Writing

The exact origins of writing are lost, probably forever, in the mists of time. Modern scholars still disagree where and when the first substantial examples of writing appeared, some favoring ancient Egypt, others ancient Mesopotamia. Those in the second group think that their argument is strengthened by the discovery in various parts of the Near East of small clay tokens dating from the eighth millennium b. c.,

A wall painting depicting Assyrian dignitaries and scribes before a king. Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

Not long after the rise of settled agriculture in the region. These tokens may have been used by farmers and merchants. The theory is that they pressed the tokens into wet clay, producing marks that recorded business transactions. A certain mark stood for a sheep, another for a bushel of grain, and four of the latter marks indicated four bushels of grain. if this was indeed an early form of writing, it predates the earliest forms found in Egypt.

Over time, after the Mesopotamian plains had been settled by the peoples now called the ubaidians and the sumerians, a more sophisticated form of writing appeared. As near as scholars can reckon, sometime between 3500 and 3000 b. c. a complex writing system appeared in the sumerian city of uruk. Then it rapidly spread to neighboring towns and other sectors of the Near East. once again, clay tablets were the basis for writing. People, mostly trained experts in reading and writing called scribes, pressed pointed sticks, reed styluses, or other objects into moist clay tablets; when the tablets dried and hardened, they became cumbersome but permanent records, the world’s first versions of letters, account sheets, and books. In its most mature form, this writing system consisted mainly of small wedgeshaped marks arranged in various combinations. Modern scholars came to call it cuneiform after the Latin word cuneus, meaning wedge or nail shaped. There were between five hundred and six hundred separate cuneiform signs in all, requiring a great deal of time and effort to master.

The way these signs were used was much more ingenious and complex than the older system of pictograms and ideograms, in which a mark that looked like a sheep or stood for a sheep meant a sheep on a tablet or other surface. By the early third millennium b. c., Sumerian writing was based only in part on picture signs; it also employed the principle of homophony. In this system, the marks made by scribes stood for sounds used in speech, and the sound for a certain object or concept could be used with other such sound signs to create messages and sentences. Gwendolyn Leick, a noted scholar of ancient Mesopotamia, explains:

In Sumerian, the word “house” was a

Monosyllabic word. Assyriologists as-

Sume that it was pronounced like the German “e.” The same sound appeared in many other contexts, such as. . . a syllable in longer words. Only the value “house” could be drawn as a picture, but this sign could be equally used for any occasion the phoneme [sound] “e” had to be written. [Over time] the meaning of signs was further enlarged. . . . The sign for “shepherd” could also stand for “to shepherd,” and the combination of [the sign for] “head” with a [bowl] near the throat [meant] “to eat.”

About five hundred thousand cuneiform tablets using such signs have been discovered so far in Mesopotamia and other parts of the Near East. The vast majority consist of dry administrative and financial records, including bills, accounts received, inventories, volumes of grain or other foodstuffs, and measures of land parcels. Though monotonous, these reveal much about social customs and economic practices, especially among members of the upper classes, who owned the land and controlled commerce. However, some of these tablets preserve actual literature, including myths, hymns to the gods, epic tales of the adventures of human heroes, odes extolling the deeds and virtues of kings, lamentations for the fall of cities and rulers, wedding songs, and proverbs and wise sayings.

Because Sumerian cuneiform—as well as Babylonian, Hittite, and other forms of cuneiform that followed it—was so complex and difficult to learn, it was perhaps inevitable that people would eventually look for easier forms of writing. The answer to this problem proved to be alphabetic signs and scripts, in which one sign stood for a specific sound. Since there are a rather limited number of basic sounds humans can utter, such a system has far fewer signs, or letters. Two alphabetic scripts appeared in the thirteenth century b. c. or shortly thereafter in the region of Syria. One, invented by scribes in the port city of Ugarit, had about thirty letters; the other, introduced by the Phoenicians, had about twenty letters. The Greeks borrowed the Phoenician version and added a few vowel sounds, thereby creating the system that became standard in Europe and, in modified form, is still in use today. The Aramaeans also adopted an alphabetic script similar in some ways to the Phoenician one to write down their own language, Aramaic. Like the Greeks, the Aramaeans added or duplicated certain letters to stand for vowel sounds missing in the Phoenician script. Much simpler than existing cuneiform writing systems, the Aramaic version swept the Near East in the early first millennium B. C. and that language became the lingua franca, or universal tongue, of the region for centuries to come.