it is used as a determinative it is abbreviated in transliteration to dand typeset in
superscript.
THE WRITTEN RECORDWriting began as bureaucratic record-keeping on clay tablets and administration
remained its principal function, starting with the approximately 5 , 000 documents
recovered from the city of Uruk (to use its Akkadian name, Sumerian Unug), and
peaking in the more than 60 , 000 documents relating to the late third millennium
empire whose capital was Ur (Urim). While these disposable economic accounts
dominate the textual record, even their distribution across space and time is highly
erratic. This is partly due to accidents of modern recovery and partly to accidents of
ancient survival, some tablets being recycled once they had served their function.
Others, however, were discarded after use, and it is these discards that archaeologists
have recovered, supplemented by tablets suspended in use when their surroundings
were destroyed or abandoned.
From the origins of writing onward, a wider range of genres was chosen for
textualization, written on a wider range of both materials and artifacts. This series of
changes, from administrative book-keeping to writing as a medium for expressing
religious intensity and literary inspiration, is often presented as a haltingly slow but
nonetheless goal-directed process culminating in a type of writing familiar to us.
However, one of the challenges facing modern scholars is a more nuanced analysis of
these developments, doing greater justice to the many dimensions of writing in the
period.
The second attested use of writing, also found among the early tablets from Uruk,
was for recording lexical lists, sometimes organized like a dictionary in terms of how
the words were written, but more often thematically structured like a thesaurus, some
lists focusing on aspects of the social world (such as lists of professions) and others on
the natural world (such as lists of trees). These lists, whose lexicon provides a poor
match to the words found in the administrative tablets, were compiled by scholars for
use in the education of trainee scribes, and presumably therefore originated in an
educational context, as opposed to the administrative contexts in which trained scribes
practiced their trade. A further contrast is that oral transmission enabled their content
to be repeated (or adapted) across time and space, the lists consequently being attested
in multiple exemplars. This early institutionalization of textual culture – its selection,
dissemination and preservation (or sometimes adaptation or rejection) – has
intellectual as well as social and political implications, not simply mirroring an external
reality but to some degree authoring it, and then re-authoring it in a constant process
of change. In addition, these lists have been as helpful to modern as to ancient students
of Sumerian, examples from the early second millennium onward specifying a word’s
Akkadian translation as well as its pronunciation in Sumerian.
The next attested type of writing marks a further major change, both content and
the bearer of that content being intended for transmission across time. Many different
types of object were introduced as the bearers of writing, all fashioned from more
durable materials intended to provide longevity; in addition, there was a change in the
message as well as the medium. This new type of writing, referred to as display
inscriptions, is attested from approximately 2800 BConward (here it should be stressed
–– The Sumerian language ––