ABSTRACT
By the late second millennium BC cuneiform script, which had originally been created in Mesopotamia, had spread throughout the ancient Near East. Its presence was particularly noticeable in the countries to the west of Mesopotamia in a broad band stretching from Anatolia, through Syria and Palestine, and even to Egypt. Trade is both an intuitively obvious means of the spread of culture, and a documented factor in the evidence from Anatolia of Assyrian trading colonies, particularly at Kultepe. Medicine was not the only skill imported to Anatolia. The evidence from Hattusa is rich in divination manuals. In the age of parity treaties between the great powers in the late second millennium, kings sent gifts to each other and expressed concerns for the health of fellow monarchs, both rhetorically and practically. Leaving aside the unanswerable questions of the differences in everyday use of cuneiform, most likely reason for the loss of cuneiform in west was that it represented an elite usage.
