The Mystery of Uruk: Unlocking the Secrets of Ancient Writing | Ancient History Wiki

Bureaucracy enabled the control of the regional economy and urban centers. By the end of the Uruk period, there existed a system of record-keeping with texts, which was the basis of all subsequent administrative cuneiform writing used for more than 3,000 years afterwards. Uruk writing is called proto-cuneiform because the signs are drawn into the clay with thin lines rather than being impressed with wedges, as is the later cuneiform script. There is no need to see a conceptual difference between the earliest script and later developments, however. This is the first time in history that people developed a writing system, and the oldest evidence for real script comes from the city of Uruk itself. The earliest tablets appear in the Uruk IV and III archaeological layers of the Iana precinct. These terms have become used to refer to stages in the development of the script itself, and as such are applied to text found outside Uruk. Accounts provide two sets of data, a record of quantities, and an identification of the person or office involved in the transaction as a participant or supervisor. Techniques other than writing can indicate the second element. Seals, for example, can imply a controller, and they were in use long before the Uruk IV period. From the 7th millennium on, stamp seals impressed on jars or on lumps of clay attached to containers identified the authority that guaranteed the contents. In the middle of the Uruk period, the cylinder seal replaced the stamp seal. It enabled much speedier coverage, because the seal could be rolled over the surface in one smooth movement. Numerous seals are attested with a large variety of pictorial imagery. Each seal belonged to an individual official, or to an administrative office whose identity could be recognized through the design. The profusion of distinguishable seals demonstrates the presence of a class of officials in the city of Uruk who supervised transactions and guaranteed their legitimacy by attaching their mark of authority. The seals did not disclose the quantity or actual contents involved in a transaction. Several techniques to record such information seem to have been tried out at the same time, or in quick succession, and are documented in various sites throughout the Near East. At Uruk itself, the archaeological stratigraphy is too confused to establish a sequence of techniques there. At the West Iranian site of Susa, however, we see, prior to the archaeological level corresponding to Uruk IV, a level where Buli first appeared, followed by one with numerical tablets. Buli are hollow spheres of clay with seals rolled all over their surface, containing collections of small objects that we call tokens. The latter are stone and clay geometric objects, shaped as cones, spheres, discs, cylinders, and many other forms. These are thought to record the measure of a particular item. The receipt of three units of barley, for example, could have been acknowledged by handing over three tokens representing one unit each. It is likely that larger tokens of the same form indicated a higher unit in a metrological system. They were kept together in the clay envelope, which was sealed to guarantee the contents through the authority of the sealer, as consultation of such records was impossible without breaking them. The idea arose to impress marks on the outer surface. Simultaneously there appear Buli onto which impressions were made, most likely by the tokens inserted inside, and solid tablets with sets of numerical signs traced on them. The numerical tablets do not reveal to us what items are accounted for, but the metrological system and the shape of the numerals must have provided such information to the people using them. These recording devices were found at Uruk and other sites where Uruk influence extended. Only at Uruk itself and in Susiana in western Iran finally did records appear that removed this ambiguity. Numbers were combined with one or two signs indicating what was involved, sheep, grain, textiles, etc. While the two regions shared the same system, immediately afterwards they developed distinct and independent systems of true writing. In the archaeological levels Uruk IV and III, the Proto-Cuneiform script appeared. Somewhat later, the Proto-Elamite appeared in Susiana. Proto-Elamite remains undeciphered because subsequent scripts in the region are very different in character and do not show later forms of the signs used. The Uruk system is better understood because its practices were continued in later Cuneiform script, which is well known. The script contained two types of signs to indicate numbers and words. The existence of a numerical sign system was fundamentally important since 90% of the Proto-Cuneiform tablets were accounts. Numbers of goods, animals, humans, and time had to be recorded. The Uruk IV notation seemed complicated to us because seven different systems were in use simultaneously, each of which varied the physical shape of the numerals according to what was measured. For example, a sexagesimal system, relying on units with increments of 6 and 10, was used to account for animals, humans, and dried fish, among other things. A bisexagesimal system, which diverges from the previous one as its units also show increments of 2, was used for processed grain products, cheese, and fresh fish. Volumes of grain or surfaces of fields were measured differently. The basic sequence of units varied, then, from system to system. Although the shape of the number signs could differ between systems, the same shapes are found in various systems but sometimes with different values. A much larger group of signs, some 900, designated non-numerical concepts. Each sign stood for a word, a physical entity such as barley or a cow, or an action such as distribution or receipt. The origin of the sign shapes is a matter of controversy. The ideas that they were based on drawings of the objects they signify, or that they were two-dimensional renderings of the shapes of tokens, do not by themselves explain the forms of all signs. Various sources of inspiration were involved. Some of the outlines reflected the physical object represented, or a part of it, such as an ox head for an ox. Others were purely arbitrary in shape, such as a circle with a cross to indicate a sheep. New signs were created by combining several basic ones, slanting them, or cross-hatching parts of them. For example, the area of the mouth on a human head was marked with hatchings in order to indicate the word mouth, or the sign for water was added to that for head to indicate the verb to drink. In order for the system to function, all users had to know the