The origins of writing
Writing appears to have been invented independently in several places, but one of the earliest known systems developed in Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, more than five thousand years ago. Interestingly, it did not begin with literature or history. The earliest texts are mostly administrative records: lists of goods, workers and payments kept by the officials of growing cities.
Before writing, people in the region used small clay tokens of different shapes to represent quantities of goods such as grain or animals. Many scholars believe that marks pressed into clay to represent these tokens gradually developed into written signs. Scribes wrote by pressing a cut reed into soft clay, producing wedge-shaped marks; the script is therefore called cuneiform, from the Latin word for ‘wedge’.
At first, signs mainly stood for objects and numbers. Over time, scribes began to use some signs for their sounds rather than their meanings, which made it possible to write names, grammatical endings and eventually complete sentences in spoken language. This shift turned an accounting tool into a flexible system for recording law, letters, religious texts and stories.
Learning cuneiform took years of training, and literacy remained limited to a small group of professional scribes. Nevertheless, the clay tablets they produced have survived in very large numbers, especially when buildings that stored them burned and the clay was hardened by fire. As a result, historians know a surprising amount about everyday economic life in these ancient cities.