SHC er O Nag Mesopotamian Cuneiform Origin PIOTR MICHALOWSKI What is probably the first known writing system in the world, conventionally called proto-cuneiform, was used in Mesopotamia at the end of the fourth millennium B.C.B., in the latter part of what is known as the Uruk Period. It is still a matter of de- bate whether the first Egyptian writings were contemporary, slightly later, or perhaps even earlier than the Uruk tablets. In southern Mesopotamia this was a time of rapid urbanization, population growth, and dramatic increase in the division of labor and political development. The first writing is part of this sudden expansion of Mesopo- tamian civilization; it cannot be ascribed to any single cause, but must be viewed as an element in a rapidly diversifying human environment. There can be little doubt that the primary context for the first writing was administrative necessity, but an invention of this magnitude, which required a realignment of all communicative systems within a small but important segment of society, also had complex symbolic and psycholog- ical roots. The script can be “understood” in some sense, but it cannot be fully read; although there has been some doubt concerning the language that was the basis for this written expression, there is clear evidence that it was Sumerian. History of discovery ‘The first written texts derive from excavations in the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk, from the period of roughly 3200-3000 B.c. Almost 5000 tablets and fragments inscribed with proto-cuneiform have been found there. All these tablets were found in secondary context, mainly in dumps and fill areas. Whereas the exact chronology as well as the original location of the tablets is unknown, the texts undoubtedly came Irom large organizations, conventionally designated as “palaces” or “temples.” On ty- pological grounds these have been divided into two periods, Uruk Il and LV, on the imodcl of the stratigraphy of that part of Uruk, the ceremonial area which was named Kana in antiquity (archeological strata are numbered in the order they are uncovered. so Uruk TV is older than Uruk III). Recently, Hans Nissen (Green and Nissen 1987). who heads the Berlin team that is publishing these materials, has proposed a more pieeise dating of tablets into smaller subdivisions. The stratigraphy of the archaic (tuk finds is currently being revised, and it possible that the dating of many of the teats may have to be changed accordingly (Haplund 1994: 16).aa PART I: ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN WRITING SYSTEMS. DP © uu ‘sheep’ ge in’ ‘f r DUG ‘pot’ Se ‘stalk of grain’ GU, ‘food’ pe OE ee various inscribed pots: DUGXMAS, DUGXLAM, DUGXAB, DUGXNAGA 15 €] up.pu = e(d) KA ‘mouth PISANXAM, = AMA ‘mother’ FIGURE 1, Proto-cunciform signs and Nissen 1987, nos. §11, 575, 235; 88, 108, 106, 89. 109, 132, 271, 28) (Gre ‘The Uruk IV period texts are unparalleled elsewhere, while the period UE ane are roughly contemporary with tablets found at other Mesopotamian sites ovens we are at the mercy of chance discoveries and there is no way of establishing oo lier history of the system, there are reasons to believe that the period IV tablets from Uruk are not far removed from the invention of the script. Structure ‘Lhe archaic system consisted of approximately 800 separate symbols, of ae i than sixty or seventy were number signs. The exact number of discrete symbols is di : ficult to establish; it depends on how one defines certain complex and ease signs, and there is still some debate concerning similar-looking, symbols. Many 7 ; e signs were pictographic, for example a drawing of a stalk of barley or wheat for ‘grain’; others, such as a cross within a circle (* sheep’) were abstract depictions (see NGURE 1). To avoid multiplying shapes, new signs were created by combining - or three signs (SAG + SILA, ‘head’ + ‘ration bow!’ = Gu, ‘food, toeat Ds by inseri ing one within another (various types of clay vessels denoted by the ‘pot sign different! ly inscribed); by combining two or more signs (UD.DU = e/d)), or by modifying existing ones with hatching (SaG + hatching = KA ‘mouth’). Another way of forming signs is represented by a subset that was used for writing the names of major Sumerian In these a stylized representation of some symbol of the major deity of the city w : combined with a sign that was a classifier for ‘city’ and had no phonetic value. ns ‘Zabala was written MUS, (stylized drawing of the symbol of the goddess Inanna) an cerry. ‘The name of Uruk was written simply as erry, which may suggest that writing, fad throughout