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While humans have been making their mark on the surfaces of this Earth for at least tens of thousands of years, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment our impulse to record what we saw tipped into what we would consider ‘writing’.
Now, a team from the University of Bologna in Italy has linked symbols on ancient Mesopotamian seals with an archaic visual communication system called proto-cuneiform; an art form which would in time evolve into one of the world’s first true writing systems.
“The close relationship between ancient sealing and the invention of writing in southwest Asia has long been recognized, but the relationship between specific seal images and sign shapes has hardly been explored,” says philologist Silvia Ferrara from the University of Bologna.
“This was our starting question: did seal imagery contribute significantly to the invention of signs in the first writing in the region?”
Writing is a complex system of rules that tells us how to arrange and interpret symbols to convey all kinds of information, from literal descriptions to abstract thoughts.
Long before those rules were invented, symbols representing basic concepts were etched, drawn – or in this case printed – onto a material to share simple ideas, which over time may have become standardized as a lexicon for grammarless ‘proto-writing’.
The researchers methodically compared the designs they found on ancient cylinder seals with known proto-cuneiform signs. The selection of cylinder seals they analyzed originated before writing emerged in ancient Mesopotamia, through to the proto-literate period.
They argue that similarities in the way common artifacts were depicted visually on the cylinder seals – for instance, fringed textiles and netted vessels – share elements with their corresponding proto-cuneiform symbols.
The proto-cuneiform signs associated with fringed material, for instance, have triangular forms with multiple vertical lines pointing downward from a piece of ‘cloth’. Representations of people weaving on a cylinder seal from the Mesopotamian city of Susa bear a similar form, as do artifacts from the city of Uruk.
Similar resemblances can be seen between what seem to be depictions of vessels enveloped in netting on the cylinders and a series of proto-cuneiform signs the researchers suspect carry the same meaning.
“The conceptual leap from pre-writing symbolism to writing is a significant development in human cognitive technologies,” Ferrara says.
“The invention of writing marks the transition between prehistory and history, and the findings of this study bridge this divide by illustrating how some late prehistoric images were incorporated into one of the earliest invented writing systems.”
Proto-cuneiform is first seen in the archeological record as a means of accounting. It allowed people to track the production and trade of everyday items, especially agricultural and textile items. But before this literacy arose in Mesopotamia, cylinder seals fulfilled that same purpose, allowing people to record trade by ‘printing’ records into clay tablets.
“Our findings demonstrate that the designs engraved on cylinder seals are directly connected to the development of proto-cuneiform in southern Iraq,” Ferrara says. “They also show how the meaning originally associated with these designs was integrated into a writing system.”
This research was published in the journal Antiquity.