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It also did not help that linguistics, until about the 1970s, focused on spoken living languages and regarded the study of writing systems, especially extinct ones, as being of peripheral interest.

Research on cuneiform was also retarded for more than a century by the much higher profile of Egyptology, which arose around the same time and drew many of the best and brighest away from Assyrology. Research on cuneiform was hampered by the fragmented nature of the tablets, many of which were broken into several pieces, with different pieces of the same tablet frequently stored at universities on three different continents. Some late Medieval, European travellers reported seeing strange symbols carved into the fronts of buildings in today's Iraq, but there was no follow-up until the mid-19th century, when archaeologists began to uncover pieces of clay tablets with what was clearly cuneiform written on them. Once cuneiform fell out of use around the beginning of the Christian Era, it was forgotten for nearly 1,500 years. Scholars dispute whether the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which are a totally different writing system, owe something to cuneiform or were invented independently. Although other writing systems were developed independently in China and by the Mayans, cuneiform is the oldest attested writing system, and evidence of any older writing systems has either not been discovered or not survived.

It was first used to write Sumerian, and later Akkadian and a number of other languages. Cuneiform was invented by the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern, relatively coastal Iraq between about 10,000 and 4,000 years ago.

That makes it the longest-lasting writing system in known history-longer than the Chinese writing system, which has existed for about 3,200 years. Cuneiform was a writing system used between roughly 5,300 and 1,950 years ago, so for more than 3,300 years.

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