Feature: How humans learned to preserve their words on clay

The newspaper you are reading, a message on your mobile phone, a shop receipt, a child’s copybook: none of these would exist without an invention that emerged on the plains of Iraq about 5,500 years ago. Writing gave humans the power to make their words outlive them. People born thousands of miles away, or thousands of years later, could still hear them.

From counting tokens to letters

Writing did not appear suddenly. According to Denise Schmandt-Besserat of the University of Texas in the United States, small clay tokens of different shapes were used to count goods in the early farming settlements of the Middle East from 8000 to 3000 BC. She says the Mesopotamian script written on clay tablets, which appeared around 3200 BC, grew out of these tokens. Both served the same purpose: keeping count of sheep and goats, grain, oil and cloth. The written signs were also modelled on the shapes and marks of the tokens.

The tablets of Uruk and cuneiform

According to the World History Encyclopedia, writing was invented in the Sumerian city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia around 3600 to 3500 BC. It was refined in the same city around 3200 BC. At first the script consisted of pictures. In Uruk, by around 3200 BC, these began to change into signs that represented sounds.

The script was written by pressing a reed pen into wet clay, so the marks looked like nails or wedges. It is therefore called cuneiform. The name comes from the Latin word “cuneus”, meaning wedge. The same source cites the scholar Jeremy Black as saying that for centuries after it appeared, writing was used only for administrative work. The world’s first writings were thus not poems or stories but accounting records.

In time, laws, prayers, recipes and epics were written in cuneiform. The best known is the epic of Gilgamesh. The script was not limited to the Sumerian language. It was used for many languages, including Akkadian, Babylonian, Elamite, Hittite and Assyrian. The first author known by name in history is Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad and high priestess at Ur. She lived around 2300 BC and put her name and seal on her poems.

Egypt, China and the Americas

Mesopotamia was not alone. According to a 1999 report in the American journal Archaeology, experts of the German Archaeological Institute found small tablets of bone and ivory, vessels and seal impressions bearing pictorial signs at Abydos, an ancient city in Egypt. Günter Dreyer, who heads the institute’s team, dates them between 3400 and 3200 BC. They are the oldest known examples of Egyptian writing. Most of the tablets were labels attached to goods.

Scholars disagree on whether Egyptian writing was inspired by Mesopotamia or invented separately. It is clearer, however, that writing was invented independently in at least a few places in the world. According to the World History Encyclopedia, writing in China began around 1200 BC with signs written on oracle bones. In Central America, the Maya also invented writing separately.

The undeciphered script of the Indus Valley

The writing of our own region remains a mystery. The script of the Indus Valley civilisation has not been read to this day. According to the World History Encyclopedia, the oldest known examples of its signs are on pottery of the Ravi and Kot Diji periods found at Harappa, dating from about 3500 to 2700 BC. Longer inscriptions appear in the mature Harappan period, from 2600 to 1900 BC.

Thousands of inscriptions have been found at about 60 sites, mostly on square seals of steatite. All are very short: five signs on average, and none longer than 26. Experts have identified just over 400 basic signs. No bilingual text has been found and the inscriptions are brief, so the script has still not been read.

The return of forgotten scripts

Nobody could read cuneiform or Egyptian writing for centuries either. According to the World History Encyclopedia, the German scholar Georg Friedrich Grotefend began to decipher cuneiform before 1823, and Henry Rawlinson read the Behistun inscription in 1837. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 1820s with the help of the Rosetta Stone.

Writing in life today

The signs that the scribe of Uruk pressed into wet clay lead in an unbroken line to our keyboards today. Writing turned accounts into records, law into books and memory into history. Every letter of Urdu, every newspaper and every school textbook today continues this 5,500-year-old invention.