Anonymous administrators and record keepers; no individual inventor is known
Plate 011
c. 3400–3200 BCE
Uruk, Sumer (present-day southern Iraq)
No photograph is shown for this exhibition. The museum displays an image only where it can show the object honestly.
About this date
The earliest tablets from Uruk are dated by archaeological layer, not by any written date. Estimates run across several centuries.
About credit
No inventor is recorded. Writing appears to have grown out of accounting practices, and scholars still debate how directly earlier clay tokens led to it.
Chapter II
The world before
Life before Cuneiform Writing
Memory was the only archive. Debts, harvests and obligations had to be remembered or tracked with small clay tokens, which could be lost, disputed or forgotten when people died.
II
The human achievement
How it came about
Scribes in the temple economy of Uruk pressed numerals and pictographic signs into clay tablets. Over centuries the signs became wedge-shaped (cuneiform means “wedge-shaped”) and began to represent sounds as well as objects, so that language itself could be written.
III
Understanding the invention
How it works
Cuneiform Writing, explained in two steps.
01
Step 01 of 02
Clay as paper
River clay was plentiful, easy to shape and, once dried or baked, very durable. Many tablets survive because fires that destroyed cities also baked them hard.
Clay as paper
Signs that stand for sounds
IV
The transformation
What changed for humanity
Government and trade
Tax, rations and contracts could be recorded exactly, allowing larger cities and longer-distance dealings.
Literature and law
Laws, hymns and epics such as the Epic of Gilgamesh were written down, copied and taught.
It let information outlive the person who held it. Laws, letters, contracts and stories could be stored, copied and read by people who were never present.
V
Before and after
Life before and after Cuneiform Writing
Before
Trust rested on witnesses and memory.
After
A sealed tablet could prove who owed what, years later.
On larger screens, drag the divider (or use the arrow keys) to give more room to the world before or after.
Mechanical copying of text builds on the idea that language can be fixed in a physical form.
VII
Human stories
The people and the moments
Schools of scribes
Learning cuneiform took years. Excavated school tablets show students copying signs again and again, which is one way historians know how the script was taught.
Where accounts differ, this museum follows the documented record and says so.
