By the late fourth millennium, the demands of running long-distance trade and managing the supply of food and materials to the world’s largest city prompted a variety of experiments in information storage. Wet clay could be used as a seal, much as wax was at other times and places – say around the neck of a sack or the cover of a jar – and could bear the impression of a stamp for extra security. Simple stamping had already appeared by 6000 BCE. More sophisticated than a simple flat stamp was the cylindrical seal, which was rolled across the wet clay to provide an impression of its design. These first appeared in the mid-fourth millennium; they could be made of shell, bone or stone and they were small – rarely more than 3cm long – making their carving a matter of considerable skill and time, since the scenes carved on them were sometimes elaborate and detailed. Presumably the owner of the seal could be identified from the design by those who needed to know. The increasing use of seals speaks of a society in which memory, word of mouth, and trust were no longer adequate tools to identify and protect property, an effect presumably of that society’s size and complexity.
A different experiment in record-keeping also used clay, but in the form of hollow spheres or envelopes, into which small clay tokens could be placed before the envelope was closed. Very possibly the size, shape and number of the enclosed tokens represented types and numbers of real-world objects, and it is possible that this technique related directly to the use of tokens to signify the same things in other contexts. The outside of the envelope could be marked with a seal or with symbols corresponding to the number of tokens inside: only a handful of examples are known, and it is not clear how common this was or exactly how it worked. It is, in fact, the only direct evidence for clay tokens denoting numbers in the region. These clay envelopes were in use for perhaps a millennium, from about 3700 BCE on.
All of these clay-based recording systems still relied on people’s memories to some degree; their capacity for recording details was limited, as was their ability to prevent tampering. It is tempting to arrange them into a developmental sequence from the more simple to the more sophisticated, but the archaeological contexts – sometimes far apart – in which they are found do not provide enough chronological detail to confirm such a story. Perhaps the better reading is that the later fourth millennium, and particularly its final two centuries, were a period of innovation and experiment, at various places and in various directions.
Number symbols from Uruk.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988.433.2. Public domain.
Yet another possibility was to take a free-standing flat tablet of clay and mark it with impressions denoting the things to be recorded: the impression of a cylinder seal or a stamp seal; a quick stylised sketch of an object (a goat, a sheep) done with the sharp end of a piece of reed; an abstract sign functioning as your personal ‘mark’; a few quick stabs with the thick end of the reed to count how many (goats, or whatever). Left in the sun, the clay would dry and become a durable record of the information it contained. It could be moistened again and modified, though tampering with the text in this way would surely be fairly easy to detect; the whole tablet could be dunked in water prior to erasure and reuse; or it could just be thrown away once its purpose had been served. Artefacts like these began to be made perhaps as early as 3500 BCE, and the simpler ones contained just a single unit of information: say one or more stylised signs plus a set of reed-stabs denoting a number. At first, the number marks were simple tallies; one example from a Syrian site has twenty-two marks with no sign of any internal grouping.
By about 3200–3100 BCE, this method had become distinctly more elaborate and sophisticated. The flat tablet of clay remained (typical sizes were from perhaps 5 to 15cm across, but both larger and smaller were possible), as did the reed stylus. So did the convention of scratching signs with the thin end of the reed and impressing number notations with the thick end. The number of signs had burgeoned to several hundred – nearly a thousand in some estimates – and the origin of some of them as pictograms had become obscured; a high proportion were now to all appearances wholly abstract, their meaning needing to be learned and handed down from person to person.
Furthermore, the surface of the clay was now divided up with lines into boxes, each holding a separate unit of information. The order of signs within each box still seems to have been quite arbitrary, but the arrangement of boxes on the tablet was itself perhaps starting to be standardised, the relationship between one box – one unit of information – and another a matter of conventions understood by those who used the clay tablets.
