The Invention of Proto-Cuneiform in the Uruk Period

Projeda (Brandon West)
May 25, 2019

Early nomadic hunter-gatherers had no use for writing. Yet as humans transitioned into an increasingly sedentary agricultural lifestyle, we saw how bullae appear to have evolved as an early accounting tool alongside the development of concepts like trade and ownership. This happened again during the Uruk Period (4000-3100 BCE) with the emergence of the world’s first true cities in southern Mesopotamia, in the land known as Sumer (modern Iraq) the birthplace of the worlds first historically documented high civilization.

Cuneiform inscription commissioned by Xerxes.

A Closeup of a Cuneiform Inscription commissioned by Xrexes on a cliff face in Van Castle (Van Kalesi), Van, Turkey. Credit: Alex Jones CC-SA-2.0.

Among a number of truly revolutionary developments in the arts of civilization – including but not limited to a boom in the use of wool in clothing and goods resulting in more sheep being brought to pasture as well as greater numbers of livestock in general, a boom in industry and trade, the invention of the potters wheel, new building techniques for both decoration and magnificent monumental architecture perfecting the building in brick, the wheel, advances in metallurgy and the discovery of bronze, as well as political developments, including the city and its administrative function – all of which the Sumerians achieved during the Uruk Period, one perhaps changed the world more than any other: the invention of writing. It was here at Uruk in Sumer towards the end of the Uruk Period that the Sumerians invented writing, beginning with the pictographic type of writing that we call proto-cuneiform which ultimately evolved over centuries into the cuneiform script (as in Xerxes inscription to the left). It was named by 19th century scholars from the Latin word cuneus which translates as “wedge”, for the triangular shape of each marking that composes each glyph. Cuneiform is perhaps the most successful scripts ever invented because it spread throughout the Near East over more than 4000 years, spread into Egypt and India as a concept, perhaps even to China, and ultimately morphed into the Proto-Sinaitic Alphabet becoming our modern alphabet through Phoenicia, Greece, the Etruscans, and Rome.

Invention of Proto-Cuneiform Script

There are so many curious unknowns about the population expansion of the Uruk Period to the point that it almost seems too large to be explained by normal native growth. Such that some have proposed that the people who ignited Sumerian Civilization on the northern shores of the Persian Gulf weren’t a native people and therefore had migrated into the region.

Another possibility is that the population growth seems enormous because people coalesced together. Before cities they were more spread out and lived in smaller groups, tribes, and villages with a far less pronounced archaeological footprint for us to find. Thus we might literally be missing people in our early estimates of population. So the population expansion seems slightly large than it actually was (even though it was considerable already) because the smaller groupings left hardly discernible footprints, but when they gathered in cities they together left a more lasting mark which reflected the true extent of the population, which is larger than our early estimates because a fair fraction was invisible to us (archaeologically speaking) before the first cities.

Whatever the case may be, and we don’t know for sure in either direction yet, we know that the first true cities emerged in Sumer during the Uruk Period. The Uruk period from about 4000 to 3100 BCE is named for its prototypical city, the great Uruk. The city of Uruk was the first true city ever, which was known by a number of various names from Unug to Warka, and Erech in the Bible. By Mesopotamian tradition, Uruk was the city and home of the Sumerian goddess Inanna. It appears to have been the locus of the birth of civilization, and it was from Uruk that the evolutionary development of urban civilized life – as well as the art of writing found in the early proto-cuneiform script – seems to have spread.

According to the Sumerians, the goddess Nisaba invented writing, and for centuries they honored her by presenting the best examples of their skill in composition and cuneiform writing to her in her temple (which the ancient Sumerians and Near Eastern peoples believed to be the literal home of the god or goddess). However, archaeology has a quite different picture because we have artifactual evidence of development of the script within the various stratigraphic layers of the ruins of Uruk.

As an aside of some interest, the Sumerian mytho-historical tale of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta got this right, even though the tale was written down over a millennium after cuneiform was first developed (being written down in the first centuries of the 2nd millennium BCE, though the tale is definitely older than when it was first written). In the legend they record that the “Lord of Kulaba” was the first to imprint words on clay. This is actually correct, because “Kulaba” was the Anu District within the ancient city of Uruk, Anu being the principal deity of the Sumerian Pantheon who was the father of Inanna. Which is a clever way of saying that they attributed the origin of to Anu. This at least partial truth gives us a keen glimpse into how historical truth can be woven discreetly into the strands of myth and legend.

