Sumer Palaeography

Sumerian Writing

The outline of the development of the Sumerian writing system has been worked out by palaeographers. It has long been known that the earliest writing system in the world was Sumerian script, which in its later stages was known as cuneiform. The earliest stages of development are still a matter of much speculation based on fragmentary evidence. The French-American archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat, building on a hypothesis advanced by Pierre Amiet of the Louvre, has demonstrated a series of small steps leading from the use of tokens for simple bookkeeping purposes to the development of written tablets on which graphs of the script stand for morphemes of spoken Sumerian.

The Origin and Development of the Cuneiform System of Writing. A table showing the forms of eighteen representative signs about 3000 BCE to about 600 BCE.

Archaeologists have discovered in lower Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq) large numbers of small, distinctively shaped clay objects. These are thought to date back to as early as 8000 BCE (before Common Era), about the time that hunter-gatherer societies were giving way to an agricultural way of life. A greatly elaborated set of these clay shapes, some shaped like jars and some like various animals, and occasionally inserted in clay envelopes, date from 3500 BCE, about the time of the rise of cities. Some of the envelopes have markings corresponding to the clay shapes inside. Moreover, these markings are more or less similar to the shapes drawn on clay tablets that date back to about 3100 BCE and that are unambiguously related to the Sumerian language. These markings are thought to constitute a logographic form of writing consisting of some 1,200 different characters representing numerals, names, and such material objects as cloth and cow.

The theory advanced to explain this transformation by Schmandt-Besserat is that the clay shapes are tokens representing agricultural goods such as grain, sheep, and cattle and that they were used as a form of bookkeeping. The multiplication of types of tokens could correspond to the increase in the number of kinds of goods that were exchanged with the rise of urbanization in the 4th millennium BCE. Tokens placed in an envelope might have constituted a sort of "bill of lading" or a record of indebtedness. To serve as a reminder of the contents of the envelope, so that every reader would not need to break open the envelope to read the contents, corresponding shapes were impressed upon the envelope. But if the content was marked on the envelope, there was no need to put the tokens in an envelope at all; the envelope could be flattened into a convenient surface and the shapes impressed on it. Now that there was no need for the tokens at all, their message was simply inscribed into the clay. These shapes, drawn in the wet clay with a reed stylus or pointed stick, constituted the first writing.

The historical record is much more explicit after 3200 BCE and reveals clearly the stages involved in the evolution from a limited system of notation suitable for recording particular events into a full, general-purpose orthography. Archaic Sumerian used mostly graphs representing numerals, names for objects, and names of persons. Graphs for numerals were geometric shapes, while those for objects were often stylized pictures of the things they represented. Yet the system was a genuine logographic writing system generally adequate to economic and administrative purposes. With the substitution of a blunt writing stylus for a pointed one, the symbols become less picture-like and more conventionalized. The writing system takes the name cuneiform from the shape of the strokes that form the symbols (from Latin cuneus, "wedge").

The next major stage in the evolution of Sumerian writing was the adoption of the phonographic principle, the use of a sign to represent a common sound rather than a common meaning. The graph representing "water" appears to have been used also to represent the locative suffix "in" because the latter sounded the same as, or similar to, the word "water". It is as if in English a person used the word for ball to stand for the person named Bill on the grounds that it is easy to represent the ball with a circular graph while there is no obvious way to represent Bill, and the two words sound similar. The Sumerian script, however, remained primarily logographic and resorted to phonographic signs only when forced to, for representing unpicturable words and for distinguishing ambiguous graphs.

Notes to the picture above:

1. is the picture of a star. It represents primarily the Sumerian word an, "heaven". the same sign is used to present the word dingir, "god".
2. represents the word ki, "earth". It is obviously intended to be a picture of the earth, although the interpretation of the sign is still uncertain.
3. is probably a stylized picture of the upper part of a man's body. It represents the word lu, "man".
4. is a picture of the pudendum. It represents the word sal, "pudendum". The same sign is used to represent the word munus, "woman".
5. is a picture of a mountain. It represents the word kur, whose primary meaning is "mountain".
6. illustrates the ingenious device developed early by the inventors of the Sumerian system of writing whereby they were enabled to represent pictorially words for which the ordinary pictographic representation entailed a certain amount of difficulty. The sign for the word geme, "slave-girl", is actually a combination of two signs - that for munus, "woman", and that for kur, "mountain" (signs 4 and 5 on our table). Literally, therefore, this compound sign expresses the idea "mountain-woman". But since the Sumerians obtained their slave-girls largely from the mountainous regions about them, this compound sign adequately represented the Sumerian word for "slave-girl", geme.
7. is the picture of a head. It represents the Sumerian word sag, "head".
8. is also the picture of a head. The vertical strokes underline the particular part of the head which is intended - that is, the mouth. The sign therefore represents the Sumerian word ka, "mouth". The same sign represents the word dug, "to speak".
9. is probably the picture of a bowl used primarily as a food container. It represents the word ninda, "food".
10. is a compound sign consisting of the signs for mouth and food (Nos. 8 and 9 on our table). It represents the word ku, "to eat".
11. is a picture of a water stream. It represents the word a, "water". This sign furnishes an excellent illustration of the process by which the Sumerian script gradually lost its unwieldy pictographic character and became a phonetic system of writing. Though the Sumerian word a represented by sign No. 11 was used primarily for "water", it also had the meaning "in". This word "in" is a word denoting relationship and stands for concept which is difficult to express pictographically. To the originators of the Sumerian script came the ingenious idea that, instead of trying to invent a complicated picture-sign to represent the word "in", they could use the sign for a, "water", since the words sounded exactly alike. The early Sumerian scribes came to realize that a sign belonging to a given word could be used for another word with an altogether unrelated meaning, if the sound of the two words were identical. With the gradual spreading of this practice, the Sumerian script lost its pictographic character and tended more and more to become a purely phonetic script.
12. is a combination of the signs for "mouth" and "water" (Nos. 8 and 11). It represents the word nag, "to drink".
13. is a picture of the lower part of the leg and foot in a walking position. It represents the word du, "to go", and also the word gub, "to stand".
14. is a picture of a bird. It represents the word mushen, "bird".
15. is a picture od a fish. It represents the word ha, "fish". This sign furnishes another example of the phonetic development of the Sumerian script. The Sumerian word ha means not only "fish" but also "may" - that is, the Sumerians had two words ha, which were identical in pronunciation but quite unrelated in meaning. And so, early in the development of the script, the Sumerian scribes began to use the sign for ha, "fish", to represent also the phonetically sounded ha, "may".
16. is a picture of the head and horns of an ox. It represents the word gud, "ox".
17. is a picture of the head of a cow. It represents the word ab, "cow".
18. is the picture of an ear of barley. It represents the word she, "barley".

[Mesopotamian Protohistory] [Cuneiform Writing] [Sumer Writing] [Sumer Language] [Historical Sources] [Material Sources]

Bibliography [4, 8]