It was a really big deal, one of the biggest of the last four or five thousand years. Links after the jump.
From LitHub, August 26:
Moudhy Al-Rashid on the Earliest Forms of Writing
If the birth of history happens when people begin to write things down, then our own journey must start with the first written words in ancient Mesopotamia. It was with these first words that my own path into the field began. I have always been a bit of a nervous wreck, and as an academic it took years before I grew comfortable enough to deliver a talk in anything but a soporific monotone that could lull even the most over-caffeinated student to sleep.
When I managed to land a teaching job at Oxford University, I had to face my new reality of lecturing to an audience multiple times a day, every single day. My first few days were a sweaty, red-cheeked, nervous-stomached nightmare, until one class reconnected me with the clay tablets that had inspired me in the first place—tablets that happened to showcase some of the first words ever written down.
My anxiety followed me up the stone steps to the main entrance of the Ashmolean Museum one cool October morning, where four columns rise up several storeys from the stone slabs of its courtyard. I found my students at the building’s side entrance and led them to the study room where two blue trays of cuneiform tablets awaited us on a large table topped with black foam. It took less than a second for the rush of adrenaline at seeing the tablets to sweep away all of my nerves. Before us lay some of the earliest examples of writing in all of humanity’s history.
We took our seats around the table in awed silence. I picked up a pale, iPhone-sized tablet whose surface was divided into uneven boxes, some filled with thick dots and others etched signs—a sheaf of barley, a foot, a bull, a divine star. “Let’s start with this one,” I said, recognising what was essentially a very ancient receipt tallying up as many as 400 objects. This was, after all, one of the first tablets I had ever picked up years ago as a student in this very class. It was now my turn to teach others about these moments from the dawn of writing, frozen into lumps of clay and nestled neatly in a bright blue plastic tray.
Amazingly, tablets from this early era of the first attempts to codify a writing system share features with those made by scribes thousands of years later, like the scribe who made the drum-shaped clay museum label from the palace of Ennigaldi-Nanna. In the seventh century BCE, a generation or so before the princess was born, that scribe, called Nabû-shuma-iddin, was pressing a reed stylus into a lump of wet clay. He pinched, rolled, and shaped the slightly slippery, moist clay to form a small cylindrical tablet about four inches long and two inches in diameter. This drum-shaped piece of clay would fit comfortably into the palm of my hand, solid and smooth apart from the gentle texture of impressed signs.
Nabû-shuma-iddin covered the drum in signs describing the now missing brick of King Amar-Suen. His text leaves behind such a wealth of detail that we need not feel too wistful about the lost brick, which once bore a short inscription in Sumerian, the first known written language used by the people who lived in what is now southern Iraq. The brick, Nabû-shuma-iddin tells us, had been discovered by Sîn-balassu-iqbi, a governor of Ur in the seventh century BCE. In other words, he was recording an archaeological find by one of his contemporaries, much as any archaeologist today makes notes on an ancient artefact and the circumstances of its excavation.
This little drum can unlock for us far more than the possible nature of Ennigaldi-Nanna’s collection. It also reveals an interplay in ancient Mesopotamia between history and languages, the shared script of cuneiform, and the main medium on which these have survived: clay. Clay may not look like much. Damp and a bit sticky when wet, it can be grey, beige, brown, or a slightly more exciting reddish brown. This ubiquitous material left the soil in ancient Mesopotamia so rich with nutrients that some people call this land between two rivers the “fertile crescent.” This silty soil may seem insignificant at first, but it becomes the opener for a major chapter in humanity’s ongoing global story. The landscape’s wealth of clay helps to enable the birth of the written word.
Nabû-shuma-iddin, a professional scribe, would have spent only a few minutes shaping the wet clay of the cylinder, but would have taken considerably longer to cover it in writing that would have been ancient even to him. On the clay cylinder are four columns of text, written in two different styles of cuneiform script. The first three columns preserve a style deliberately made to look old, just as the “font” would have appeared on the original brick he was copying from: an attempted rendition of the original Sumerian writing on the brick of Amar-Suen....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
"How Bills of Exchange Went from a Way to Bring Textile Proceeds Home to the 'Foundation of Modern Commercial Banking'"
"Four Thousand Years Ago, Textile Traders Invented a Basic Social Technology: Mass Literacy"
