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Product Description: As the first known system of writing, the cuneiform symbols traced in Sumerian clay more than six millennia ago were once regarded as a simplistic and clumsy attempt to record in linear form the sounds of a spoken language. More recently, scholars have acknowledged that early Sumerian writing—far from being a primitive and flawed mechanism that would be "improved" by the Phoenicians and Greeks—in fact represented a complete written language system, not only meeting the daily needs of economic and government administration, but also providing a new means of understanding the world...read more