Cuneiform - the Birth of Writing

It was the first of its kind; writing which sparked a cultural revolution, the tremors of which can still be felt today. But how did cuneiform script evolve, what languages did it influence and for what reason was it first used? The history of this fascinating paradigm takes us all over the ancient world, beginning in the fertile fields of the Mesopotamian plains.

Origins

To understand cuneiform, you must first delve into its birthplace. Fourth millennium BC Mesopotamia was a land full of opportunity, where the smallest tribe could lay claim to an entire continent. By that time the city-states of Sumer had begun to stamp their authority on the region, pioneering skills such as irrigation and social structuring. The sodden reaches stemming from the Persian Gulf were perfect at times for the growing of foods like barley, onions, grapes and apples.

However, the gulf’s two main tributaries – the Tigris and the Euphrates – were capable of destruction on a biblical scale, literally: many now believe the flooding of the two giants to be the basis for the Noah story. Whole villages, towns and cultures could be wiped out in a matter of days, not to mention the devastating loss in yields of crops. Thus the area needed ways of dealing with these two capricious life-givers, and rigid social structuring allowed local leaders to control Mesopotamian flood prevention and containment. Arguably the earliest such structuring, this is one reason Mesopotamia, and Sumer in particular, is known as the ‘Cradle of Civilization’.

Yet to get to the bottom of their greatest achievement you need to reach back to around 8,000 BC, to the ‘token era’. In a vast region comprising the modern states of Turkey, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Iraq and Iran, plain clay tokens were used simply to keep a record of the quantity of food, for example, someone took during a transaction. The ungainliness of needing to carry a hundred little clay tokens to signify a 100-bale sale of wheat seems almost ridiculous to modern observers, yet this system lasted for nearly four thousand years. It wasn’t until around 4,000 BC that the plain tokens began to be replaced by detailed ones around the Sumerian region. No surprise – many believe these advanced models to record numbers of manufactured goods, at a time when Sumer was rapidly growing in non-agricultural areas. In fact, one of the earliest caches of these tokens has been taken from the Temple of Inanna in Uruk. Seemingly it was the decorated tokens that showed the exchange of man-made materials which went to building the hallowed sanctuary.

Token Gestures

Tokens would be placed inside envelopes – though not quite the sort you’d use to send your granny an apologetically late birthday card. These were cumbersome clay pots. On the outside of the envelope would be indented the impressions of the number of tokens inside. Again, all this seems almost laughably strung-out (just picture the surly Sumerian builder counting his tokens at the end of a job). Why not just draw a symbol for a hundred bricks, when you could draw the symbols for ‘100’ and ‘brick’? Thus, around 3,500 – 3,000 BC the first pictograms began to appear on clay tablets, etched with reed, wedge-shaped styluses (hence the term ‘cuneiform’, from the Latin cuneus, meaning ‘wedge’). The earliest discovered evidence for this transition is the Kish Tablet, dated around 3,500 BC, which shows proto-cuneiform pictograms etched into a small limestone block. The tablet represents the transitional phase between proto-literacy and the first literacy, which can be traced to around 3,200 BC.

It was during this time - the Jemdet Nasr renaissance of southern Sumer - that the first Sumerian writing emerged. This was an easily identifiable series of symbols which represented a huge variety of things, all linked semantically (for example, the symbol for ‘mouth’ also represented ‘voice’ and ‘speak’). In the beginning of cuneiform, symbols invariably looked like their meanings. For example, a piece of barley looked like, well, a line. However this was soon elaborated, and phonetics soon came into play. The Sumerian word for barley was ‘she’. So the word ‘fig cake’, which was ‘she-er-ku’ was written by combining the two. Writing was born, and its evolution would be rapid.

Infectious Evolution

As centuries passed, cuneiform naturally became more elaborate and descriptive. Texts were written on cylinders, cones and rectangular tablets, and described anything from religious tales, to recipes, to farming techniques and transactions – and much more. Different languages were borne of Sumerian, notably Akkadian, which served the northern Assyrian and Babylonian portions of Mesopotamia, and Elamite which was used by the eastern kingdom of Elam. Cuneiform is indescribably important for historians looking back on the ancient world. They told of the dynasties of leadership, the population of cities, religious stories and values, wars and conquests, and daily life. Cuneiform essentially marked the moving from prehistory to history; the dawn of man’s posterity and retrospect of the great and the bad.

Yet there was another form of writing, which too had been around since the end of the 4th millennium BC – the Egyptian hieroglyph. Better known due to its ornate style and the dramatic nature of its deciphering, hieroglyphs were the records which speak of the empire’s great pharaohs, the architects of the pyramids and other monuments, and the wild intertwined web of Egyptian religion. Yet was it an evolution of cuneiform? Or had it sprung up entirely of its own accord? Both systems used pictograms and both made use of phonetics – yet surprisingly, no hard evidence exists which links the two. Most scholars agree that the chances hieroglyphs came into being without being prompted by their cuneiform cousins – especially as many of the nations of the region shared trade routes – is hugely unlikely. But for now that door must be left open.

Cuneiform was undoubtedly one of the world’s most important inventions; the caustic kindle that sparked the world’s biggest explosion in civilization. It was cuneiform that turned the Mesopotamians from a land of farming pioneers into the most modern, revolutionary culture for centuries, and led to the recording and cultural expansion leading to our own complex societies. So next time you’re reading a paper on the tube, you might want to say a little thanks to the Sumerians. Unless you’re reading The Sun.

Images by Mary Harrsch, Andre Nantel and Charlie Phillips.
 

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About The Author

Sean Williams (follow me: e-mail or )

Last three pieces by this author:

New York's Met Museum Records Best Attendance since 2001 | Bettany Hughes Publications you Can't go Without | 3,200-year-old Chariot Linchpin 'Proves Ancient Egyptian City in Israel'

Sean is an English Literature graduate, who currently works as a writer and journalist in London. He enjoys ancient history, theatre and sport. He does not enjoy Big Brother.