The Art of Early Writing with special reference to the Cuneiform System. by CLARK, CUMBERLAND

London: Mitre Press, 1938. First Edition. Hardcover. In exceptionally good condition/No Dust Jacket. Demy octavo, [21.25cm/8.5inches], full gilt-embossed algea-green cloth sans dust jacket, pp.151, indexed. Illustrated w/ 16 b-w halftone plates &tc. Please feel free to inquire as to particulars and/or additional photographs. ... Being a "readable" account of the earth's oldest extant system of writing. After cuneiform was replaced by alphabetic writing sometime after the first century A.D., the hundreds of thousands of clay tablets and other inscribed objects went unread for nearly 2,000 years. It wasn’t until the early nineteenth century, when archaeologists first began to excavate the tablets, that scholars could begin to attempt to understand these texts. One important early key to deciphering the script proved to be the discovery of a kind of cuneiform Rosetta Stone, a circa 500 B.C. trilingual inscription at the site of Bisitun Pass in Iran. Written in Persian, Akkadian, and an Iranian… Read More