History of Writing: How Cuneiform Began in Uruk

The first great city

We are in southern Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, around 3500 BC. The city of Uruk grows around temples, with a tall stepped tower, a ziggurat, rising above flat roofs. By about 3200 BC it may have had around 40,000 people, many times more than any earlier town. Canals watered the fields, and temples collected barley, wool and beer. That meant somebody had to keep track of who gave and who received. A big city runs on memory, and human memory was no longer enough.

Tokens and envelopes

Archaeologists have found thousands of small clay shapes, cones, spheres and discs, some from as early as 8000 BC. Each probably stood for a unit of goods: a measure of grain, a jar of oil, a sheep. Later the tokens were sealed inside hollow clay balls called bullae, and marks pressed on the outside showed what was inside. The researcher Denise Schmandt-Besserat proposed that these tokens led to writing. It is a theory, and not all scholars accept it, but it fits the idea that writing began with counting.

Accounts, not poems

Around 3300 to 3200 BC, someone in Uruk began to draw signs on flat clay tablets. About five thousand early tablets have been found there, and almost all are administrative lists. They record numbers, sheep, grain, beer and rations of workers. The first writing was not a poem or a prayer. It was bookkeeping. Scribes studied long lists of signs to learn the system. Scholars call this stage proto-cuneiform. Writing could not speak, but it could remember, and for the first time a promise or a debt could outlive the people who made it.

From picture to wedge

Drawing curves on soft clay was slow. Scribes found it faster to press the cut end of a reed into the clay. This left a wedge-shaped mark, and the script is called cuneiform from the Latin word cuneus, “wedge”. Watch a picture change: a star, the sign AN or DINGIR, came to mean “sky” and “god”, and the sign for “head” is SAG. Over centuries the signs turned on their side and lost their picture look. They also began to stand for sounds, which made it possible to write names and whole sentences. Cuneiform was used for about three thousand years.

Invented again, elsewhere

Writing was invented more than once. In Egypt, hieroglyphs appear around 3200 BC; the early labels on goods in a tomb at Abydos are among the oldest. Whether Egypt borrowed the idea from Mesopotamia is debated. In China, the oldest known writing is cut into oracle bones around 1200 BC, when kings of the Shang dynasty asked questions of their ancestors. In Mesoamerica, writing appears during the first millennium BC. Each time, a society had grown large and complicated, and needed to keep records or speak to the gods across time.

Stories on clay

Once people could write, they wrote stories. The Epic of Gilgamesh tells of a king of Uruk who loses his friend Enkidu and searches for life without end. It includes a story of a great flood. The best-known version fills twelve tablets, and copies were found in the library of King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Scholars rediscovered them in the nineteenth century. Even earlier, around 2300 BC, a priestess named Enheduanna composed hymns and signed them, the first author we know by name.

The laws of Hammurabi

Around 1754 BC King Hammurabi of Babylon had his laws carved on a black basalt stele about two metres tall. It lists 282 cases about trade, marriage, wages and crime, and the punishments often depended on the social rank of those involved. They were not the first laws, since an earlier Sumerian code survives, but this one is the best preserved. Archaeologists found the stele at Susa in 1901 and 1902. Today it stands in the Louvre. Its message is that law should be written down so that everyone can see it.

How Writing Was Born