Invention of cuneiform writing at Uruk

Date

c. 3300–3100 BCE

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

Southern Mesopotamia (Iraq)

Era

Prehistory

Significance

In the administrative archives of Uruk, scribes pressed wedge-shaped marks and pictographic signs into clay tablets to record quantities of grain, livestock, labour and goods, producing the earliest known writing system, proto-cuneiform.

The script grew out of an older accounting tradition of clay tokens and numerical tablets, and the overwhelming majority of the earliest texts are economic records rather than literature, indicating that writing arose chiefly to manage the bureaucracy of a complex urban economy. Over centuries the pictographic signs were simplified into the abstract wedge ('cuneus') forms made with a reed stylus that give cuneiform its name, and the system was adapted to write Sumerian, Akkadian and many other languages across the Near East for three thousand years. As humanity's first full writing system, cuneiform transformed administration, law, religion and the transmission of knowledge, and it underpins the very distinction between prehistory and recorded history.

Related science, technology & invention events

• Invention of the potter's wheel in Mesopotamia
  c. 3500 BCE
• Earliest Egyptian Hieroglyphs at Abydos (Tomb U-j)
  c. 3250 BCE
• Earliest wheeled vehicles in Mesopotamia
  c. 3300–3000 BCE
• Ötzi the Iceman, a Copper Age life preserved in ice
  c. 3300 BCE
• Invention of the wheel and wheeled vehicles
  c. 3500 BCE
• Early horse domestication on the Eurasian steppe
  c. 3500 BCE

Further reading

Cuneiform

If you read one book

Cuneiform

Irving Finkel

A British Museum expert's lively introduction to the first writing.

Get it on Amazon →

Also worth reading

• The Story of Writing — Andrew RobinsonAmazon →

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