The number signs themselves had also undergone some development by now, and had acquired something of the same complexity as the non-numerical signs. To count discrete objects, the system mimicked the structure of the spoken Sumerian number words, with symbols for 1, 10, 60, 600, 3,600 and 36,000. For 1, the symbol was a small triangle; for 60 a larger triangle; and for 3,600 a large circle. The symbol for 10 was a small circle, and that symbol could be added inside the signs for 60 or 3,600 to yield 600 or 36,000. Each sign was repeated as many times as needed, and signs for larger numbers conventionally came to the left, smaller to the right.
To count particular commodities such as grain, land, beer or sheep, though, there were different systems, with not only different sets of signs but different relationships between them. To count processed grain, for instance, there were symbols for ½, 1, 10, 60, 120, 1,200 and 7,200; for areas the symbols stood for 1, 10, 60, 180, 1,800 and 10,800. Presumably these were based on conventional measuring instruments such as rods and bowls and their relationships, the written symbols reflecting the fact that, say, there were ten small bowls in a large bowl, and so on.
In all, there were at least twelve different systems of number signs, perhaps as many as fifteen. Some symbols were specific to one system, but others were reused across more than one, making them ambiguous unless the reader paid close attention to the context. A small round impression could stand for ten discrete objects, but also for eighteen large units of land, thirty small units of grain …
The marks on the tablets from Uruk were probably the world’s first writing. If there were any earlier attempts to represent human language through marks on surfaces, they have not survived, or archaeologists have not yet found them. Thus, from Uruk’s period of apparently concurrent, competing ways to record information and signify the world more durably than speech and more reliably than memory, this was the innovation that ended up being most long-lived and important; although clay tokens, seals and stamps would also continue in use for centuries more. Admittedly, this very earliest writing performed only some of the functions that would later be associated with written scripts. Neither the order of the words nor their specific grammatical form was represented, for instance. The signs, indeed, were not an attempt to record the spoken language completely; the tablets should be compared to invoices and receipts, not to pages of prose.
Equally, the numerical marks from Uruk are the world’s first number symbols: more complex and abstract than one-to-one tallying, and clearly deriving their structure from the number words that preceded them. Using Sumerian words, you said the number of tens then the number of units; or the number of sixties, then of tens, then of units. In Uruk’s symbols you did much the same, making a mark for each sixty, each ten, and each unit. When speaking in Sumerian of, say, amounts of grain, you reported the number of large bowls followed by the number of small bowls; in symbols you made a mark for each large bowl then a mark for each small bowl. So the symbols followed, apparently quite closely, the way quantity was talked about in Sumerian.
Around 5,000 tablets have been recovered from Uruk, where after their useful life was over they were repurposed as building rubble in the temple complex. They apparently date from soon after the system of symbols was invented. They were used within what was evidently the complex domestic economy of the city, in which it was of real importance to know how many units of different commodities had been transferred from owner to owner or from location to location. Clay is not a very flexible medium, and its limitations shaped how the process could work: it would harden in the time it took to move a sheep from one side of the city to the other, say, so there could be no running accounts built up over days or weeks. Indeed, if a set of tally marks or a set of raised fingers relates to the activity of counting rather as smoke does to fire, more structured notations leave a wider gap between the act of counting and the trace it leaves behind. First you count (or indeed calculate), then you write a notation that records the result. There was no question, then, of a scribe traversing the city with a set of wet clay tablets in a satchel, witnessing transactions and writing them down in real time. It is likely that most records were made after the fact and that there was an element of unreality about them: that their purpose was to establish responsibility for certain assets rather than necessarily to report movements of goods and people that had literally happened.
That said, the clay tablets speak of a concern to illuminate even the smallest details of the city’s economic life: information about animals, barley, people and land was reported with painstaking accuracy. They speak of a culture in which counting (and measuring) had become a critically important part of the economy. Some were later summarised into secondary accounts reporting totals and subtotals, say of temple offerings over a period of years. It is possible that the information was used – was intended to be used – for planning, such as the apportioning of rations or of labour.