Mesopotamia, was invented in Uruk, viewed their home as “the city” par excellence (Micha sntations of divine symbols are known front seal or the version of writing that whose inhabitants may he lowski 1993). Some of these repre: desiyus and other artistic representations, SECTION 3: MESOPOTAMIAN CUNEIFORM i Me gimn Fart cE] bil ki a4 cee an LEY Kae) FE ee |e >E Ce EMNT bar gi u, psy maar’! bil di Lar! bar bil MACE EIT ging di FIGURE 2. Two copies of lines 152-53 of the za.me hymn, with Neo-Assyrian equivalents and transliterations. The meaning is obscure, but there is no doubt that they represent the same text: (152) bil.gi nun (153) bar bil.gi u, di pl. 117, no. 265; right, pl. 122, no. 268; reproduced with permission). (Biggs 1974: 5 Unlike in early Chinese and Egyptian writing, there is only sporadic evidence for phonetic complementation, which was used more frequently in later phases of the writing system. Nevertheless, there are a few ready in the earl es of phonetic complementation al- stages of cuneiform, and these, as Krispijn (1991-92), Krebernik (1994), and Steinkeller (IN PREss) have recently observed, leave little doubt that the underlying language of the earliest texts was indeed Sumerian. Thus the sign AMA, which was the Sumerian word for ‘mother’, was rendered with a sign we transliterate as PISAN (‘box’) inscribed with AM,, which indicates the range of pronunciation. Some had double glosses, as demonstrated by the writing U.NAGA.GA.MUSEN for uga ‘raven’, which consists of a basic sign, NAGA, bracketed by the glosses i and ga, fol- lowed by the bird name classifi Although the majority of individual symbols represented whole words—because Sumerian was predominantly monosyllabic—these same words could function as syllables in other contexts (Ba ‘ration’ = /ba/). The syllabic spellings were needed for the expression of personal names and later for the writing of grammatical elements. Homophony was used to produce syllabic writings, but rarely for creating other word signs through the rebus principle. There were also a series of preposed and postposed classifiers that delimited semantic classes, such as Gi ‘wood’, The visual layout of tablets also had semantic value. The arrangement of cases and columns enclosing, signs was different for different types of transactions and for different parts of the text, such as for the final total of goods. This variety of arrangements disappeared lat- er onas the system became more flexible and more linked to natural language. On the carly tablets, signs were arranged in random order within cases that were ordered ver- tically, from our point of view. There are indications that the tablets were held at a different angle than in later times. The random order of signs within the cases contin- ued down to Early Dynastic times when the first literary texts are attested; in this pe- riod, duplicate passages of the same composition could be written with signs in completely different order (see FIGURE 2). ‘The structure and logic of the system indicate that it was invented as a whole and did not develop gradually. Individual elements were borrowed from existing commu- hicative devices: the number signs may have been adapted from small clay counters that were used independently, or impressed on tablets. Certain cult symbols, as wellHAR I: ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN WRITING SYSTEMS, as other signs were probably used earlier in cylinder seal designs, but the system as such was designed in one fell swoop. Those who favor an evolutionary model of the «levelopment of writing cite certain “antecedents” to proto-cuneiform: rough clay containers (“bullae”) that enclosed simple counters and were impressed with the shape of the counters, and sealed; as well as the so-called numerical tablets; that is, clay tablets with the impressions of counters. It has been proposed that the hollow Initlae were flattened, and this produced the first tablets. These, in turn, were im- pressed with the shape of the clay counters (Schmandt-Besserat 1992). The inventor or inventors of proto-cuneiform drew on a variety of such ideas, but the quantum leap lu the conceptualization of the earliest writing system was without precedent. The only other contemporary writing system was the hitherto undeciphered Proto-Elamite script used over a wide area of southwest and central Iran. The first tab- lets in Proto-Elamite are slightly later than proto-cuneiform—conventionally they are teparded as contemporary with Uruk Il—and the relation between the two systems 1s unclear. Both use the same numerical notation, and they share at least