Nov 29, 2024 08:00:00

How did the ancient Sumerians create the world's first writing system?

The Epic of Gilgamesh , known as the oldest story in history, is thought to have been written in the early 2nd millennium BC, with the original being even older, in the 4th millennium BC. Journalist Bartle Bull, a member of the committee for the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explains in his book how the ancient Sumerians created a writing system at such an early date.

How the Ancient Sumerians Created the World's First Writing System ‹ Literary Hub
https://lithub.com/how-the-ancient-sumerians-created-the-worlds-first-writing-system/

Sumer was a civilization that arose in southern Mesopotamia and is said to have laid the foundations of Mesopotamian civilization. By around 3000 BCE, Uruk , a city near the mouth of the Euphrates River, had a population of 80,000. Bull's book , Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000-Year History of Iraq , chronicles the 5,000-year history of Uruk, from its great accomplishments to the collapse of the modern Iraqi monarchy.

According to Bull, the Sumerians invented many things, including kingship, priesthood, diplomacy, law, and war. In addition, the Sumerians invented

the sexagesimal system, which defines time and seconds, because the cuneiform writing they used had a way of writing numbers from 1 to 59.

At the ruins of Uruk, houses, workshops, barracks, etc. have yet to be excavated, so 'almost nothing is known about the actual conditions of life in the city.' However, Uruk was the world's only large city in the 4th millennium BC, and records show that free laborers in search of compensation built public buildings that were unprecedented at the time. 'People who gathered in the city to work needed a way to record their labor contracts and the buying and selling of livestock and agricultural products. This is the background to the development of writing,' Bull said.

Clay tablet tokens, used to record people's possessions and transactions, and burras , spherical containers used to hold small clay tablets, have been found at the site of Uruk. By 3300 BC, the earliest known human invention of writing was hieroglyphics, which were images more or less recognizable to people without shared knowledge.

However, pictographic characters, which have many curves, were not suitable for carving into clay, so around 2900 a new type of writing was developed, in which lines were carved with a tool with a straight blade. The reed plant was used to carve the characters, and by cutting it into a sharp point like a pen, the lines made with the reed were written in a wedge-like shape. For this reason, the characters that appeared at this time are called cuneiform.

Around 3000 BC, shortly after writing first developed, the Akkadians , who would later conquer the Sumerian civilization, settled in northern Sumer. The interaction and conflict between the Sumerians and Akkadians, who lived side by side, greatly spurred the development of early writing, as they needed to use two different languages interchangeably to record things like geography and the names of merchants, Bull said.

As life around ancient Mesopotamia became international, characters needed to express the nuances of spoken language rather than record it so that they could be used by people of various languages. Therefore, most of the symbols in the characters began to represent sounds rather than meanings, evolving from ideograms to phonetic characters. Bull concludes that this evolution was revolutionary, removing the boundaries that limited the use of characters and creating infinite expansion.

Following Bull's explanation, the community site Hacker News has sparked a heated debate over whether the Sumerians created the first writing. For example, one user suggested, 'There was a writing system before, but everything recorded rotted and disappeared. In other words, what the Sumerians invented was not writing, but clay tablets that will last forever.' Similarly, some users claim that the Sumerians created the oldest writing system because of records discovered in 2024, and that further excavations may reveal that there was an even older writing system. On the other hand, as Bull explained, there are also opinions that the invention of writing was necessary in Sumer for purposes such as city systems and international exchange, and that people before that did not need a writing system.