The vast majority of the earliest clay tablets that we have found depicting the early proto-cuneiform phase of the development of the cuneiform have been found in the Sumerian city of Uruk, which makes sense as the script was principally developed here. To be specific, about 5000 (out of about 6000 total proto-cuneiform tablets) have all been found at Uruk. Moreover, the clay tablets upon which their script was written have been found mostly in the temple district of the city, because all life was run through the temples in ancient Sumer. They were the centers of administration: all grain and goods were organized and distributed by the temples, their officials were in charge both of the running of this system and of its documentation.

Therefore, writing was not actually developed for literary purposes. From its inception it was close to a thousand years before it had developed enough to be used to write down longer compositions such as poems, myths, and legends with accuracy to the nature of spoken language. From the beginning the technology of writing was devised for bureaucratic purposes. For business and administration in other words, used to record transactions, shipments, sales, trade, storage of goods, and the distribution of goods. This is why at Uruk almost all of the proto-cuneiform tablets were found in the Eanna Precinct, which was the temple precinct to the goddess Inanna (Eanna literally meaning the “House of Inanna”).

This is strong confirmation that the invention of writing was a necessity of dealing with the required bureaucratic complexity that emerged from the congregation of humans into greater social structures and hierarchies, that were both more complex and challenging in their own new ways. For this appears to have been the first time that humans lived together in the thousands and multiple thousands, also with the curious and unique centralized nature of the Sumerian city-state, with the whole local region essentially being ordered, overseen, and perhaps even operated from the temples. It is fair to say that the invention of proto-cuneiform, and writing itself, was driven by the necessity of increased social complexity, its first stage being pure accounting of goods necessary to support a population, which in hindsight makes a great deal of sense.

Proto-Cuneiform Picture-Writing :: First Attempts At Writing

Around halfway through the Uruk Period, about 150 years into the Late Uruk Period which spans from about 3500-3100 BCE (bringing us to about 3350 BCE) is when we begin to see the first examples of writing. The Sumerians first attempts were all pictographic in nature. Meaning that when they first attempted to record ideas and concepts in a physical symbolic fashion, they began to do so by drawing pictures of the things that they were attempting to represent.

Their medium of choice was clay, which they would fashion into small rectangles (which were shaped somewhat like little pillows) which the accountant-scribe would scratch the glyphs into with the stalk of a reed which had been cut down to the right size. That was all the stylus they needed. Though in a couple of centuries they would eventually sharpen one end of the reed into a triangular shape for a more precise “sketching-edge” which in actuality was destined to revolutionize the whole nature of the script.

Proto-Cuneiform to Cuneiform Sign Development

This table was published by E. A. Wallis Budge (Ernest Alfred) and L. W. King (Leonard Wooley) in 1922. Shows the transition from Proto-Cuneiform writing in Cuneiform script proper, as well as the simplification of the signs. Public Domain.

As you can see in the top line of the table to the right, to symbolize the word “head” they scratched out in their wet clay tablets a picture that looked like a human head. Likewise, to represent fish they drew a picture of a fish, the same for a star, rain, an ear of wheat, and a reed. A few proto-cuneiform picture-glyphs that aren’t on the table were a hand which meant either “hand” or “to receive”, an ox-head was drawn as a triangle point-down with two vertical lines on top representing the horns of an ox. A foot which looked more like a boot also had a double meaning of “to go” and, conversely, “to stay”. The first phase of the Proto-Cuneiform script was therefore quite simple in character. Depictions of what they were attempting to describe.

The earliest documents written in proto-cuneiform date to between 3350 and 3100 BCE during the second half of the Late Uruk Period, found in the Eanna District of Uruk. The population of Uruk at this time may have been as great as 50,000 people, so it really was a bustling metropolis, relatively speaking.