meaning of these signs and conventions must have existed to enable someone to recognize the writer's intent and to guide the creation of new signs. The word signs are the central concern of the second group of tablets found at UROC, the lexical texts, which make up 10% of the UROC corpus. They are lists of words designating cities, officials, animals, plants, and manufactured goods, always in the same sequence. Their function was to show scribes how to write signs, and many manuscripts are the work of students copying out parts of a list. Such texts remain part of the Mesopotamian corpus for the entirety of its history, later expanded to thousands of entries with translations into one or more languages. Lexical texts are a fundamental part of the Mesopotamian cultural tradition, reflecting an organization of the vocabulary for practical purposes. Yet, ideological concerns also inform the order given. First, the grouping of words in the same list indicates that a system of classification existed. Second, the ordering of words in a list may have been important. The interpretation that the standard list of professions reflect social hierarchy suggests that the ranks of officials and their relative importance have been systematized. The proto-cuneiform signs show little connection to the spoken language, but there are indications that people speaking Sumerian developed them. They represented the Sumerian word for mother, A-M-A, for example, by the drawing of a star into a box-shaped sign. As the star could be read A-M, it intimated the pronunciation of the entire sign. The phonetic value of signs permitted their use to indicate terms beyond the names of concrete objects. The rebus principle was employed to extend their range. For example, the sign for read was used to indicate the verb to return, as both words sounded alike in Sumerian. The majority of Sumerian words were monosyllabic. Consequently, the signs to write them could also be used to render syllabically a longer word or a grammatical element. A person's name could be spelled out with several syllables. Cuneiform writing was never intended to give a full phonetic rendering of a text, however, even if it had the ability to do so. Throughout its history, a single sign could record a word, such as king, irrespective of the language of the text or the grammatical form of the word. It was only in the mid-third millennium that markers of the conjugation of Sumerian verbs were written down, and only in the early second millennium, when Sumerian was probably a dead language, was a consistent effort made to record all grammatical elements in a sentence. It is important to keep in mind that cuneiform is a script, not a language. Just as the Latin alphabet has the potential to record any language, cuneiform script could do the same, and a large number of ancient Near Eastern languages were written in it. We can only determine the identity of the language based on the syllabic writing of words, or on grammatical elements. The script invented in the late Uruk period had all the components of cuneiform writing. It developed further by reducing the number of signs, increasing the use of syllables, and changing the signs themselves, replacing curvy lines traced into the clay with increasingly rectilinear ones impressed onto it. A single line looks like a triangle because the scribe first pressed the head of the stylus into the clay, and then pushed down its thin side to create a mark. This shape led to our modern designation of the script as cuneiform, that is, wedge-shaped writing. In order for accounting to function properly, a fully developed metrology had to exist as well. In the late Uruk period, a complete system of weights and measures appeared that laid the foundation for all later Mesopotamian systems. The basic units were inspired by natural phenomena, and ordered with a mixture of the sexagesimal and decimal systems that characterized the numerals. In the recording of time, a year consisted of twelve months of thirty days each, and an additional month was added intermittently to adjust the cycle to the solar year. In weights, the load a man could carry, a talent, was subdivided into sixty minas, each of which contained sixty shekels. Lengths used the forearm as the basic unit, subdivided into thirty fingers. Six forearms made up a reed. A set of equivalences was established at this time in order to facilitate the exchange of goods measured in different ways. There was thus not an evolution of precursors to writing, from bully with tokens to tablets with signs impressed on them, as is very often suggested. These presumed stages coincided and must be seen as different and competing attempts at conceptualizing the surroundings. The most successful and consequential of these attempts ended up being the cuneiform writing system. It provided a new way to signify the physical world surrounding its users and organized that world as a logical system that could be expressed through writing. The development of writing was a conceptual breakthrough, not merely an administrative one. The tools of bureaucracy all continued to develop in later Near Eastern history based on the foundations laid in the Uruk period. To a great extent, these elements define the ancient Near East. Cuneiform writing on clay tablets, the cylinder seal, and the mixture of decimal and sexagesimal units and numerals. While there were local variations and changes over time, the continuation of the elements that we first observe in the late Uruk period shows how important that period was for the formation of Near Eastern culture. The developments just described all happened in the far south of Mesopotamia in the area around the city of Uruk. We are unable to determine whether similar processes took place independently in other parts of southern Mesopotamia because of an overall lack of excavation of Uruk period levels there. Nevertheless, the sheer size of Uruk, roughly 250 hectares, suggests that it was an unusual center whose complexity led to the use of writing and the organization of a city-state. Ironically, much more archaeological information for the Uruk period comes from regions outside southern Mesopotamia, especially western Iran, northern Syria, and southern Turkey. In the mid-4th millennium, local developments there became fundamentally influenced by southern Mesopotamia. A variety of interactions between local populations and people from the Uruk region is attested, and some of the difficult questions are to determine why these interactions took place and to what extent local or foreign impulses caused change. Just to the east of lower Mesopotamia is the area of southwest Iran, itself an alluvial plain below the Zagros mountains, that is