Visible Language (Part I)

There are four instances in human history when writing was invented with no previous exposure to, or knowledge of, writing: in Mesopotamia and Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BC, in China during the second millennium BC, and in Mesoamerica by the middle of the first millennium BC. These writing systems are considered "pristine" because they were created independently.

Most of the earliest scripts were largely "logographic" (each sign represented one word) and "pictographic" (each sign looked like the word it represented). Scribes also used other kinds of signs (called "determinatives") to tell readers what kind of word preceded or followed. But this system was very limited. How do you write an abstract concept that cannot be drawn?

These early writing systems also used signs that represent sounds but not meaning. Here are examples in English: eye = I, bee + leaf = Belief. Drawing objects in the world (like a bee and a leaf) to represent homonyms ("belief") is called the "rebus principle." Rebuses allowed scribes to permanently represent and record a fuller range of ideas by breaking the iconic bond between image and object, associating the sign with the sound of the word rather than the object itself.

Seal iconography provides important insights into various aspects of Mesopotamian society, such as social organization, rituals, economy, architecture, and warfare. Seals depicting a "temple and herd" motif, like this one, have been tied to the functioning of the temple institution through their identification as temple herds. Temples were centers of ritual as well as major economic institutions, and the temple herds represented on these seals reflect both of these roles.

According to one theory, simple seals with repeating motifs of animals might have been used by low-level workers at a temple. Complex seals with elaborate imagery might have been used by specific high-ranking individuals within the administrative hierarchy.

According to another theory, seal images might refer to specific offices in a temple. For example, seal impressions depicting pigtailed ladies involved in industrial activities may have been used by temple institutions involved in production activities such as spinning, weaving, and pottery making.

So far there is no scholarly agreement on the specific cultural value of seal iconography. Nonetheless, seals used images to communicate information about ownership and access in a complex administrative environment, an approach that would later influence the invention of writing.

In the 1990s, Denise Schmandt-Besserat argued that the token accounting system led directly to the development of cuneiform. She hypothesized that simple tokens made their appearance with the beginnings of agriculture in the ninth millennium. They were used as a way to track the sale and exchange of various goods.

According to Schmandt-Besserat's theory, complex tokens, those that have various markings and incisions, may have been a response to the burgeoning urban societies of the fourth millennium. Different shapes and markings could indicate different commodities. For example, this crescent-shaped complex token might have represented a transaction of silver.

Tokens could be sealed in clay "envelopes" as a way to prove that nobody had tampered with a transaction. Impressions of tokens on the outside of the envelopes could be checked against the tokens inside in the case of a dispute. Schmandt-Besserat believed that Mesopotamians eventually realized they did not need to seal tokens inside of an envelope with impressions on the outside. Instead, they could simply flatten the clay into a tablet and inscribe numbers and information with less effort. This system of printing quantities and items on tablets led to the invention of writing.

According to Schmandt-Besserat's theory, after Mesopotamians realized that they could use tablets for accounting, the cones and spheres of complex tokens were translated to two-dimensional pictographs and were drawn with a stylus. By comparing the geometric shapes and designs of the tokens with those of the early cuneiform signs, Schmandt-Besserat assigned meaning to fifty complex tokens. For example, these three tokens (from top to bottom) correspond to the cuneiform graphs for sheep and goats, wool, and silver.

Schmandt-Besserat's theory has been criticized in recent years. It is difficult to accept that tokens found over such a vast time period and geographical range—from the Mediterranean to Iran, from the ninth to the end of the fourth millennium BC—comprised a uniform accounting system. Additionally, the idea that tokens look like certain cuneiform signs is subjective. Finally, Schmandt-Besserat's theory is at odds with the scholarly understanding of Mesopotamian economy and society. The alleged sheep token occurs only fifteen times over seven thousand years, which contradicts the importance of livestock in the ancient Middle East.

The only thing that is certain is that there is a relationship between the impressions on the envelopes and the numerical graphs of the cuneiform system. As for the origins of the word signs, or logograms, of proto-cuneiform, most of these were no doubt invented with the writing system itself.

In the Sumerian story of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, the legendary king Enmerkar invented writing on clay tablets to defeat his rival in a competition for the affection of the goddess Inanna. In the tale, Enmerkar gave his messenger a very long, eloquent, and complicated message to take to the Lord of Aratta:

"(Enmerkar's) speech was very grand; its meaning very profound. But the messenger's mouth was too heavy, and he could not repeat the message. Because the messenger's mouth was too heavy, and he could not repeat it, the Lord of Kulab (that is, Enmerkar) patted some clay and put the words on it as on a tablet. Before that day, words put on clay had never existed. But now when the sun rose on that very day—so it was! The Lord of Kulab had put words as on a tablet—so it was!"

The earliest pictographic signs became more abstract as signs incised with a sharp stylus gave way to wedge-shaped impressions that later gave the script its name: cuneiform (which means "wedge-shaped"). Cuneiform was first written by impressing a reed stylus into wet clay. The script appears to have been developed to write the Sumerian language, which is unrelated to any other known language family. Among the first texts are also lists of signs and words, called lexical lists, that organized and preserved knowledge and also taught new scribes how to write.

At the root of the cuneiform writing system is the logogram, or word sign, which represents a single word or group of semantically related words. Logograms had both a semantic meaning, as representing words, as well as a phonetic value, expressing the pronunciation of those words.

More abstract concepts could be expressed through the rebus principle, where the phonetic value of one word, most often something that could be easily drawn, could be used to write another word that was identical or nearly so in pronunciation. For example, the sign for sar "garden" (a pictograph of a garden bed), could be used to write the more abstract verb sar "to write." Signs that represent sounds but not meaning are called "phonograms."

Some logograms were created from material culture, like the sign for "disbursement," which combines a head and a beveled-rim bowl used for food rations. Some emblems connected with deities and their cult centers, which possessed powerful symbolic value, were drafted into the cuneiform script as well. However, many logograms were probably invented with the writing system itself, representing a completely new mode of communication.

Mesopotamians also used determinatives, signs that were not read but were used to indicate the semantic class of certain words. For example, city names were often preceded by the sign for URU "city" and god names were often preceded by sign for DINGIR "god."

In the earliest written texts, scribes used curved lines and a pointed stylus. Over time, the lines of cuneiform grew straighter, and a stylus with a triangular cross section was used to create wedge shapes. Graphs were simplified and depicted more abstractly.

Mesopotamian writing was developed to address administrative needs. As a result, early cuneiform texts largely focus on economic matters. Based on currently preserved material, literature did not play a role in the earliest development of Mesopotamian writing. Religious texts, historic documents, and letters like this one are not included among the archaic text corpus. Rather, these genres arose later, beginning in the middle of the third millennium, some seven hundred or more years after the first written documents.

The cuneiform script was eventually adapted to write a wide range of languages, including Hurrian, Hittite, Elamite, and Old Persian. Scribes in Ugarit, on the eastern Mediterranean coast, took the basic shape of cuneiform signs and briefly used them to develop a cuneiform alphabet in about 1200 BC.

Cuneiform continued in use for over 3,000 years, until about AD 100. The script disappeared gradually over the course of several centuries. When the Achaemenid Empire took over Mesopotamia, the official administrative language changed from Akkadian to Aramaic. Eventually Greek became the lingua franca of the ancient world after the conquests of Alexander. The cuneiform script eventually disappeared from daily use as successive political administrations imposed administrative languages written in other scripts.