Edward Hincks was the first to recognize in 1850 that Assyrian cuneiform was not originally invented to record a Semitic language. His foresight was remarkable. Indeed, the debate surrounding the existence of a non-Semitic language predating Assyrian shook the world of specialists for half a century, from 1850 to 1905: by then, the existence of the Sumerian language had become indisputable.
The syllabaries in the library of Assurbanipal in Nineveh played anessential role in the discovery of a language older than Assyrian. The same sign was to be read AN when it meant "heaven" and DINGIR when it meant "god". Hence the question posed by the first decipherers: wasn't there a language in which "heaven" was AN and "god" DINGIR? Logic would have it that it was for this language that cuneiform writing was invented: Assyrian would simply have borrowed and adapted it. This would explain the mixture of logographic and phonetic notations found in Assyrian texts: "sky" could be written with the logogram AN (a single signifying sign) or with the syllabic sequence šá-mu-ú, rendering the Assyrian word šamû "sky".