Who did the writing, and the reading, and the planning? The number of recovered clay tablets is enormous, but marking clay takes little time and it would not have occupied more than quite a small number of people on a full-time basis. The Uruk term for them was umbisag, denoting an accountant or scribe: the world’s first numerate professionals. It was a new role, a person who neither made goods nor wielded political power but who stood between the two, managing the production and movement of goods on behalf of the city’s rulers. They were few, and they had skills and therefore power that the vast majority – including quite probably the elite rulers themselves – did not. In the seventh century BCE, nearly two and a half thousand years after the invention of writing, an Assyrian king could still boast of being able to read and write as though that was unusual. As historian Marc Van De Mieroop puts it, ‘people must have realized how important documents were, how they protected them against accusations of theft or careless loss. The scribe had thus certain esoteric powers, a control over people’s lives that was expressed in ways most of them could not control.’
Even during its first centuries, the Sumerian system of marks on clay was changing and developing. Perhaps as soon as there was a community committed to sustaining this new way of recording information, that community set about, both by accident and by design, to refine the system. It became conventional to arrange the signs in lines read from left to right and to place them in the order in which they would be spoken; the lines themselves were arranged in columns whose number depended on the size of the tablet. It was soon realised that impressing the stylus into the clay was quicker and more attractive than scratching lines, and so the older curved lines were replaced by straight ones. The scribe would now press the head of the stylus into the clay and then push it down to the side, producing a characteristic wedge-shaped mark. The signs, already mostly stylised, became completely so, and consisted of one or more wedges in various configurations. (It could now properly be called a cuneiform, ‘wedge-shaped’, script.)
The number signs developed in the same way, so that numbers from two to nine were now shown by a single wedge repeated the appropriate number of times; the number one by a slightly more elaborate single T shape, and ten by a one-sign rotated to the left. The structure of the system remained the same, though, and a range of different systems for counting and measuring different things continued in use. There was some reform during the course of the third millennium. Gradually the systems seem to have been reduced to five: one for lengths, one for areas, volumes and bricks, one for liquid capacities, one for weights, and one for discrete objects. They continued to have various bases, in which multiples of sixty were important but not all-pervasive. Lengths, for instance, had thirty fingers in a cubit, six cubits in a reed and two reeds in a rod.
Perhaps more important than these changes in the appearance of the script were moves towards recording a larger proportion of the words actually spoken. Many Sumerian words had only a single syllable, which meant that the sign for a word could also be used to represent its sound. That created the possibility of spelling out other or longer words, including for instance people’s names, on a phonetic basis. Thus the sign for ‘reed’, sounding ‘gi’, was reused for the word ‘to return’, which happened to sound the same. A single sign could end up having as many as twenty different meanings, and you had to know the language well to interpret the script.
The system of receipts and summaries continued in use, and up to 90 per cent of the documents excavated from the third millennium are of that quantitative type. The remaining 10 per cent include an increasing proportion of Mesopotamian literature: the world’s first written myths, set in the world of Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim. They also contain lists of words, compiled by and for trainee scribes. The longest contain thousands of words, and give a vivid sense of the difficulty of becoming proficient in the system of cuneiform writing.
Techniques of calculation, similarly, had to be learned and practised at the cost of considerable effort. Some clay tablets were used for artificial calculation exercises, such as invented accounts, or problems like how many workers a given quantity of grain could feed or how much land was represented by a given survey.
Addition is fairly easy with a system like the Sumerian ones; you merely need to write down the complete set of signs represented by the two quantities to be summed, and if any sign occurs more times than is allowed you do some replacement, setting a 10 in place of ten ones, a 6 in place of six ones, depending on the system being used. Subtraction is not much harder. But multiplication and division require some work, as indeed they do with any set of number symbols. For all the calculating that was involved in producing these accounts, traces of written calculation – rather than its end results – are very rare indeed in the early cuneiform record, and it is likely that a non-written technology was used to calculate: an abacus with beads on strings, perhaps, or a board on which counters moved. None has survived; neither has any depiction of one.
