Archaeologists have identified the precursors of writing in the designs of ancient seals dating back about 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia.
Proto-cuneiform is one of the earliest written languages, developed at the end of the fourth millennium BCE in the influential Mesopotamian city of Uruk, located in what is now southern Iraq. The script consists of hundreds of pictographs – image-based symbols or “signs” that often convey meaning by resembling a physical object.
Today, more than half of the proto-cuneiform signs remain undeciphered.
This could change now that a team of researchers from the University of Bologna in Italy have uncovered a direct link between specific proto-cuneiform signs and the designs of artifacts called cylinder seals.
Cylinder seals are cylindrical artifacts typically made of stone that are engraved with an image. They were designed to be rolled onto flat, malleable surfaces such as a clay tablet and leave a stamped impression of the image behind.
Starting in the mid-fourth century BCE, cylinder seals were used in Uruk for accounting systems that tracked the production, storage and transport of goods like textiles and agricultural products. Several hundred years later, proto-cuneiform would be used for this purpose.
“The close relationship between ancient sealing and the invention of writing in southwest Asia has long been recognised, but the relationship between specific seal images and sign shapes has hardly been explored,” says lead author Silvia Ferrara. “This was our starting question: did seal imagery contribute significantly to the invention of signs in the first writing in the region?”
To find an answer, the team systematically compared seal designs to proto-cuneiform signs, looking for similarities in both form and meaning.
“This approach allowed us to identify a series of [seal] designs related to the transport of textiles and pottery, which later evolved into corresponding proto-cuneiform signs,” say co-authors Kathryn Kelley and Mattia Cartolano.
“Our findings demonstrate that the designs engraved on cylinder seals are directly connected to the development of proto-cuneiform in southern Iraq,” says Ferrara. “They also show how the meaning originally associated with these designs was integrated into a writing system.”
The research is published in the journal, Antiquity.
