Invention of Cuneiform Writing in Uruk
Writing was invented in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC to keep track of grain and sheep. The earliest tablets from Uruk are accounts. They record quantities of barley, beer, textiles and livestock, the names of officials and the periods covered, and they contain no literature, no history and no prayers for several centuries. The system developed out of an older accounting practice. Small clay tokens of different shapes had been used across the Near East since about 8000 BC to represent commodities, sealed inside hollow clay envelopes for transactions; impressing the tokens on the outside of the envelope so that the contents could be read without breaking it made the envelope redundant, and the impressions became signs. The signs were then drawn with a reed stylus, whose triangular tip gives the wedge shapes that produce the name cuneiform. Sumerian is the language, and the script was adapted afterwards for Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite and Persian. Egyptian hieroglyphs appear at about the same time and the question of whether they were invented independently or on the Mesopotamian idea has not been settled. Chinese writing appears independently on oracle bones by about 1200 BC, and Mesoamerican writing independently again. The consequence is what everything else rests on. Once obligations, laws, dates and stories could be recorded, states could tax at scale, kings could be remembered, and knowledge stopped depending entirely on who was alive to repeat it. The other consequence is that history begins here by definition. Everything before it is prehistory not because nothing happened but because nobody wrote it down, and the first named individual in the human record is an accountant called Kushim who signed for a quantity of barley.
- Year: 3200 BCE
- Category: Cultural
