CUMMINS 



1670 



CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 



in recognition of his services a monument to 

 him has been erected on the road near Wheel- 

 ing, W. Va. Because of the increasing im- 

 portance of the railroads in stimulating west- 

 ward immigration, construction work on the 

 government highway was stopped in 1840. 

 Each of the various states through which it 

 passed was eventually given control of that 

 portion of the road included within it. 



CUM'MINS, ALBERT BAIRD (1850- ), an 

 American lawyer and political leader, one of 

 the leading progressive members of the Re- 

 publican party, three times governor of Iowa 

 and since 1908 United States Senator from that 

 state. Cummins 

 was born on Feb- 

 ruary 15, 1850, at 

 Carmichaels, Pa. 

 After a schooling 

 at the academy 

 in the neighbor- 

 ing town of 

 Waynesburg, h e 

 studied surveying 

 and became a 

 railroad civil en- 

 gineer. He later 

 studied law, was 

 admitted to the 

 bar of Illinois in 1875 and practiced in Chicago 

 for three years. In Des Moines, which became 

 his home in 1878, he was soon conspicuous as a 

 Republican orator and campaign organiser. He 

 was Presidential elector-at-large, chairman of 

 the Republican state convention and delegate 

 to the national convention in 1892, and there- 

 after was conspicuous at nearly every state and 

 national convention of his party. He was 

 several times considered as a candidate for 

 Vice-President, and in 1912 sought the nomina- 

 tion for President. He refused to leave the 

 Republican party in that year, although he 

 was in general sympathy with the Progressive 

 party and opposed the methods by which 

 President Taft was renominated. 



Cummins first became a national figure about 

 1900, as the chief sponsor of the "Iowa idea," 

 which called for a reduction in the existing 

 high tariffs. In Iowa he was the leader of the 

 progressive Republicans who opposed the Con- 

 servatives led by Senator William B. Allison. 

 In 1902, 1904, 1906 and again in 1908 he was 

 elected governor, but resigned a month before 

 the end of his third term in order to become 

 United States Senator, filling out the unexpired 

 term of Senator Allison. He made a thorough 



ALBERT B. CUMMINS 



study of railroad regulation- and the control 

 of other corporations, and his terms as governor 

 were noteworthy for advanced trust legislation. 

 In the Senate he became one of the leaders of 

 a steadily-growing number who sought and 

 secured progressive legislation. 



CUNEIFORM, ku ne' i jorm, INSCRIP- 

 TIONS, the name given to the wedge-shaped 

 characters used in one of the earliest forms of 

 writing known to man. Cuneiform is from the 

 Latin word cuneus, meaning a wedge. This sys- 



MEANING 



The sun 



God, 

 heaven 



Mountai n 



Man 



Ox 



Fish 



Outline 

 Charac- 



ter 

 4500 B.C 



/MTK 



={> 



Cunei - 

 form 



2500B.C. 



xj 



Assyrian 

 700B.C. 



*- 



Baby- 

 lonian 



500 B.C. 



EXAMPLES OF CUNEIFORM WRITING 



tern of writing originated in Babylonia at a re- 

 mote and unknown date, and was invented by 

 a primitive race of people called Sumerians, 

 who developed it from a crude form of picture- 

 writing. From stone they turned to clay as 

 a writing material, using a sharp-pointed instru- 

 ment, or stylus, which was triangular in shape, 

 and which made wedgelike impressions in the 

 soft clay. In this way cuneiform characters 

 originated. Adopted by the Semitic Baby- 

 lonians about 4500 B. c., cuneiform writing 

 was taken over by the Assyrians and other 

 peoples of Western Asia and by the Egyptians, 

 and was in use until the first century before 

 the Christian Era. The inscriptions were made 

 both on clay tablets and on stone. 



Each sign employed consists of a wedge or 

 a combination of wedges written from left to 

 right. The wedge points to the right, down- 

 wards or aslant, and sometimes two are joined 

 to form an angle. Cuneiform writing is diffi- 

 cult to translate, because a character may 

 represent a whole syllable or a word, and the 

 system is therefore extremely complicated. Of 

 the various forms of this writing the Persian 

 is the simplest, because each sign stands either 

 for a word or for a consonant and a vowel. 

 The Assyro-Babylonian system is the most 



