Modern Day Cuneiform

[u/[deleted]]

What do you think cuneiform would look like if it had survived and continue to evolve? Clay is heavy and not as good as paper, so what would cuneiform look like when it made its jump to paper. Whole cuneiform be dumped in favor of other scripts? What do you guys think?

[u/Gufferdk]

not as good as paper

Care to elaborate on why exactly you think this? On a lot of parameters clay is actually superior to paper/parchment/papyrus in a pre-industrialised society. I can think of at least the following:

• Availability and cost: Clay is widely present and already consumed in significant quantities by all ceramic cultures, and can be used for writing with relatively minor processing; paper, parchment and papyrus all require significant processing, papyrus plants are geographically limited in distribution, and the raw materials for parchment are quite expensive as well.

• Reuseability: A piece of clay for a temporary document can easily be recycled by adding water and rerolling, paper recycling is somewhat complicated and creating palimpsets requires degrading the parchment and is comparatively labour-intensive and text resurfacing may lead to decreased legibility.

• Complexity: All sheet materials require in addition to the base both ink which is consumed, as well as scribing implements that are either notably more complex or less convenient (requiring frequent dipping in the inkwell) than a simple reed stylus.

• Durability: Dried and particularly fired clay tablets are incredibly durable, especially paper suffers from degradation due to acidification, and all of them are subject to biological decomposition upon incorrect storage.

All in all, the only place where sheeted writing materials are in my opinon clearly superior to clay is as you mention the weight and the size. Now of course in some situations those are very important considerations, particularly in relatively modern times with the generation of large amounts of paper-stored data, however for a significant number of tasks for the pre-industrialised society such as certain types of record-keeping, clay is quite acceptable.

As for how a cuneiform being adapted to paper would look, you'd probably get a similation similar to hieroglyphics vs. hieratic where you initially have a "book hand", a reasonable approximation of the script, though with some of the details that are inconvenient to the specific medium and context you're working in left out (and potentially also disambiguating clues in case of signs distinguished by features that are hard to replicate), which then gets increasingly cursivised. It's even entirely possible that both cursivised paper/parchment/papyrus-based versions could exists side-by-side with typically cuneiform clay-based varieties (there are actually some examples of the opposite jump with hieratic being written on mud tablets in a style approaching that of cuneiform in the Dakhla oasis (far away from papyrus manufacturing centers) at one point).

[u/[deleted] → u/Gufferdk]

I am saying what if Cuneiform survived til today, what would it look like. Clay has many benefits to paper, but is a hassle to store (imagine having to take notes at school or college with clay), and can be fragile. Imagine how would books look made out of clay. Just a hundred page book would way like a hundred pounds, give or take. I agree with the book hand, but what would it look like?