Chapter 1
Cuneiform, humanity’s first writing system, was invented some five thousand years ago in what is now southern Iraq, and it was most often written on clay tablets a few inches square and an inch thick. Hundreds of thousands of tablets have been discovered by archaeologists over the centuries, and they are held by many museums and libraries around the world, including the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. When I visited the Morgan to view cuneiform, Sidney Babcock, curator and department head, Ancient Near Eastern Seals & Tablets, invited me to pick one up. “Really? I can touch it?” I asked. “Absolutely,” he responded. “The oil on your hands won’t hurt them. And they won’t break—they’ve lasted this long!”
To be so close to these tablets, which are mind-bogglingly old, was stunning. Vellum, parchment, papyrus, and paper—other writing surfaces people have used in the past—deteriorate easily. But not clay, which has proven to be the most durable, and perhaps most sustainable, writing surface humanity has ever employed.
Gingerly, I brought the tablet close to my eyes. The clay was cool to the touch. Palm-sized and pale brown, it was full of tiny incisions. Although I had seen images of cuneiform before my visit to the Morgan, I underestimated how much the reproductions had been magnified. I imagined the tablets would be the size of my iPhone, but most were half that. And the marks were tiny. Babcock used this analogy to describe the size of the writing: “Find the second portrait of Lincoln on the penny. You know, the one of his statue inside the Lincoln Memorial on the obverse? That’s how small the script can be.”
The tablet, cool and fitting nicely in my palm, felt somehow comforting. There was something indescribably affective about touching it, and something familiar, too—not unlike holding my smartphone, upon which I often make marks.
“Cuneiform,” which means wedge-shaped, is a term the Greeks used for the look of the incisions. It was used to write at least a dozen languages, just as the alphabet that you are reading is also used for many other languages. It looks like a series of lines and triangles, as each sign comprises marks—triangular, vertical, diagonal, and horizontal—impressed onto wet clay with a stylus, a long, thin instrument similar to a pen. Clay tablets were so central to cuneiform they became part of one Sumerian word for “writer,” dubsar, which combined the word for “tablet,” dub, with sar, from the verb for “writing,” which means to go fast and straight. A dubsar was a writer or scribe who could write quickly and in a straight line on a tablet. Sumerians also integrated an old technology into another verb used for “writing,” hur, which also means to draw or trace. What was to them a new technology, writing, was associated—linguistically, at least—to an older one, drawing, which they had previously done on pottery.*
Deciding to use clay for a writing surface was ingenious. As a result, many more examples of Sumerian writing have survived than more recent writing done by ancient Greeks, Romans, medieval Europeans, and even, proportionately, writing done after the invention of the printing press. If the Greeks had written on clay, the Library of Alexandria would have survived the flames. (Egyptian papyrus, the second oldest writing surface, has also lasted better than many forms that came after it because of the Egyptians’ practice of burying documents in sealed containers.) We have a glut of cuneiform but a paucity of cuneiform readers—only a few hundred in the world—so only a fraction of the discovered tablets have been translated. Still, they have not been lost to posterity, even if they have been ignored. Each time a cuneiform-using city was burned down during the past five thousand years, the clay hardened and became even more indestructible.
Of course, cuneiform wasn’t the first method by which human beings made marks. Cave paintings, tally sticks, and memory boards all predate cuneiform. But those are forms of information storage, and thus considered by most linguists to be proto-writing. Most agree that cuneiform did begin as proto-writing—like African drumming and Incan quipus, record keeping by means of knotted cords—and evolved into the first full-fledged writing system, with signs corresponding to speech.1 The roots of cuneiform lie in tokens, or chits, used by Sumerians to convey information. They would take a stone and declare it a representation for something else, perhaps a sheep. A bunch of stones might mean a bunch of sheep. These stone tokens would sometimes be placed in a container and given to someone else as a form of receipt—not that different from what we do today when we hand over pieces of paper with numbers on them to buy a quart of milk, and the clerk gives us back another piece of paper with numbers on it to confirm the transaction.
By 3000 B.C.E. the Sumerians had taken this system to another level of abstraction and efficiency, moving it from proto-writing to writing. They began using clay envelopes instead of cloth envelopes, and instead of putting stones inside of them, they stamped the outside of the envelopes to indicate the number and type of tokens being conveyed.
