It is referred to as the cushion clay tablet and it is believed to have been
made around 2600 BC. This tablet shows the details of the transaction
of grains. The upper part means 135,000 liters.
This is the item in question: barley. They drew it as it is.
The left side represents the terms of the transaction. It says 37 months.
This tablet is a record that somebody lent or borrowed 135,000 liters of
barley for a period of 37 months. What, then, do these symbols mean?
According to research, the sound represented by these symbols is coushem.
Unlike the other symbols found on these ancient relics, the meaning
of these are a mystery.
The two signs in these early tablets, coushem, are puzzling because
they don't mean anything.
Um, these two signs individually each have a meaning but together
they don't seem to mean anything.
And so, it's been suggested quite plausibly that this is somebody's name.
That somebody wrote these two signs because the name sounded the same way.
A coom sign meaning something, and a shim sign meaning something else but together
just somebody's name.
The phonetic symbols coo and shim came together to form cooshim,
a symbol that represents a sound. This marked the beginning of salavak writing.
It was the birth of rebus writing system. A single example of rebus can be found
using a car and a cat. This representation,
however, does not mean a car and a cat. The sounds of the words represented
by these pictographs, car and pet, could be used to mean something completely
different. In this case, carpet. These symbols, meaningless by
themselves, come together to form a word. This type of writing system is known a rebus,
a representation of words in the form of pictures or symbols.
In the modern era this concept is seen as quite simple and basic
but for people in ancient times the adoption of a rebus writing system
was a truly revolutionary development.
With the adoption of more complex rebuses, the number of cuneiforms ranged from
about 1500 to about 600. The previously complicated pictures became simpler.
More advanced forms of cuneiform were found in relics north of Moor.
The most famous among them were from the poor.