Evidence of human writing 1,000 years earlier than previously thought
The history of human writing is being rewritten after archaeologists found the origins of words engraved on 6,000-year-old cylinders used by accountants.
The earliest known writing system is thought to be Sumerian cuneiform, which grew up around the region of present-day Iraq, dating from about 3350-3000BC.
Now, experts have linked early cuneiform symbols to designs that appear on cylinder seals between 4400-3400BC, a millennium earlier.
Similar images representing words such as wine vessels, buildings, nets and reeds were found on cylinders and in early cuneiform.
Seals a record of goods
Cylinder seals were used as part of a pre-literate accounting system for tracking the production, storage and movement of agricultural goods and textiles.
The tubes were engraved with designs, then rolled across clay tablets to print their motifs on to them, and record the amounts of goods exported and imported.
“The close relationship between ancient sealing and the invention of writing in south-west Asia has long been recognised, but the relationship between specific seal images and sign shapes has hardly been explored,” Prof Silvia Ferrara, the co-author from the University of Bologna, said .
“Did seal imagery contribute significantly to the invention of signs in the first writing in the region?”
To find out, experts studied seals from Uruk, one of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia, which was a centre of immense importance during the fourth millennium BC.
It is believed that about 40,000 people lived in Uruk at its final phase in 3100BC, with a further 80,000 in its surrounding environs, making it the world’s largest urban settlement at the time.
It was the city of Gilgamesh, the hero from the Epic of Gilgamesh, often cited as the first major composition. It is thought to be the city of Erech mentioned in Genesis and founded by Nimrod, the great-grandson of Noah.
The team compared cylinder seal motifs with proto-cuneiform signs, aiming to find correlations that could be convincingly shown to not only relate to shape but also to meaning.
They identified seal motifs, related to the transport of jars and cloth, which transformed into proto-cuneiform signs, showing for the first time that there is a direct continuity between pre-literate seals and the invention of writing.
‘Significant cognitive development’
The researchers also found that similar exchanges of textiles and vessels took place at different cities, probably involving temple institutions, and that both seals and tablets were used to document these exchanges.
“The conceptual leap from pre-writing symbolism to writing is a significant development in human cognitive technologies,” added Prof Ferrara.
“The invention of writing marks the transition between prehistory and history, and the findings of this study bridge this divide by illustrating how some late prehistoric images were incorporated into one of the earliest invented writing systems.”
The experts said that the findings prove that the motifs known from cylinder seals are directly related to the development of writing in southern Iraq and gives important new insights into the evolution of symbol systems and writing.
Archaeologists are hopeful the discovery will help scholars decode more proto-cuneiform in future, and conversely allow them to learn more about the meaning of the seal motifs.
The findings were published in the journal Antiquity.