About 90% of all the tablets we have found during this first Proto-Cuneiform phase of writing are administrative in nature. They are essentially records of collecting, trading, and distributing a variety of animals, goods, and raw materials. Thus we can see clearly how writing evolved from the bullae system of accounting. This also explains the reasons for the development of writing, as the first pictographs (picture-words) the Sumerians developed all represented objects such as cattle, grain, mountains, man, women, man-slave, woman-slave, fish, jars of oil, and so on, as well as basic (necessary verbs) all of which applied directly to the daily administrative functions of the temple.

The tablets record the type of good and its quantity, as well as both the individuals and the institution involved in the transaction. They recorded information such as the specific granary that an amount of grain was distributed to, and on what day. They also recorded how much grain or beer was distributed to a specific laborer, who was named. In the trade of slaves they even named the slaves. [21] The even record the titles of the officials (accountant-scribes) who were overseeing the transactions, such as what may have been a “collector of taxes”. This inclusion of names was difficult for a pictograph-based script, thus we see a few examples even during this early proto-cuneiform phase of a phonetic use of the script obeying the rebus principle, which would over time change the script entirely.

(Note that these ancient slaves were not from Africa. Mostly slavery throughout history has not been related to African peoples at all, because slavery has existed from the beginning long before it was practical to head to Africa for slaves. Thus slavery has a far longer disturbing and troublesome history, as people have always enslaved essentially their neighbors. In Sumerian the symbol for female slave was written with the glyphs for “female” (which we are pretty sure was a sketch of a vagina) as well as three angled or curved lines which looked like hills or mountains with the glyph meaning “mountains” and “foreign land” because they got their slaves from the mountainous lands that border Sumer, Mesopotamian and the fertile crescent in general to the east and north, which was the Zagros and Taurus mountain ranges, respectively. They abducted and enslaved people much like themselves, which is technically the case no matter which race is enslaving which race, though they were enslaving people just hundreds of kilometers from their own home cities. While African slavery was one of the most outrageous events not least because it was on a completely new scale, not unlike the death toll of the two World Wars compared with all other wars in history (greater technology, greater damage) it was not even even the most recent example, and just another event in a long history of humans enslaving humans that goes right back to the beginning of history, and probably long before.)

These texts may seem a little mundane and ordinary – and they are to some degree. Nonetheless they are of great benefit to the historian, for we possess incredibly detailed records of the first high civilization that ever existed almost from the same time that we have cities, right from the institution that was the heart of their socio-political system as well as their economy – the temple. This is incredibly lucky for modern scholars and for all modern people so that we can know about our past.

Since the Sumerian’s material of choice, clay, is nearly indestructible when baked at high temperatures, the cultures of the Near East who had adopted the script that power phonetic cuneiform script that proto-cuneiform was to become, are some of the most well-documented civilizations before the Industrial Revolution. [16] Since papyrus and paper scrolls break down quickly and are incredibly fragile by comparison, also requiring consistent, regular copying and recopying as time wears on in order to preserve them. Indeed, thanks to the hardy nature of clay these “documents” survived intended destruction – they were literally thrown away at regular intervals (perhaps being kept for a year and a day, or some specified length of time) after which they were mostly irrelevant. They were discarded unceremoniously and at random on what were perhaps regular rubbish piles, reused in the filling for holes, walls, and the razing and leveling of previous structures for new foundation.

Lexical Lists and the Beginnings of Scholarship

The remaining 10% of documents written in Proto-Cuneiform during the Late Uruk Period are lexical lists. The term “lexical” refers to the words and vocabulary of a language, so these lists could just as accurately be called word lists or vocabulary lists. These lists are themed, so we might find one that lists professions, while another lists types of plants, birds, metals, temples and other building types, gods, diseases, jars, wooden implements, cities, and stars. (Though not all of these lists occurred during the Uruk Period, emerging only in the later millennia of Mesopotamian history.) The oldest and most famous of all lexical lists is the Standard Professions List which hierarchically orders all of what were essentially political positions (officials) and occupations within the city of Uruk.