Finally, the later third millennium saw an intriguing innovation in the cuneiform way of writing numbers. Scribes began to simplify their calculations and the conversions between different systems, by taking quantities expressed in the traditional systems and rewriting them all in the system normally reserved for counting discrete objects: the one that went 1 – 10 – 60 – 600 – 3,600 – 36,000. The convention that the signs were written in descending order of size was now long established, and the scribes further simplified the notation by abandoning the traditional range of differently shaped signs for the larger values; instead they just used the ‘one’ sign – an upright wedge – for 1, 60 and 3,600, and the ‘ten’ sign – a slanted wedge – for 10, 600 and 36,000, relying on the order in which the signs appeared to convey which number was intended. You would now read \\||\\\|||| as two 600s, two 60s, three 10s and four 1s (equal to 1,354).
These were understandable simplifications motivated by practical needs. Scribes, having written a quantity in the new notation, could calculate with it efficiently, and then convert the result back into whatever traditional system was appropriate; this new notation was not used for record-keeping. Some surviving clay tablets include tables specially for multiplication and division with this 60-based system, namely tables of number pairs whose product is sixty.
The earliest datable calculations in the new notation are from 2039 BCE. A system that relied on position rather than symbol shape to denote numbers in this way was a flexible tool; it was, interestingly, an indefinitely extensible system, with no particular upper limit on the size of the numbers that could be expressed.
Over the following millennium, it became usual for scribes to turn everything into the new positional notation when calculating. By the first millennium, it was in use in Babylonian astronomy, and its emphasis on the number 60 is the ultimate ancestor of the division of circles into 360 degrees, and hours into sixty minutes.
A question that arises naturally to a modern mind, and must have occurred fairly early to users of this notation, is what to do if there is, so to speak, a blank column. How do you express the number made of two sixties and three units but no intervening tens, for instance? Some sort of sign meaning ‘blank’, or just a blank gap on the clay, seems to be needed. The earliest surviving example of a solution to the problem is in a table of squares from Kish, dating to the seventh century BCE: it has a placeholder identical to the sign for ‘30’, performing the ‘blank’ function. Signs with this function would become common in later Babylonian arithmetical and astronomical number writing.
Cuneiform number symbols had come a long way from their origins, both in their appearance and their functions. Elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent, they were being put to very different uses from administrative record-keeping, or indeed astronomical calculation: they had become part of the tradition of royal self-advertisement, display and boasting.
Tiglath-Pileser I: Counting plunder
The city of Katmuhu, near Assyria; early in the eleventh century BCE. Two scribes survey the field of battle, the killed, the captured and the plunder. One uses a stylus to keep track, counting under his breath. Later the record will be written up and become part of the royal annals:
‘I captured in battle their king, Kili-Teshub, son of Kali-Teshub, who is called Errupi. I carried off his wives, his natural sons, his clan, 180 copper kettles, five bronze bath-tubs, together with their gods, gold and silver, the best of their property.’
As well as undergoing a range of developments in its original Mesopotamian location, cuneiform writing spread throughout the Near East. The system was exported early to other cities in Iraq and Syria; the evidence is fragmentary, but numerical symbols like those from Uruk have been found at a number of sites in the late fourth millennium, and it is possible that the original invention was a more widely distributed affair than the evidence now shows.
The later changes made cuneiform a flexible tool, capable for instance of being used for literary texts and letters. They made it capable of being used to notate languages other than the original Sumerian. Cuneiform would eventually be used to record about fifteen different languages across the Near East; at its peak, it was used from Turkey to Egypt and from Lebanon to Iran. In fact, cuneiform on clay would remain in use for over 3,000 years, making it the longest-lived writing technology the world has yet seen, its history longer than that which separates the present from the fall of Troy. The Uruk system of record-keeping was the basis for administrative systems over the whole of that period.
