1. Introduction
The invention of the Mesopotamian world that had the greatest impact on the later development of humanity was writing, born at the close of the Copper Age or Chalcolithic, and which radically transformed the political, economic and social structure of urban settlements.
The earliest documents are the inscribed tablets from Uruk IV (3800–3200 BC), written in a pictographic script in which each sign symbolised the image of one or more concrete objects and stood for a word whose meaning was equivalent or similar to the object drawn. The first texts demonstrably written in Sumerian, however, date from the Jemdet Nasr period (3200–3000 BC). At first the signs used in writing were very numerous — between 2,700 and 2,400. Over time their number was reduced as scribes, in search of practical efficiency in what was a cumbersome system, gradually simplified and standardised the drawings, slowly erasing the original pictographic symbols until they were no longer recognisable, in favour of wedge-shaped marks — hence the name cuneiform. The script settled at around 600 signs. They were impressed on still-soft clay with bone or ivory styluses.
Almost all the tablets were used for accounting or inventory. Only at the end of the Early Dynastic period (2900–2334) did writing begin to be used to record historical events.
2. The spread of cuneiform
In the second millennium BC cuneiform spread to neighbouring peoples, reaching Syria and the Elamite area. Because of its practicality, the cuneiform script was adopted for the different languages of the region, such as Hittite and Urartian. By this time it was established across the whole Near East.
Bureaucratic demands became ever more specific as a result of the growing exchanges between city-states (third millennium), and the scribes' administrative system gained decisive importance. Hence the extraordinary development of scribal schools. Training future scribes, given the extreme complexity of the writing system, took several years. Schooling was necessarily very long for this reason: the complexity of cuneiform and the poverty of teaching methods forced the adolescent to drill for a long time in cuneiform signs and to learn lists of vocabulary. The aim was to produce technicians of writing, each competent in a particular branch, able to copy and read a specific type of text.
Growing demand for correspondence, political and international treaties and the need to keep control and record of payment receipts, valuations or merchandise — for example at Ur and at Nippur — produced the flourishing of the scribal profession; scribes thus gained direct control over all information.
A curiosity about scribal work: just as in our time one used to take two sheets of paper and a carbon to obtain a copy of a document, scribes took two clay tablets, still soft, and with a sharpened reed inscribed their order notes; they kept one and handed over the other, which was an exact copy, after both had been fired in a kiln, which hardened them at once into something more resistant than any kind of paper — as is proved by the fact that, after more than three thousand years, they can still inform us with accuracy.
The thousands of tablets found in the royal archives of palace G at Ebla (third millennium), in the palace archives of Mari and Ugarit (second millennium), the tablets from Tello and the immense library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh form the indispensable documentation that allows orientalist historians to reconstruct the history and ways of life of these societies.
Continues in the second part of this series.
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Cuneiform script in other languages:
- German: Keilschrift
- French: Cunéiforme
- Spanish: Escritura cuneiforme
- Italian: Scrittura cuneiforme
- Polish: Pismo klinowe
- Portuguese: Escrita cuneiforme
- Romanian: Scriere cuneiformă
- Russian: Клинопись
- Arabic: كتابة مسمارية
- Chinese: 楔形文字