These lists are basically ancient dictionaries, because that is how they were used by ancient scribes, in the education and training of young scribes, as well as by modern historians and linguists of the 19th century when the languages of the cuneiform script where first being deciphered, because some of these lists contained vocabulary in Sumerian, with its synonym in Akkadian, or some other Near East language, which was essential in the decipherment of not only the Sumerian language, but a few other Near Eastern languages as a result.

These lexical lists were for scholarly use. They would have been useful for the organization of information, as well as in the display of and teaching of these symbols. You can imagine the early accountant-scribes gradually creating symbols as the need arose and adding them to certain master lists which they would periodically update with whatever new proto-cuneiform signs were developed. A teacher in the edubba (the Sumerian scribal school) probably would have used these lexical lists as part of the curriculum, and would have assigned to his students specific lists to learn and master.

I can even imagine particularly fine examples of these lists being displayed in scribal quarters or in the edubba both for reference purposes (to quickly look to the wall to check the construction of an obscure sign) as well as for decoration, an example of artistic skill or of what true quality and skill looks like, for the benefit of the students. I believe that these lists represent the beginnings of scholarship and of science, because they are the first attempt at rigorously classifying the world around them, which set the standard for an accumulation of knowledge that would one day grow into science and history, the realm of scholars.

Copying such lexical lists would then have been the work of advanced student, and maybe even some masters (depending n the intended use of the lexical list). It also makes sense that some would have been displayed in the edubba and functioned as a textbook. These lists were copied until the end of cuneiform culture. The oldest and most copied list known, being Standard Professions List is hierarchically organized Uruk officials and occupations.

The Evolution of Proto-Cuneiform

Grammar wasn’t relevant for the recording of sales and distribution, because so long as the type of good, quantity, direction of the transaction, recipient, overseeing official, and distributor were all made clear, anything extra would have seemed redundant at that stage, unnecessary excess. Therefore the complexities of grammar didn’t develop until the uses for writing had evolved.

As such, these archaic proto-cuneiform texts were not technically “read” in the normal sense because the script was not yet advanced enough to mirror spoken language. In essence the function of proto-cuneiform was essentially the same as if we were to show a quantity of apples by sketching a small picture of an apple with tallies beside to show how many, thus depicting that there were a specific number of a specific good. In the beginning proto-cuneiform didn’t follow speech, so there was not convention or underlying rules for word order. The ancient Sumerians compensated with a standard tablet arrangement so that the accounting information was organized in an understandable fashion that would have otherwise been the role of grammar.

By around 3300 BCE the citizens of Uruk where using about 700 different symbols. Which they apparently developed in only about 50 years. It seems that at first they were making a different symbol for every word or concept, like the Chinese symbolic script to this day. As can be expected, they started simply with things without attempting too many representations of verbs at first, except for those necessary, such as “to receive” which they depicted with the sketch of a hand, probably because when you receive something you accept it with outstretched perhaps open hands. Verbs – even simple verbs – are more difficult to represent in general, they are more abstract, subjective, and amorphous and would therefore take longer to develop.

[Clay bulla with tokens, precursor to cuneiform script in Mesopotamia]

A clay bulla with tokens, excavated at the Tell of the Acropolis in the city of Susa, Elam. Uruk Period. Excavated between 1933-1939 by Roland de Mecquenem. Sb 1932. Public Domain.

This first proto-cuneiform stage of writing was not really a departure from the bullae system. More than anything it was a transition and evolution of the bullae system because not only was the information presented on the first clay tablets the same as that which was presented on the bullae, the token impressions also provided the first symbol shapes. However, eventually the Sumerians did evolve far beyond what bullae were capable of. They got rid of the clay bullae with the tokens hidden inside, first using the tokens to impress their symbols on the surface of fairly flat pillow-like clay tablets, which appear at around 3200 BCE.

However, shortly afterwards by around 3100 BCE at the end of the Uruk Period we see that the tokens were abandoned completely, in favor of a cut-reed stylus, which they used to scratch the glyphs into the wet clay. Thus by the end of the Uruk period (c.3100 BCE) a system of symbols and record keeping had been developed whereby the symbols were scratched on clay (as opposed to impressed into it) called the Proto-Cuneiform script, because the triangular reed impression had not yet been developed which is what made the later writing system cuneiform (wedge-shaped) in the first place. Yet even at this stage we are not too far removed from the bullae system in concept, though in actual process and appearance great innovations have been made.