Gradually, Sumerians developed symbols for words. At first these phonemes symbolized concrete things: an image of a sheep meant a literal sheep. Then another leap of abstraction was introduced when symbols were developed for intangible ideas, such as God, or women. Cuneiform, in other words, evolved from a way to track and store information into a way to explain the world symbolically. The marks became more abstract over time as well, evolving into signs that look nothing like what they refer to, just as the letters s-h-e-e-p have no visual connection to a woolly four-legged animal. These marks and signs took the form of triangular wedge shapes.
Cuneiform marks became more abstract because they made the system more efficient at a time the Sumerians’ society was becoming more complex. The origins of writing lie in their need to keep better records—not, as many might assume or wish, to express oneself, create art, or pray. Most agree cuneiform developed primarily for accounting purposes: While we can’t know about tablets that have been lost, the majority of those that have been excavated and translated contain administrative information.
Mundane as this story is concerning why writing was invented—to record such things as sheep sales—the story of how cuneiform was later decoded is spectacular. For hundreds of years no one could read it. Even though cuneiform was used for millennia—and much of it, incised on rocks in Persia, was in plain view for centuries after it ceased to be used—the language was unintelligible for almost two thousand years. Not until 1837, after British army officer Sir Henry Rawlinson copied down inscriptions from the steep cliffs of Behistun, in western Persia (now Iran), could anyone know what the marks said.
How those marks were made continues to defy logic or explanation: The angle and height of the incisions seem to preclude the possibility of a chiseler on a ladder. Rawlinson at least figured out how to copy the marks by making paper impressions as he stood, perilously, on the ledge. Then he took them home and studied them for years to determine what each line stood for, what each group of symbols meant. Eventually he decoded the markers that had sat in the open for some five thousand years, thereby cracking the cuneiform code. (The inscriptions describe the life of Darius the Great, king of the Persian Empire in the fifth century B.C.E., as well as his victories over rebels during his reign.) Similar to the Rosetta stone, on which the same text is written in hieroglyphics, demotic, and Greek, the cliffs of Behistun contained the same words written three times in three different languages: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. None of these languages were known, but several scholars, over time, slowly cracked the code by first discovering the key to reading Old Persian and then, because the same words were written in each language, decoding the other two inscriptions.
Once the language could be translated, scholars learned about Sumer, including how Sumerians taught cuneiform to their children. We now know quite a bit about what Sumerian children did in a penmanship class. Their activities were remarkably similar to what happens in Ms. Hammer’s second-grade class today.
Having invented the first writing system, Sumerians also established the first schools to teach writing. Schooling was entirely devoted to teaching writing. (The Sumerian word for “school” is edubba, or tablet house.) But schooling was far from universal. Only a tiny percentage of Sumerians were taught to write—primarily the sons and, occasionally, daughters of the most privileged in Sumerian society.
A wellborn boy started school at around age seven. During class he would sit, probably outside, on the ground, and his first lessons would be about tablet making: He had to make his own writing surface, too. (Today, of course, children are not required to make their own paper.) His teacher would give him a piece of wet clay and tell him to mold it into one of several shapes and sizes, each of which indicated a different purpose for the tablet: Some were round, some square, some large, some tiny. Round tablets were used only for school assignments. The most common shape was a palm-sized rectangle.
To write on his tablet, the boy used a stylus usually made from a reed, since cuneiform requires no ink or graphite; one cuneiform scholar terms it “writing with shadows.” Then, with his tablet and stylus in hand, he was taught how to score the tablet into columns and lines that would guide the marks. The columns not only helped the boy keep his words straight but also divided the communication into manageable units, like a page or a paragraph is used by us today. After scoring his tablet, he would then make signs, pressing his stylus into the clay in the proper direction and at the proper depth.
Stylus technique was complicated. The tip of the stylus was triangular, and turning it caused different slants and directions for the marks—some went deeper than others, some went horizontally or vertically, and the bottom of the stylus would make a round mark—each with a distinct meaning. Writing was two-handed: Cuneiform writers held the stylus in one hand and the tablet in the other, turning both as they went, an action requiring practice and training to master.
Students were taught the symbols for words using principles of linguistics and phonics that are still valued as pedagogical principles.* There were no textbooks or lesson plans; instead, teachers memorized assignments—perhaps from their own schooldays—and taught their students to do the same. No one composed writing; all the students did was copy, following drills to improve memory and fine motor skills. In one exercise, teachers would help students learn their marks by writing words on one side of a tablet and then give the tablet to the student, who would turn it over and use the other side to try writing the same words—not unlike a blackboard demonstration.
