A skill for the few
In ancient Sumer, reading and writing were not general skills. Cuneiform took years to learn, and the evidence suggests that only a small share of the population, mostly men attached to temples, palaces or wealthy households, could use it with confidence. The word often translated “scribe”, dubsar, literally means “tablet writer”, and it covered a range of ranks, from junior clerks to senior officials and scholars.
That does not mean the written word was out of reach for everyone else. Farmers, merchants and craftsmen could have their business recorded by a scribe, and seals pressed into clay worked as personal marks of authority for people who could not write. Many people probably grew up used to hearing documents read aloud and seeing them used as proof in a dispute. Literacy in this period is best understood as a professional skill with wide social effects, not a mass ability.
Women appear less often in the record, but they are not absent. The poet and priestess Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, is the earliest author known by name. She lived around 2300 BCE, and the Enheduanna poetry attributed to her was still being copied in schools centuries later. In the Old Babylonian period, women of the cloister at Sippar kept records and sometimes wrote. These were exceptions, but they show that access depended on a person’s role in an institution, not on a ban on writing.
From accounts to letters
The first writing, in the Uruk period of the late fourth millennium BCE, was almost entirely accounting. Its job was to record who owed what to whom, in a world of large temple economies. For several centuries there was little else. The tablets that list rations, flocks and fields were used by administrators, and they show what mattered to the people in charge.
Over the third millennium BCE, scribes began using the same system for other kinds of text:
- Royal inscriptions on bricks, statues and foundation deposits, giving a king’s name, titles and building works.
- Legal and business documents, such as sales of land, loans, adoption agreements and records of trials, many of them witnessed and sealed.
- Letters, which appear by the middle of the third millennium and become common in the later periods. A letter was often carried by a messenger who may have recited its contents aloud.
- Lists and school texts, which doubled as a record of vocabulary and a way of teaching it.
- Literature, including hymns, proverbs, laments and stories.
The development of writing was therefore not a straight rise from simple to complex. It spread to new purposes as people found that a durable record could settle arguments, give orders at a distance and preserve memories.
Schools and literature
Sumerian literature is known mostly from tablets copied in scribal schools. Fragments from around 2600 BCE show that hymns and wisdom texts already existed. The great majority of the best-known compositions, however, come from the Old Babylonian period, roughly 1900-1600 BCE, when pupils copied them as exercises. Sumerian was already fading as an everyday language by then, so the copies preserve a literature that was being kept alive by training and prestige.
The surviving works include hymns to gods and kings, laments for ruined cities, debates between personified objects such as summer and winter, and the Gilgamesh poems, which a later tradition drew on when it composed the Epic of Gilgamesh in Akkadian. Humorous school dialogues and proverbs also survive. These tell us that scribes valued eloquence, memory and a shared canon of texts. Scribal schools were the place where this literate culture was passed from one generation to the next.
Numbers as well as words
Writing and counting developed together. The earliest tablets use number signs for grain, animals and labour, and the later scholarly tradition developed the sexagesimal number system, based on sixty, which is still echoed in the way we divide hours and circles. A scribe needed arithmetic and measurement as much as spelling, since he might survey fields, calculate rations or check a building’s materials. Literacy in Sumer was therefore as much about managing information as about literature.
A language that outlived its speakers
Sumerian was spoken in southern Mesopotamia in the third millennium BCE, but Akkadian gradually became the language of daily life, and most scholars place the end of Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere around 2000-1700 BCE. This did not end its use. Sumerian remained the language of religious ritual, of hymns and lamentations, and of the scribal curriculum. Scribes compiled bilingual word lists and dictionaries, with Sumerian on one side and Akkadian on the other, so that new generations could learn it as a classical language.
A useful comparison is Latin in medieval Europe: no longer anyone’s mother tongue, but still the language of the church, law and learning. Similar scholarly activity took place in Babylonian temples, where priests and astronomers trained in the old script, in a world of Babylonian scribal scholarship that kept both languages in use. Sumerian signs also survived inside Akkadian writing as logograms, so even someone who never learned Sumerian saw it on every tablet. Cuneiform literacy lasted until the early centuries CE, when the last of these temple scholars disappeared.
Why it matters
The legacy of Sumerian literacy lies in the habits that came with it: keeping archives, writing contracts, copying a canon of texts and training specialists in schools. Many of these practices were taken up by later Mesopotamian states, and some spread more widely. Their ultimate effect was to make the past available to later readers. Because scribes valued copying, modern scholars can read works that were composed more than four thousand years ago, though the work that followed the Sumerian rediscovery of the nineteenth century still leaves many passages uncertain.