The cuneiform writing on this Sumerian tablet, from the time of the third dynasty of Ur, lists plowmen employed by the state and the amount of land that was assigned to them as wages.
The Sumerian system of writing appears to have evolved out of a number of different recording systems developed in southern Mesopotamia. The original impetus for developing writing was the need to keep accounts. At first a simple picture script, the system allowed the number of sheep, goats, or baskets of grain brought to the temple to be recorded.
The style of script used by the Sumerians is called cuneiform (wedge-shaped) because it was written by pressing a pointed stick, or stylus, into a tablet of soft clay, leaving an impression in the shape of a wedge. The tablets were then dried in the sun or fired, and they could last for thousands of years.
To begin with, the cuneiform style of writing was pictographic, which meant that each sign of the script represented an object or, later, an idea. Eventually, these pictorial signs changed into phonetic symbols. So, for example, in the first phase, the symbol for a star was also the symbol for a god. The same sign was used for “An,” which means either heaven or the god Anu. In the next phase, the star symbol came to represent the syllable “an,”even in words that had nothing to do with the god, a star, or heaven.
The development of writing was crucial to the development of civilizations. It permitted the keeping of permanent records and the transmission of information over large distances—both essential to a civilization ruled by a central
Administration. The cuneiform script was universally adopted by the early Mesopotamian civilizations and remained the basic form of written communication in western Asia for the next 2,000 years.
In Sumerian culture, and it was celebrated by a reenactment of the wedding of Dumu-zi and Inanna. The myth has parallels to the Greek story of Persephone, Hades, and Demeter, which also explains the origins of the seasons.
World History