Years of study were needed to become a scribe. That the training was so extensive makes sense, given how small the script and tablets are and the complexity of the marks themselves. Also, cuneiform became more complex as it evolved, and new signs were added. Students had to memorize hundreds of signs, and some would continue, after learning the basics, to advanced studies. They could specialize in copying legal documents or in temple administration. The most advanced students were allowed to copy hymns and epics.
Remarkably, all cuneiform marks look identical across tablets. Some scribes left small marks, called colophons, on their tablets, attesting to the authenticity of what had been written and honoring Nabu, the god of scribes, but the colophon was written in a script indistinguishable from the other words on the tablet. The fact that, of the thousands of tablets found—many from the same archaeological site—none are written with an identifiable hand becomes even more astonishing in light of the complexity and intricacy of cuneiform.
The first handwriting, then, was not the least bit personal. Based on their output, scribes were more like human computer keys than they were individuals expressing ideas. However, Sumerians did have a way to distinguish themselves: Each one had a unique seal.
All Sumerians, even the illiterate, carried seals: small, cylindrical pieces of stone (not clay) upon which were carved, intaglio-style, raised words and images. Seals had holes through them and every Sumerian hung his or her seal around the neck. And, just like fingerprints, no two seals were the same.
Cuneiform seals were the Sumerian version of signing one’s name in ink. To witness a marriage, a Sumerian would roll her seal over a wet tablet, making a base impression on the clay shallower than the marks contained within it, similar to a rubber stamp. Seals were so central to Sumerian society that experts have identified “canceled” seals—the equivalent of cutting up a credit card—as well as forged seals and seals with lines scratched across them, perhaps made after someone died.
Although each seal was made from stone, Sumer had no stones: It was a flooded desert plain. Every seal, therefore, had to be imported. Some of the stones have been identified as coming from as far away as modern-day Afghanistan and Egypt, but how or why they were transported is unknown.
To us, one’s signature is tied ineluctably to his sense of self. Signatures are not reproducible: There are laws against forging them. But for Sumerians the opposite was true: seals were their signatures, and they were reproducible. Each time a Sumerian rolled her seal across clay, it looked exactly like the last time she did it: Again, the seal functioned much the same way as a rubber stamp does today. Seals were a form of identity akin to credit cards: both reproducible (you used them to make the same mark over and over) and unique (they identified one unique individual).
Cuneiform, as a writing system, is dead in the sense that Latin is dead: No one writes or converses in it. But it is not gone. One can buy Complete Babylonian: A Teach Yourself Guide by Martin Worthington and, indeed, argue persuasively that cuneiform was the most influential writing system in human history: Fifteen other languages developed from it, including Old Persian, Akkadian, and Elamite. Sumerian was taught as a classical language for generations after it ceased to be a living language. It was taught to those who spoke Aramaic and Assyrian but who read, copied, and recopied Sumerian literary works. By 1600 B.C.E. no Sumerian speakers were alive, but Sumerian was still used for another thousand years. When one form of writing “dies,” it takes an inordinately long time to go extinct, if it ever does.
Eventually, Aramaic and Akkadian replaced Sumerian. Writers stopped using clay in favor of papyrus. And a new word, “scribe,” replaced the Sumerian word, “tablet writer.” The transition was slow, with several systems being used simultaneously; clay continued to be used even after most people had shifted to papyrus.
Indeed, this transition is familiar: The simultaneous use of different writing technologies was happening in the coffee shop where I typed this chapter. Looking up, I saw people using a pen to annotate a paperback, a cell phone to text, a laptop to write, and a pencil to take note of a transaction at the cash register. Some days, a twentysomething hipster comes in with his manual Remington typewriter, too.
We may, in fact, be becoming more like the Sumerians with every passing year. Most of us carry around small, palm-sized writing tablets made of a durable material. And cuneiform feels—materially—more similar to my daily experience of writing than do the sheets of paper in elementary school classrooms.
* We do this kind of linguistic repurposing today all the time. For instance, we talk about “browsing” the Web. The word “browse” was originally used to describe a different action: something one did in bookstores and antique shops.
* As Maryanne Wolf argues in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper, 2007), the pedagogy Sumerians used to teach their children—by emphasizing categories of words, such as types of trees, animals, stones, plants, clothing, and food, as well as the practice of copying—is similar to contemporary educational practices.