Cracking Cuneiform: How Sumerians Invented Writing

About 5,000 years ago, in a city called Uruk in what is now Iraq, people had a problem: they were trading so much grain, sheep, and beer that nobody could remember who owed what to whom. So they invented something that changed the world forever — writing. The Sumerians pressed wedge-shaped marks into wet clay with a reed stick, and those marks became the first writing system anyone has ever found: cuneiform.

- Explain why the Sumerians invented writing and what problem it solved - Describe how cuneiform marks were made and read - Identify the difference between picture-signs and sound-signs in early Sumerian writing - Explain why clay tablets survived for thousands of years

The earliest Sumerian writing, from around 3400 BCE, used little pictures called pictograms — a drawing of a cow meant 'cow,' a drawing of a jar of grain meant 'grain.' Scribes pressed a cut reed stylus into soft clay, and over a few hundred years the pictures got simpler and more angular, because it's much faster to jab a wedge-shaped mark than to draw a careful picture. By about 2900 BCE, the picture-drawings had turned into the wedge-shaped signs we call cuneiform, from the Latin word cuneus, meaning 'wedge.'

The biggest leap happened when scribes realized a sign could stand for a SOUND instead of just a thing. The sign for 'arrow,' pronounced 'ti' in Sumerian, could also be used to write the unrelated word 'life,' which was also pronounced 'ti.' This trick — using a picture-sign for its sound rather than its meaning — is called the rebus principle, and it's the same idea as drawing a bee and a leaf to spell 'belief.' Once scribes could write sounds, they could spell out names, grammar, and any word in the Sumerian language, not just things you could draw.

Mesopotamia had very little stone or wood, but the rivers Tigris and Euphrates left behind huge amounts of soft, sticky clay. Scribes shaped clay into flat tablets, wrote on them while they were still wet and soft, and let them dry in the sun — or, for extra-important records like laws or treaties, baked them hard in a kiln. Dry clay tablets barely decay, which is why archaeologists have unearthed hundreds of thousands of them still readable today, giving us receipts, letters, math homework, myths, and even a Sumerian's complaint letter to a merchant about bad-quality copper.