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| Keywords: GEME-amtu-Cuneiform-sign-history.svg Graphic showing the historical development of the Sumerian sign GEME Akkadian amtu Borger no 558 from the origins of the cuneiform writing system to its later stages ;Upper left One of the earliest forms of the cuneiform sign used to write GEME the Sumerian word for female slave It can be seen that it is compounded from the MUNUS / SAL cuneiform sign a schematized drawing of the female pubic triangle with the basic meaning woman and the KUR cuneiform sign a schematized drawing of hills with the basic meaning mountains apparently because slaves were imported to Mesopotamia from the mountainous Zagros area at that period ;Upper right Early Sumerian version of the sign after the orientation of writing started to change from a top-to-bottom direction along vertical columns to a left-to-right direction along horizontal rows This change apparently took a long time to be fully completed so that forms of the sign at upper right and middle left could also sometimes be rotated clockwise 90° ;Middle left and middle right Later forms of the sign second millennium BCE after pictographic drawings gave way to abstract wedge shapes ;Lower left and lower right Variant renderings of the late Assyrian first millennium BCE form of the sign after the cuneiform script was changed so that the head of a wedge was generally never below or to the right of its tail Own based on publicly-available information MUNUS-SAL-sinnishtu Cuneiform svg Vulva symbols svg Reference Writing Systems A Linguistic Introduction by Geoffrey Sampson ISBN 0-8047-1756-7 p 52 supplemented by standard reference works Converted to SVG and uploaded to Commons 2010 AnonMoos Self-made graphic declared to be public domain Sumerian signs | ||||
