THROUGHOUT the whole history of cuneiform writing, with the Babylonians and Assyrians it continued a syllabic system. There was no development with them of alphabetic characters.
The first evidences we have as yet of such development through this cuneiform was at the time when the Medes, an Aryan people related to the Persians, received from the primitive or earlier inhabitants of Media their system of writing.
These Proto-Medic tribes were a Turanian people of Ural-Altaic stock speaking an agglutinative language. Their system of writing was the cuneiform, and had been a development from the Semitic Babylonian script.
In the adaptations of this to the requirements of an agglutinative speech a process of simplifying had occurred quite similar to that which the Japanese present upon the transmission to them of the graphic system of the Chinese.
The Semitic Babylonian system which was originally adopted from the cuneiform of a Turanian people, had developed a complicated and cumbrous method of writing, including over five hundred signs. This had arisen in the attempts to adapt a syllabary and characters expressing an agglutinative speech to the uses of a Semitic language.
It was from this that the Persian cuneiform was derived, and in the further simplicity which appeared in the transmission of this to an Aryan people, and its applications to an Aryan speech, that we find a development towards alphabetism.
With the adoption of the Proto-Medic cuneiform by the Medes and Persians, many of the syllabic signs, instead of representing syllables came on the acrologic principle to be used as alphabetic characters.
As certain of these signs retained a syllabic character, the Persian cuneiform was never a pure alphabet, though far on the way to this as early as the period of the Achæmenian kings.
Dr. Taylor says of this: