2.1 The Dawn of Writing: Story of Cuneiform Script
Unlocking the Mysteries and the Evolution of the World’s Oldest Script Through the Window of History that Shaped Human Civilization.
In comparison to spoken languages, which evolved over tens of thousands of years and left little evidence of their origins, written languages provide access to practically the entire history of some scripts. Cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia is an example. Sumerian cuneiform, the earliest known script and long considered the ancestor of all writing, has a wealth of historical data about its origins. Similar assertions may be made for other alphabetic scripts, including ancient Greek and Roman, as well as the Korean Han’gul, all of which have a wealth of materials for tracing their origin.
The topic of whether writing had a single or numerous origins is essential to the consideration of the various writing systems. Scholars have struggled with this desire since the dawn of history, and until the eighteenth century virtually generally embraced the monogenetic hypothesis of writing, which says that all scripts descended from a single ancestral. This hypothesis became tangled with the peripheral subject of cultural and religious supremacy early in the history of writing, to the disadvantage of scientific study. Several early alphabet researchers agreed that alphabetic systems descended from a single ancestor, Old Canaanite. Despite the presence of many closely related common features, such as phoneticisms, the rebus principle, determinatives, early pictographic elements, elitist scribal castes, large sign inventories, and morphological multivalence, scholars of cuneiform, Mycenaean, Chinese, and Mayan reject the validity of linguistic monogeneticism, finding no evidence to support it.
Sumer, also known as Babylonia in classical times, is the lower half of Mesopotamia, roughly corresponding to modern Iraq from north of Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. The Sumerians were Mesopotamia’s first civilization, emerging around 4500 BC. They were responsible for several early technologies, including as writing, the wheel, and irrigation systems. Mesopotamia is an eastern Mediterranean region that includes modern-day Iraq, Kuwait, parts of Syria, and Turkey. Mesopotamia was home to a number of empires, including the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires.
The oldest civilisation in the Near East also emerged along rivers, in Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, which flowed separately into the Persian Gulf at the time. Mesopotamia is Greek meaning “the land between the rivers,” and it was named after these two rivers. Yet, in Mesopotamia, food production was not wholly confined to the strips along the rivers, albeit alluvial land, intersected by the various canals of the Euphrates, did represent the majority of it.
Mesopotamia’s temperature is exceedingly hot and dry, and its soil is parched, wind-swept, and infertile if left to its own devices. Because the area is plain and river-formed, there are no minerals and nearly no stone. It had no trees for lumber save for the massive reeds in the wetlands. Despite the land’s inherent limitations, they transformed Sumer into a true Garden of Eden and established what was perhaps the first advanced civilization in human history. Sumerians had a remarkable talent for intellectual innovation. Even the early inhabitants had discovered irrigation, which allowed them to gather and channel the rich silt-laden overflow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in order to water and fertilise their fields and farms. To compensate for the scarcity of minerals and stones, they learned to fashion sickles, pots, plates, and jars out of river clay and mud, which was virtually limitless. They cut and dried the vast and numerous marsh reeds, tied them into bundles or plaited them into mats, and crafted them into cottages and byres with the help of mud-plastering.
The Sumerian was acutely aware of their individual freedoms and loathed any infringement on them, whether by his monarch, superior, or equal. It’s no surprise that the Sumerians were the first to create laws and legal codes. The importance of written communication grew as Mesopotamian communities got more complicated. They began writing information on clay tablets with a stylus, making wedge-shaped strokes. This enabled the production of written documents that were easily transportable and stored. Across the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Elamite civilizations, a writing system evolved with increasing sophistication and abstraction from pictorial meaning. This is known as the Cuneiform writing system.
Cuneiform was the ancient Mesopotamian writing system. Its name (from the Latin cuneus, “wedge”) refers to its appearance as triangular wedge-shaped impressions created on a clay tablet with a reed stylus. The Sumerians invented the cuneiform script around 3200 BC, and it was eventually used for a variety of other ancient Near Eastern languages, including the Akkadian group (Old Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian), Elbaite, Hittite, and Elamite. Cuneiform has a nearly three-millennium history; it was used in Mesopotamia until the second century BC, when it was replaced by more efficient alphabetic systems and ink-and-brush media with which it had coexisted for several centuries. Writing in Mesopotamia was initially used to document the activities of a vast bureaucratic network that controlled labour, materials, and subsistence resources. Cuneiform was created as a technological advance for administrative purposes.
Cuneiform is imprinted on damp clay tablets, although monumental texts have also been engraved on stone and other hard surfaces. Clay is exceedingly durable once dry, and hence tens of thousands of such tablets have survived to the current day. A single sign’s strokes have varying lengths and are impressed at different angles. Each stroke has a wedge-shaped head generated by the stylus’s angular head and a straight tail. By the end of the third millennium, short angular strokes had lost their tails, and scribes had abandoned the habit of using a second stylus that had a circular cross-section. It is difficult to evaluate the remaining Sumerian language or estimate what is buried in museums and unexcavated Near Eastern mounds. The first written texts were discovered during excavations in the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk around 3200–3000 B.C. Around 5000 proto-cuneiform tablets and pieces have been discovered there. While the exact chronology and original location of the tablets are unknown, The archaic system had around 800 distinct symbols, more than sixty or seventy of which were numeral signs.
Scribes were highly trained servants of the local administration, which was a complex balancing act of religious and political power as well as an equitable economic system. The writing system, which was designed for record keeping, served as a managerial instrument for bureaucratic authority and growth. Writing moved to the domains of propaganda, science, and entertainment as cuneiform evolved to imitate spoken language. Although reading remained a specialist elite skill, its productivity infiltrated public and private life, from massive inscriptional displays and international diplomacy to private communication and contracts, and daily commodity exchange and distribution accounting.
Cuneiform script evolved from pictographic writing. Each sign featured a representation of one or more tangible objects and a term whose meaning was identical to or closely linked to the object depicted. A system of this type has two flaws: the sophisticated forms of the signs and the large number of signs necessary make it too unwieldy for practical usage. The Sumerian scribes overcome the first challenge by gradually reducing and standardising the shapes of the signs until their pictographic origins were no longer visible. About the second difficulty, they used various helpful methods to lessen the amount of signs and keep them within limitations. The most important device was the substitution of phonetic values for ideographic values. The diagram below depicts the evolution of cuneiform writing.
No 1 depicts a star. It essentially represents the Sumerian meaning heaven. The identical symbol is used to represent the god.
No 2 depicts the earth. The sign is clearly supposed to be a representation of the Earth, but its interpretation is still unknown.
No 4 represents the word pudendum. The identical symbol is used to represent the word munus (woman in Sumerian language).
No 5 represents a mountain. It is an adaptation for the kur (mountain).
The sign for the word geme, which means slave girl, on the other hand, is a mixture of two signs: munus (woman) and kur (mountain). As a result, this compound sign literally means mountain-woman. But, because the Sumerians received the majority of their slave girls from the hilly regions around them, this compound sign correctly symbolised the Sumerian term for slave girl, i.e. geme.
The signs in the first column date from the earliest known period of Sumerian writing development. Not long after the discovery of the pictographic script, Sumerian scribes discovered that it was more convenient to turn the tablet so that the pictographs lay on their backs.
This method became standard as the writing evolved, and the signs were regularly rotated 90 degrees. The pictographic signs in this turned position are shown in the table’s second column. The following column depicts the “archaic” script that was in use approximately 2500 B.C. Column IV depicts the types of signs from around 1800 B.C., when the majority of the literary works were created. The more simple forms illustrated in the last column were utilised by Assyrian royal scribes in the first millennium B.C.
The graphic form and the sign repertoire, extending the vocabulary range, and providing scribal training. Novel applications and writing techniques were frequently tradeoffs between reducing the writing system’s complexity and enhancing its capacity to transmit information.
The script’s scope expanded from documentary to narrative and creative literary domains as it became more flexible and powerful in transcribing messages. Texts grew from simple itemizations to poetry and prose, chronicles and epics, and magicalo-religious and scientific instructions; multivolume multilingual dictionaries, archives, antiquarian libraries, and massive stone stelae and wall reliefs emerged from flattened lumps of clay. These were millennia-long developments, with the Archaic period witnessing the early, immature stages of expansion in numerous directions.
The earliest known corpus of cuneiform inscriptions is comprised of four thousand clay tablets unearthed at the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk, a significant urban centre of the southern Mesopotamian river plain. The early steps of the palaeographic evolution indicative of cuneiform’s ongoing growth can be seen within this corpus, which is thought to span roughly two centuries. Comparison with cuneiform graphemes from later historical eras has allowed decipherment of around 75% of these early Archaic period signs, despite significant changes in sign shape and repertory throughout the ages.
Pictographic cuneiform markings were the earliest. Several of them are easily recognised, especially those that depicted an object or an animal. The process of sign abstraction was gradual but ongoing. The curved outlines that were common in the first cuneiform signs were straightened, and sharp angles and delicate details were lost. Originally circular designs progressively evolved into squares, triangular shapes into rectangles, and face characteristics of signs depicting animals or men vanished. The Archaic period corpus contains the beginnings of these and other graphic changes. Cuneiform characters evolved throughout time into nonpictorial, regular, linear arrangements of wedge-shaped stylus marks.
The number of written characters reached around 700 early in the history of cuneiform, and remained that high for the next several centuries. Yet, the number of core graphic components used to create signs was substantially lower. During the Archaic period, adaptations of existing signs made for over 60% of the sign repertoire. Sometimes artistic embellishments like stippling or cross-hatching were added, but most new signs were created by combining two previous signs, one abutting the other in a graphic ligature or inscribed within the contour of the other.
The systematic combination of graphic elements became the dominating strategy for internal alterations as the repertory of signals consolidated. Although new composite signs were being introduced, several distinguishing sign forms were reshaped and simplified into obvious ligatures.
Cuneiform script evolves into different sub-scripts in neighbouring places over time. While cuneiform was employed by several civilizations in Mesopotamia and neighbouring areas, it underwent significant adjustments and alterations to meet the needs of diverse languages and dialects. Furthermore, as other writing systems such as the Phoenician alphabet and the Aramaic script became more popular in the Near East, cuneiform progressively fell out of favour and was rendered obsolete by the 1st century AD.
Despite numerous attempts by researchers, the cuneiform script remained a mystery for decades. Nevertheless, in the late 15th century, a man named Henry Rawlinson made a revolutionary discovery.
Rawlinson was a British Army officer stationed in Persia (modern-day Iran) at the time. He was fascinated by ancient history and had learnt to read and write in a number of old languages. He discovered a massive rock face with a cuneiform inscription beside portraits of King Darius I of Persia while researching the ruins of the ancient city of Behistun.
The inscription was written in three languages, according to Rawlinson: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. He studied the inscriptions for years, painstakingly transferring them onto paper and comparing them to other manuscripts he discovered. He eventually deciphered the script and translated the inscriptions into English.
Rawlinson’s cuneiform decipherment was a great accomplishment in archaeology and linguistics. It gave historians a lot of knowledge on Mesopotamian civilizations, including their history, religion, and daily life. We now have a far better knowledge of this pivotal period in human history because to Rawlinson’s study.
Through commerce and travel, the Cuneiform writing system spread over the entire world. Every language’s individuality, history, and literature have contributed to human ability to understand earlier civilizations. Language and script are always interwoven with the ancestral culture. Much like Mesopotamian civilisation, Egyptians culture was quite distinctive. They have their own narrative about writing and culture. Next, we’ll look at Egyptian hieroglyphs.
