LANGUAGE
The Invention of Writing
~5,200 years ago
History · Bronze Age · Holocene · Northgrippian
The oldest known writing, proto-cuneiform, appeared about 5,200 years ago in the temple precinct of Uruk, to record rations, livestock and deliveries.
Proto-cuneiform, which appeared about 5,200 years ago in the temple precinct of Uruk, in lower Mesopotamia, in present-day Iraq, constitutes the oldest known writing system. It was used by the administration for recording rations, livestock and deliveries, and its basic signs have precursors in the motifs that cylinder seals impressed on the same clay before any reading. For several centuries the tablets carry no literary or commemorative text, but exclusively accounting records.
Why it matters
Writing renders the transmission of knowledge independent of individual memory, and constitutes the support of every subsequent archive, legal norm and textual tradition. One step determines its nature: the rebus principle, by which a sign representing a thing is used for the sound value of that thing's name, which permits the notation of what no image can depict, a personal name, a verb or a grammatical element. The system passes from designation to the notation of language at that precise point. Accounting tokens moreover remain in use two millennia after the first tablets, alongside writing and not replaced by it.
Dating & uncertainty
The oldest proto-cuneiform tablets, from the Eanna precinct at Uruk, are dated to about 3300 to 3100 BCE, that is 5,300 to 5,100 years ago. Egyptian writing appears in approximately the same century, and the priority of one over the other, like the existence of reciprocal influence, remains undetermined.
Our species’ history as one day
23:36:1323 min 46 s before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day