Uruk IV and Uruk III Phases of Proto-Cuneiform

There are two distinct phases in the development of the archaic proto-cuneiform script. The difference between the two can be observed in a number of ways: in an alteration of the style and appearance of each glyph (a transition from picture-words to true symbols); in the technique used to produce them (from token to cut-reed stylus, from impression to inscription), as well as a temporary increase in complexity from the older Late Uruk Period proto-cuneiform to that of the younger Jemdet Nasr Period.

At Uruk there are some 18 stratigraphic layers which mark the numerous periods of occupation before about 2000 BCE, reaching back to c.5000 BCE. When we count stratigraphic layers, the youngest are on top because they are the most recent which also have the lowest numbers. As we penetrate to older phases of occupation we proceed to deeper layers, which are numbered in sequence, the numbers getting larger the deeper that we go. At Uruk in the Eanna Precinct, the sacred temple precinct generally at the heart of all ancient Mesopotamian cities, which is where we have found the majority of proto-cuneiform tablets, the most recent of these layers is called Uruk I which corresponds to the Early Dynastic Period. Uruk II was an incorrect distinction so it is omitted. Then as we go deeper below Uruk I to Uruk III, this layer corresponds to the Jemdet Nasr Period (3100 – 2900 BCE) and Uruk IV to Uruk VIII cover the Late Uruk Period from 3100 to 3500 BCE, respectively.

[Proto-Cuneiform Tablet probably from Uruk, Jemdet Nasr Period (3100-2900 BCE)

A Proto-Cuneiform Tablet from the Jemdet Nasr Period (3100-2900 BCE) probably from Uruk. Metropolitan Museum of Art

The two phases of the development of proto-cuneiform are recorded in the stratigraphic layers where proto-cuneiform documents have been uncovered – found first in the Uruk IV layer and then in the Uruk III layer. No proto-cuneiform was found in any layer older than Uruk IV – not in Uruk V, VI, VII, or VIII – so we know that writing was first invented during Uruk IV phase which spans about 3350-3100 BCE. It was in the Uruk IV phase that we find the earliest instances of writing, which take the form of what we can call administrative documents which were arranged into only a few spacious grids and filled with a limited number of simple pictographs, though with a total repertoire of some 700 symbols. (As compared with the incredible complexity and precision evidenced in the Xerxes inscription.)

However, by the Uruk III layer (the Jemdet Nasr Period) much development had taken place with a strong push towards straight lines within the glyphs which also made them more standardized and less subjective. The stylus also evolved in that the reed was cut horizontally and then perhaps shaved in some sense of the word into a triangular cross-section.

In Uruk III proto-cuneiform we also see a tendency towards greater abstraction of symbols. What was once a picture of the object being described (a mountain, fish, human head, or the sun rising between what looks like two mountains) now became abstract symbols whose meaning could not be inferred from the glyph itself but was bestowed and perpetuated by the Sumerian scribes, making many of them unrecognizable as the picture-words they once were.

The difference is that even I, today, with no ability to read Sumerian cuneiform, can tell that the proto-cuneiform pictograph of a fish is indeed a fish, without anyone having needed to tell me. However the symbol that developed in the coming centuries would mean nothing inherently to me because it’s meaning is imbued by humans by tradition. This development continued, more and more originally pictographic signs becoming symbols. Within these two phases of proto-cuneiform alone from Uruk IV to Uruk III spanning only a few hundred years we see a shift from pictures to symbols, a different theory of symbols emerging (much closer to cuneiform proper) as well a dramatic increase in complexity of what was being expressed.

