A script, not a language
“Sumerian writing” is a convenient phrase, but it blurs two things. Cuneiform is a script: a system of signs pressed into clay. Sumerian is one of the languages it was first used to write. The same script was later adapted for Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian and others, much as the Latin alphabet serves English, French and Turkish. There was no single moment when someone “cracked” it. Scribes invented it gradually in the late fourth millennium BCE, and modern scholars needed roughly a century of work, from the early 1800s onward, to read it again.
From clay tokens to the first tablets
Long before writing, people in the Near East used small clay objects, often called tokens, in shapes such as cones, spheres and discs. Some scholars, most famously Denise Schmandt-Besserat, argued that these tokens represented counted goods and were the ancestors of the first signs. Later, tokens were sometimes sealed inside hollow clay envelopes that carried impressions on the outside. The link between tokens and writing is still debated, and not every researcher accepts it as a direct line of descent.
What is clearer is the setting. The earliest tablets with true writing come from the city of Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, and date to roughly 3300-3100 BCE, the later part of what archaeologists call the Uruk period. Thousands of these early tablets survive, and most are administrative: lists of rations, animals, textiles, grain, land and workers, together with numerical signs. In other words, writing appears to have begun as bookkeeping for large temple and palace households, not as a way to record stories or poetry. Some of the same early lists of professions and objects were copied by later scribes for well over a thousand years.
From pictures to wedges
The first signs were drawn with a pointed tool and looked like what they stood for: a head of grain, an animal, a vessel. Over several centuries three changes took place.
- Scribes began to press a cut reed into damp clay instead of drawing lines, which produced wedge-shaped strokes. The Latin word cuneus, “wedge”, gives the script its name.
- The signs were turned about 90 degrees and the direction of writing settled into rows read from left to right, so that the old pictures became hard to recognise.
- Signs came to stand for sounds as well as things. In Sumerian, the word for “arrow” and the word for “life” were both pronounced ti, so the arrow sign could be used for either. This rebus principle made it possible to write names, grammar and abstract ideas.
The result was a mixed system. A sign could be a whole word (a logogram), a syllable, or a silent marker that told the reader what category a word belonged to, such as wood, a deity or a place. A single sign often had several readings, and several signs could share one sound, which makes cuneiform demanding to learn. The number of signs in regular use fell from many hundreds in the earliest period to a few hundred later, though scholars’ texts used more.
One script, many languages
By the middle of the third millennium BCE, cuneiform was being used to write Akkadian, a Semitic language unrelated to Sumerian, and the script spread across the Near East. Over its long life it carried the Assyrian royal inscriptions, letters between kings, business contracts, omen lists, mathematical exercises, medical recipes and literature. Akkadian became a diplomatic language, and rulers of different countries wrote to each other in it, as the Late Bronze Age letters found in Egypt show.
Two other cuneiform scripts are worth keeping separate. Ugarit, on the Syrian coast, used a short alphabetic form with about thirty signs. The Persian kings created Old Persian cuneiform, a largely syllabic script of about three dozen signs, for royal monuments. Both used wedges, but they are not the same system.
Cuneiform was never fully replaced in a single stroke. As Aramaic, written in a simple alphabet on perishable materials, became common in the first millennium BCE, cuneiform retreated to temples and scholarly circles. The latest securely dated tablets are astronomical texts from the first century CE.
How scribes were trained
Scribes learned the script in a school the Sumerians called the edubba, “tablet house”, though in practice teaching may often have happened in a teacher’s home. Most of what we know comes from exercise tablets of the Old Babylonian period, around 1900-1600 BCE, found in towns such as Nippur, but the habits they reveal are older.
The training was long and based on copying:
- Pupils started with basic strokes and the names of signs.
- They moved on to long lists of words grouped by subject, such as trees, animals, stones and places, which taught both spelling and vocabulary.
- They copied personal names, proverbs and model contracts.
- Advanced students copied hymns, myths and other literary works, which is partly why so many survive.
Teachers prepared a model on one side of a tablet, and the pupil copied it on the other. Round, palm-sized tablets are typical of beginners’ work. One Sumerian literary composition, usually called “Schooldays”, describes a student being beaten for faults such as poor handwriting; it is a humorous literary text and should not be read as a plain record of daily discipline. Scribes could go on to work for temples, palaces or private households, and the most learned became experts in omens, medicine or astronomy, the world described in the study of Babylonian scribal scholarship.
Reading cuneiform again
Cuneiform became unreadable as the last scribes died out, and for many centuries travellers could only wonder about the inscriptions they saw at ruins in Iran and Iraq. European visitors began copying them in the 1600s and 1700s. The breakthrough came with the simplest of the scripts: in 1802, the German teacher Georg Friedrich Grotefend identified several royal names in Old Persian inscriptions from Persepolis. Later scholars, above all Henry Rawlinson working at the Behistun inscription in Iran, used a trilingual text to extend the work to Babylonian and Akkadian. The same decades saw the excavation of Assyrian palaces, whose libraries supplied thousands of tablets. By the 1850s several scholars were producing translations that agreed with one another.
Sumerian was the last piece to fall into place. Scholars first saw it as a hidden layer inside Akkadian texts, and only in the later nineteenth century did a consensus form that it was a separate, unrelated language. It is still classed as a language isolate. The step-by-step story of that work is told in the article on cuneiform decipherment, and the comparison with the Rosetta Stone is a useful reminder that each ancient script needed its own key.
What the tablets preserve
Cuneiform tablets are among the most durable records humans have made, since clay baked by accident in a burning palace can survive better than papyrus or parchment. Museums worldwide are thought to hold several hundred thousand of them, many still unpublished. They include the earliest known administrative records, school lessons, legal contracts, letters, and works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Because of this, historians of Mesopotamian civilization can often study ordinary households, prices and disputes in a detail that is rare for the ancient world.
Reading them is still a specialist task. Many signs have uncertain readings, texts are often damaged, and scholars continue to revise translations as new tablets are published. What can be said confidently is that the script began as a practical tool of accountants and grew, over about three thousand years, into one of the longest-used writing systems in history.