one sign; but other than that, there is little that one can say about the differences and similarities between the two (see SECTION 10). Distribution and contents Aside from the tablets found at Uruk, archaic texts of period Mf have been found fur- ther north at Jemdet Nasr, possibly at nearby Tell Ugair, and at Fara; and some, of un- known provenance, have been purchased on the antiquities market. This means that the writing conventions first attested, and perhaps invented, at Uruk were rapidly adopted by other Mesopotamian politics. The largest group of over 200 tablets, from Jemdet Nasr (Englund and Grégoire 1991), consists of texts that are very similar to The majority of Uruk archaic texts are administrative documents. These com- prise texts dealing with such matters as animal husbandry, grain distribution, land, an- imal and personnel management, and the processing of fruits and cereals. Approximately 15% are not economic: these are lists of words arranged by semantic class and by sign design, commonly known as lexical lists (Englund and Nissen 1993). There are lists of wooden objects, professional names, fish, plants, and other subjects. These differ from the accounts in a number of respects: they are preserved 1 multiple copies (as many as 163 for the professions list), some duplicates were lound outside Uruk, and they were copied by later scribes for hundreds of years. These lexical texts have been interpreted in a variety of ways, but most scholars agree that they were manuals for the teaching of writing. This demonstrates that from the beginning there was a concern for the structured transmission of the system from gen- yn to generation, and that the method of instruction was passed on along with the knowledge of the script. practic: SECTION 3: MESOPOTAMIAN CUNKILORM Sumerian and Akkadian JERROLD S. COOPER Cuneiform script was used to represent the Sumerian |; southern Mesopotamia from ca, 3200 B.C.E., and was ects in Mesopotamia and Syria by 2500. Although Sumerian had become extinet as a spoken language by the early second millennium, it continued to be used for rel gious and legal purposes, and was studied and written until the beginning of the ct rent era. Cuneiform texts in the Semitic dialect family we call Akkadian (kei [ 1966) appear in southern Mesopotamia beginning around 2350 (the dialect is ci j Old Akkadian); and after 2000, texts are written in two dialects the Babylonian, oi ' inating in southern Mesopotamia, and Assyrian, originating in northern Mesw ie, mia. These are chronologically distinguished as Old Babylonian/Assyrian, Mi | ie Babylonian/Assyrian, and Neo-Babylonian/-Assyrian, representing the ae o roughly, the first half of the second millennium, the second half of the second mille plum, and the first half of the first millennium respectively. The Akkadian Sila that continued to be used into the Seleucid period in Babylonia is called Late Rg lonian, and the language used for literary and commemorative inscriptions in the fa second and the first millennium is known as Standard Babylonian; cuneiform texts were written as late as the first century C.. In addition, during the a mille ‘ um, Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform texts were produced aa ous areas peripheral to Mesopotamia, in an arc stretching fro1 to Anatolia and down through Syria and the Levant into Ee texts from southern Mesopotamia written in Semitic before 7 50, in a dialect that w: Probably a precursor to Old Akkadian—and the many thousands from Ebla ins fe representing a language related to, but probably different from, the precursor a Mh i Akkadian (Gelb 1987)—is not considered here. ; Sumerian and Akkadian are not only dead languages, cal Hebrew, ancient Greek, or Latin, they : tion of study. Akkadian is a Semitic language, but Sumerian is a language isolate af a very different type, and with a very different phonemic inventory. The values we Swe (0 cuneiform signs in Sumerian texts are based on Akkadian values and a : cient glosses. Since most of these glosses date from periods when Sumerian w, i longer spoken, i.e. from a milieu speaking Akkadian or other Semitic languages i i said that we view Sumerian phonology through Akkadian glasses. However signs used to write Akkadian had bee | ; of cuneiform writing, Sumerian optici language (Thomsen 1984) in adapted to write Semitic dia at various times in vari m southwestern Iran up ypt. The few cuneiform but unlike Sanskrit, Bibli are languages without a continuous triudi wes, itis since the n ‘n adapted from an originally Sumerian system we might also say that our Akkadian glasses were made by a