Developments In Susiana and the Greater Near East

These terms Uruk IV and Uruk III have come to apply to evidence of script found in a number of cities outside of Uruk as well. This is due to the fact that writing spread from Uruk, because its high level of civilization, arts, and culture had given it some influence over the neighboring regions. Though this happened more in the Uruk III phase of proto-cuneiform, Uruk III style tablets having been found further abroad such as in the northern Sumerian villages of Jemdet Nasr, Khafaji, Tell Uqair, as well as in the city of Susa in the country of Elam (in west-central modern Iran) and other sites in north and central Iran. Complex societies with proto-cuneiform may have existed in Syria and Turkey (some distance to the north of Sumer) c.3500 BCE. [15]

On the one hand, no other site contains the wealth of data and examples of proto-cuneiform that we find at Uruk, the birthplace of cuneiform. However, while the documents are few at other sites, they actually give us an advantage that we don’t have at Uruk: many of these foreign documents are complete. At Uruk, because there were so many cuneiform tablets in existence and being created on a daily basis for business record-keeping purposes, this meant also that they were thrown out at regular intervals. When they were unceremoniously disposed of (these ancient Sumerians never dreaming that any future peoples would have found any interest in them at all) they were often broken. Though at more distant sites, we find generally a higher concentration (per volume) of complete texts, which is incredibly useful.

To the east of Uruk lay the city-state of Susa, which was the principal city in the region that we know of as Susiana, south of the Zagros Mountain range. In the Late Uruk Period at about the same time as Uruk was going through a major transformation, the city-state of Susa was going through the same one. They were also building temples, and inscribing clay tablets with numbers and word signs – the same proto-cuneiform system that Uruk developed – beginning about 100 years after the earliest Uruk examples.

Susiana and Sumeria initially both shared the same system. This indicates that they had close ties, whether through trade, blood, or shared politico-religious authority is unknown. Though we do know that all the cultures of the Near East shared the same pantheons. However, while they shared the same proto-cuneiform system at first, Uruk IVa (the shallowest level of Uruk IV, closest to Uruk III) and Uruk III levels marking the emergence of proto-cuneiform script at Susa, immediately afterwards Susa developed its own unique and independent system of true writing. This is called Proto-Elamite, which remains undeciphered because later very different scripts developed without a continuous adherence to the ancient practices and symbols where the evolution is clearly seen, like at Uruk. [1] Proto-Elamite contained two types of signs to indicate numbers and words.

Proto-Cuneiform Number Systems

Proto-Cuneiform Sexagesimal Number Signs

Proto-Cuneiform Number Signs of the Sumerian Sexigesimal Numerical System. Nissen-Damerow-Englund. Credit: Otfried Lieberknecht CC-SA-3.0.

The Sumerians development of number signs was also revolutionary. You’ll recall how in the bullae system, the number of goods was given by the number of that goods token impressions that were made on the surface of the clay sphere. However, now with the development of numbers, the quantity and good were symbolized separately as two independent ideas. For example, if you look right you will see that a small circular impression meant “10” while a conical impression stood for “1”. These were placed beside the good to indicate the number of that good, so if you had 3 circles and 7 cones that stood for the number 37 (30 + 7). Interestingly, these impressions once were token impressions that stood for various units of grain. [15]

Within the Uruk IV proto-cuneiform phase several numerical systems were used, the numerals varying in shape depending on what was being measured. In total they had about 60 different number signs, and what made it even more confusing was the sometimes the same symbols were used in different systems, but with differing values.

However, this wouldn’t have been a problem for someone who knew the numerical system, because different types of commodities were measured with different systems. This is similar to modern Chinese and Japanese only in the sense that they have “counter characters” which are words and symbols attached to a number which vary depending on the type of commodity that you are counting.

In Sumer a sexagesimal system (which is a number system that uses a base of 60, with both divisions or multiplications of 10’s and 6’s, such as our modern system of telling time – 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour) was used for accounting humans, animals, and dried fish. though bisexagesimal system was used (increments of 6, 10, and 2) was used for grain products, cheese, and fresh fish. [1] Volumes in general, volumes of grain specifically, and surface area (such as that of a field) were also measured with different numerical systems. [1]

From Proto-Cuneiform To Cuneiform

We have now covered the evolution of writing from its conceptual ancestor in the bullae system, towards the first true invention of writing in its pictographic form of proto-cuneiform. All of these revolutionary discoveries, inventions, and developments took place in the Late Uruk Period and the Jemdet Nasr Period. Though in the first years of Sumerian History proper is when this script really begins to take off, and take on its powerful form which spread throughout the Ancient Near East, eventually even becoming the ancestor of our own modern alphabet.