maybe Darius and his successors could start to promote the Persian alphabetic cuneiform in place of the Semitic letters, even using cuneiform to write the Aramaic language. Then, even after the eventual fall of the empire, cuneiform could be the standard written form for Middle Eastern languages.

[edit] Here's Omniglot's chart of Persian cuneiform letters: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/opcuneiform.htm
 
Is there any way that cuneiform could have survived until modern day as a common writing system -- and as a logographic system preferably -- much like Chinese script?

I doubt it could have survived in its original form...i.e. a syllabic script intended to be written by impressing a reed stylus into clay. Syllabic scripts just about always lose when alphabetic scripts are introduced. Alphabetic scripts are just more easily learned, more adaptable, and generally superior. And writing in clay will, of necessity, go the way of the dinosaur as soon as paper becomes widely available as a writing medium.

However, that is not to say that cuneiform, in the form of a wedge-shaped script derived from the original Sumerian/Akkadian cuneiform syllabic script, could not have survived.

The bronze-age city of Ugarit actually developed an ALPHABETIC cuneiform script that, had the city survived the great catastrophe of c. 1200 BC, might have been further simplified and more widely adopted, and become a challenger to the later alphabetic scripts which apparently derived from Sinaitic heiroglyphs and later led to the Phoenician, Greek, and Latin alphabets.

EDIT: The Persian cuneiform spoken of by earlier posters was not truly alphabetic. It was also syllabic in character, and contained logograms for commonly used words, both of which features would have made it harder to learn than the truly alphabetic Ugaritic version.
 
Last edited:
I was under the impression that it was originally logographic, like the modern Chinese script.

Well, the early pictograms from which cuneiform was derived may have been logographic. The classical cuneiform script used in Sumeria, Akkad, and elsewhere was syllabic.
 
EDIT: The Persian cuneiform spoken of by earlier posters was not truly alphabetic. It was also syllabic in character, and contained logograms for commonly used words, both of which features would have made it harder to learn than the truly alphabetic Ugaritic version.

Persian cuneiform's been described as "semi alphabetic" - if you look at the chart, some syllables have their own glyphs, but others have to be constructed from vowels and consonants. Furthermore, there are only five logograms in the sources I see - & there's nothing wrong with a small # of those ... even true alphabets have a small % of glyphs that function as logograms, right?

But more to the point, the Ugaritic script did not have a major empire behind it, making it less likely, from an alternate history standpoint.
 
Top