Fifty-eight hundred years ago, an ancient people, living in an area which originally was called
Mesopotamia, took a giant step in the development of civilization. After experimenting for a few
centuries with simple prototypes, they developed a mature system for writing down their language.
This people, now called Sumerian, was the first to do so. Even though their writing
system did not evolve into the one we now use, they deserve credit for their invention which has
inspired so many subsequent cultures.
It was all done with mud and sticks, and it was originally just about keeping track of commodities.
They had needed some way of sending listings of various items to distant landowners.
Living by the banks of great rivers, as they did, provided them with ample clay which they fashioned
into small slabs. A wooden tool was used to mark the soft clay with symbols, and each stood for
a particular item. One represented a head of sheep, another a bushel of wheat, and so on.
The clay slabs were then baked in a fire, developing the durability of bricks. At first, only
nouns were used, but soon verbs and other parts of speech were in use. Since each symbol was
made up of marks shaped like a wedge ( actually a golf tee ), and the Latin name for wedge is "cuneus",
this style of writing is called cuneiform. We have recovered many thousand examples of this
script, and below is a glimpse of it:
As you can see, the symbols are highly abstract, although they originally represented an image of the
word they stood for. This is not alphabetic writing, but rather a system called logographic.
Modern Chinese writing is of the same type. Some of the symbols will be more
recognizable if you rotate your head ninety degrees to the left. The last one, for example,
becomes a foot. At a certain point, unexplicably, the Sumerians changed the method of writing
from top-to-bottom to left-to-right. They did this by rotating the whole writing surface
counter-clockwise, symbols and all.
Before too long this system was expanded to express all the range of thoughts of which human beings
are capable. The Sumerians used their new found skill to write lists, correspondence, histories,
novels, and graffiti. It must have seemed like magic that one person's words could be
transmitted across space and through time to the eyes of another. The surrounding cultures were
strongly impressed, each one either adapting cuneiform symbols to their own language, or developing
their own system inspired by the Sumerian example.
The Sumerians had their moment in the sun, but eventually they were replaced by other peoples.
Their language is no longer spoken, their temples and monuments are in ruins, their fields have
been taken over by the desert. Only their legacy of writing lives on.