often called Susiana after the large site of Susa at its center. Although geographically similar to southern Mesopotamia and close by, travel between the two regions is difficult as marshes separate them. The nearest access route is in the foothills of the Zagros, going around the marshes. The difficulties of communication might explain why the cultures of the two areas remained distinct until the 4th millennium. Probably due to indigenous forces in the early 4th millennium, a large center emerged at Susa, but at the time of the late Uruk period, Susa's material culture became entirely influenced by southern Mesopotamia. We find typical late Uruk pottery in great quantity in the precursors of Proto-Cuneiform writing, bully with tokens, numerical tablets, and tablets with numbers and one or two word signs. Seemingly inspired by Uruk, Susa had become a city in its own right, commanding resources from the entire Susiana region. Moreover, Susa extended its cultural influence over a wide area in Iran, as is shown by the appearance of the beveled rimbol in sites all over the country. Examples have been excavated in the Zagros mountains, in northern, central, and southern Iran. They were even found on the coast of modern Pakistan. Some of these locations were more than a thousand kilometers from Susa, which we assume was the transit point for Uruk influences, as the contacts between these sites and Susa survived after the Uruk expansion had ceased. The situation in the north was different. In northern Iraq, Syria, and southern Turkey, elements of the Uruk culture appeared starting in the mid-4th millennium, but the degree to which these affected local cultures varied. Southern influence had waned after the Ubaid period, and the local cultures attested are subsumed under the name Late Chalcolithic. In the first half of the millennium large centers with monumental architecture arose in the region, commanding the resources of their immediate surroundings as the result of local developments towards centralized power. Some scholars call these cities, but their growth stalled in the mid-4th millennium, while Uruk in the south increased massively in size and complexity. The new southern city established close links with the north, although its influence varied between different sites. In some places settlements of urban proportions appeared on virgin soil with a cultural assemblage imported wholesale from southern Mesopotamia, such as Habuba Kabira on the middle Euphrates, which was a densely inhabited and fortified city. Most scholars think that southern immigrants founded these cities as colonies. In other places Uruk people established themselves into existing settlements, creating enclaves for themselves. Their interaction with the local populations introduced innovations within the context of native traditions. For instance, at Tel Brak southern pottery, including the beveled rimbol, became dominant and people used painted cone mosaics, sealed bully and numerical notation tablets, all items inspired by southern influences. But they did not fully replace local products. In still other places, the Uruk presence was restricted to a few buildings. But even there the influences on the local populations could be drastic. At Arslan Tip in southern Turkey, for example, local elites seem to have imitated southern practices and constructed a massive monumental building. Finally, there were ancient settlements, such as Kinintip in Turkey, where Uruk influence was completely absent. The Uruk cultural elements that appeared in this region are building plans and decoration, pottery, and precursors of writing, bully with tokens and numerical tablets. Proto-cuneiform writing, found in Uruk Ewa levels in the south, did not make its way into the north, so contacts must have ceased just before this development. These material elements are less important than the social change the Uruk expansion caused. Urban centers suddenly arose with the concomitant social hierarchy and economic organization. It remains unclear what was most important in this process, indigenous evolution or foreign influence. Local trends toward larger settlements and a hierarchy of settlements predated the Uruk expansion. Uruk influence may thus have accelerated a process that had its roots in the local cultures. On the other hand, the massive foreign influence observed in a city like Habuba Kabira clearly shows southern inspiration. Aspects of Uruk culture penetrated beyond the spheres where its impact was direct. The Bevelled Rim Bowl is found at several sites near the north Syrian coast, for instance. Most intriguing is the possibility that Uruk influenced early Egypt, where in the late 4th millennium a number of cultural characteristics similar to those of Mesopotamia appeared. Nitched mud brick architecture, decorative clay cones, some pottery styles, cylinder seals, and certain artistic motifs. That these elements appear in central Egypt and not in the north suggests that the contacts were made through travel via the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea rather than overland across Syria. The most difficult challenge remains to explain why this expansion took place. For what reason did the young city-state or states of southern Mesopotamia decide to send out people to distant places in order to settle there, bringing along their cultural baggage? Most scholars suggest that Uruk people wanted access to resources rare or absent at home, and they stress that Babylonia lacks wood, stone, and metals. That deficiency is exaggerated, however, and materials were locally available to compensate for it. It seems more appropriate to take the fundamental demographic and ideological changes that occurred in Uruk time's southern Mesopotamia into account. States had developed with a new type of ideology and a new social structure. Certain people held positions of importance never seen before and had influence over the lives of many. The newly emergent elites may have wished access to exotic materials, whose possession distinguished them from the rest of the people. Many luxury goods were only available outside Mesopotamia. Semi-precious stones, gold, silver, and so on. The settlements to the east and north could have been colonies of southerners, assuring access to these resources through interaction with local populations. Moreover, the conviction that a god had influence beyond the city limits may have contributed to an expansionist ideology. Not only the immediate surroundings but also distant regions may have been considered as dependent on the city god. Such ideological elements, while impossible to ascertain in the documentation, should not be entirely ignored in our interpretation of the Uruk expansion.