Anonymous Uruk Scribe

The anonymous scribes of Uruk produced the earliest known writing. Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, was among the largest settlements in the world around 3300 BC, with perhaps forty thousand people, monumental temple precincts, and an economy that redistributed grain, wool, beer and labour on a scale no household could remember. The earliest tablets, from the level archaeologists call Uruk IV, are administrative. They record quantities of barley, jars of beer, textiles, livestock and rations of workers, using impressed number signs alongside pictographic signs drawn with a pointed stylus. Writing did not begin with literature, law or religion. It began with accounting, and it was almost certainly invented to solve a bureaucratic problem: keeping track of what an institution had received and owed when the transactions exceeded what an individual could hold in mind. Its precursors are the clay tokens used across the Near East for several thousand years to represent commodities, sealed inside hollow clay balls, with impressions of the tokens marked on the outside — at which point the contents became redundant. The decisive step was phonetic. Once a sign could stand for a sound rather than a thing, the system could record names, grammatical elements and eventually anything that could be said. The reed stylus pressed into clay produced the wedge shapes that give cuneiform its name. Individual scribes are unnamed for centuries. The earliest signed authorship in the world is Enheduanna, a priestess of Ur, some five hundred years later. Around a hundred thousand administrative tablets survive from the region.

• Nationality: Iraqi
• Roles: scribe, administrator