The world’s oldest identified system of writing was influenced by symbols used for commerce — engravings discovered on cylinders used within the alternate of farming produce and textiles, a brand new research suggests.
The discovering reinforces an thought proposed in earlier analysis: that cuneiform script — which was developed in early Mesopotamia round 3100 B.C. and is considered the earliest writing system — originated partially from accounting strategies for monitoring the manufacturing, storage and transport of such gadgets.
In keeping with the researchers, a number of symbols engraved on stone “cylinder seals” have been developed into indicators utilized in “proto-cuneiform,” an early model of the cuneiform script utilized in southern Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq. The researchers reported their findings in a research printed Tuesday (Nov. 5) within the journal Antiquity.
Such cylinder seals have been used for millennia all through Mesopotamia, the place they have been rolled throughout clay tablets to print their motifs on them — typically to confirm a transaction or, later, a letter.
A number of the seals examined within the new research date to about 4400 B.C. — greater than 1,000 years earlier than the event of writing. “We targeted on seal imagery that originated earlier than the invention of writing, whereas persevering with to turn into the proto-literate interval,” research co-authors Kathryn Kelley and Mattia Cartolano, each researchers within the Division of Classical Philology and Italian Research on the College of Bologna, stated in an announcement.
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The workforce’s work recognized seal motifs associated to the transport of jars and fabric between completely different Mesopotamian cities, in all probability involving temple establishments. The researchers recommend these motifs grew to become proto-cuneiform indicators in early writings concerning the commerce of farming produce and textiles.
The invention, which nonetheless has skeptics, exhibits the continuity between the “preliterate” seals and early writing, in line with the authors.
“It proves that the motifs identified from cylinder seals are immediately associated to the event of writing in southern Iraq and exhibits how which means was transferred from preliterate motifs into script,” they wrote within the assertion.
Oldest writing
Cuneiform writing used a stylus to make wedge-shaped impressions in unbaked clay. These impressions created indicators representing sounds to make a report of spoken language. The clay might be dried or baked, preserving the indicators.
Cuneiform was developed by the Sumerian civilization that lived in early cities in southern Mesopotamia from about 5500 to 2300 B.C., when it was succeeded by the Akkadian Empire, primarily based within the metropolis of Akkad.
The Akkadians adopted the Sumerian system of writing however utilized it to their very own language — and Akkadian written in cuneiform grew to become the widespread written language of Mesopotamia for greater than 2,000 years, all through the next Babylonian and Assyrian durations.
The brand new research highlights a number of motifs seen on preliterate cylinder seals. The authors recommend these motifs have been developed into indicators within the proto-cuneiform script seen on 5,000-year-old clay tablets from the southern Mesopotamian metropolis of Uruk. These embody symbols depicting a constructing, poles constituted of reeds, and fringed cloths in a vessel.
The authors hope their work will assist students decode extra proto-cuneiform symbols, in addition to present perception into the which means of some seal motifs.
“The conceptual leap from pre-writing symbolism to writing is a big improvement in human cognitive applied sciences,” research co-author Silvia Ferrara, a professor within the Division of Classical Philology and Italian Research on the College of Bologna, stated within the assertion. “The invention of writing marks the transition between prehistory and historical past, and the findings of this research bridge this divide by illustrating how some late prehistoric photos have been integrated into one of many earliest invented writing techniques.”
Unclear origins
Anthropologist Gordon Whittaker, an skilled on the origins of cuneiform on the College of Göttingen in Germany who was not concerned within the research, known as it “attention-grabbing and thought-provoking.” However he cautioned that it might be untimely to recommend the motifs on cylinder seals have been “stimuli for the invention of writing.”
“Within the few cases wherein the identical merchandise seems to be depicted in each a seal and a proto-cuneiform signal, there is no such thing as a apparent causal relationship that might hyperlink the one with the opposite,” he advised Stay Science in an e mail.
“Moreover, a number of of the shapes — reminiscent of a slender rectangular with out inside element — are just too basic or obscure to be useful to the authors’ argument,” he stated.
College of Pennsylvania archaeologist Holly Pittman, who was not concerned within the analysis, advised Stay Science in an e mail that the brand new research verified her suggestion from roughly 30 years in the past, that the imagery on seals was a basic affect on proto-cuneiform writing.
Pittman stated the concept was dismissed on the time, however she was happy to see that the authors of the brand new research had reached the identical conclusion.
