its inventor – surely just one man – would not have realized the full potential of what
he had just created, nor had any idea of the consequences. Around 3400 BCan official
in charge of the stores at Inanna’s temple in Uruk enjoyed a moment of sublime
inspiration. He was responsible for controlling the income and expenditures of the
temple household. Up till now a few basic tools had been available: clay tokens in a
variety of shapes, seals to validate the record of a transaction, clay tablets on which to
mark numbers and possibly a counting board (as Friberg, in Englund 2001 : 499
interprets the sign for scribe). His idea was that instead of using shapes of clay or their
impressions to serve as mnemonics for commodities, he would draw marks on the clay.
These marks allowed him to specify the different commodities in his care – plants from
the temple fields, animals from the temple herds, products, and storage jars – and the
people with whom he interacted on a daily basis. To his contemporaries it must have
seemed amazing how much information he could store reliably on his tablets. Or at
least something like that must have happened. There is much about early writing that
remains a mystery to us.
It’s magnificent, but is it writing?This new intellectual tool would in time spawn the cuneiform writing system, but
“proto-cuneiform” itself occupies a transitional stage between non-writing and writing.
Although clearly something more sophisticated than semiotic systems like airport
signs, it does not fully meet the usual criteria for writing; in particular, its relation to
language is tenuous. For the sake of convenience I shall refer to it henceforth as a
writing system, although it is not unambiguously such until a few centuries later. At
the outset the system was used only for administrative purposes. There was no
literature, no letters, no royal inscriptions. The only other texts so far discovered are
those dedicated to schooling beginner scribes in the use of the new technology. There
are of course practice texts where the trainee bureaucrats have rehearsed their future
trade. There are also lists of signs used in writing. Whilst such lists are a ubiquitous
feature of later cuneiform culture, their creation at this early stage is noteworthy, and
marks a degree of abstraction in the system. The original purpose of the lists was
presumably to define and prescribe the sign corpus. The system could only function
if every user shared a common set of signs. They are unlikely to have been an arena
for scholarly speculation. In fact there were no scholars as such at this time.
This new system had much in common with the old ones. Lumps of clay were
covered with arbitrary shapes standing for something in the real world, and impressed
with seals. The information encoded was very similar – commodities and quantities.
But the new tool had advantages – greater precision, extensibility, and flexibility. It is
this that constitutes the real cognitive breakthrough rather than the materials, method
of inscription or technique of representation. Mesopotamians had long known the
practice of representing elements of the world around them using images, as abun-
dantly evidenced by stamp seals and ceramic decoration. Potters had started to use
abstract and arbitrary pot-marks to distinguish the work of different craftsmen. But
here now was a standardized system capable of conveying reliably whatever infor-
mation was needed. The reader may ask why an ink-based system was not used. The
answer to this probably lies in the requirements of sealing practices, and the weight of
clay-based tradition already established by the forerunners to writing. The small
–– The first scribes ––