Mysterious symbols may have originated the world’s oldest writing system

Researchers have discovered links between the precursor to the world’s oldest writing system and the mysterious and intricate designs left by engraved cylinder seals that were rolled into clay tablets around 6,000 years ago.

Scholars consider cuneiform to be the first writing system, and humans used its wedge-shaped characters to inscribe ancient languages ​​like Sumerian on clay tablets starting around 3,400 BC. The writing system is believed to have originated in Mesopotamia, the region where the world’s oldest known civilization developed, which is today modern-day Iraq.

Before cuneiform writing, however, there was an archaic script using abstract pictographic signs called protocuneiform. It first appeared around 3350 to 3000 BC in the city of Uruk, in present-day southern Iraq.

But the origins of the emergence of proto-cuneiform have been obscure, and many of its symbols remain indecipherable.

Researchers who carried out a careful analysis of proto-cuneiform symbols were surprised to discover similarities when they studied the engravings of cylinder seals invented in Uruk in 4400 BC and used to imprint motifs in soft clay. Not only do some of the symbols match exactly, but they also appear to convey the same meanings in relation to ancient transactions and commerce.

A study detailing the similarities was published on Tuesday (5) in the journal Antiquity.

“Our findings demonstrate that designs engraved on cylinder seals are directly linked to the development of protocuneiform in southern Iraq,” said study lead author Silvia Ferrara, professor in the department of classical philology and Italian studies at the University of Bologna. “They also show how the meaning originally associated with these designs was integrated into a writing system.”

The results of the analysis could change how scholars understand how writing was invented and what it suggests about the advances of ancient civilizations that developed technologies like accounting and writing thousands of years ago.

From accounting to writing

Uruk, now known as Warka, was one of the first cities to emerge in Mesopotamia, and served as a center of cultural influence that could be traced from what is now southwestern Iran to southeastern Turkey.

The ancient metropolis is where cylinder seals were invented and used for administrative purposes.

Stamp cutters engraved designs onto the cylinders, which could then be rolled over damp clay to transfer the motifs. A preliterate society used stamps extensively in an early accounting system that helped track the production, storage, and movement of crops and textiles. The motifs on the stamps functioned as a primitive form of marking to identify goods, according to the study authors.

In addition to seals, accounting systems, developed during the fourth millennium BC, also physically documented the trade of goods using labels, number tablets, tokens, and clay balls called bullae.

Researchers have long thought that protocuneiform developed from these early accounting methods, but there was no definitive link to show how the transition occurred. And unlike cylinder seals, the hundreds of iconographic signs attributed to protocuneiform have only been found on tablets in southern Iraq.

“The close relationship between ancient sealing and the invention of writing in Western Asia has long been recognized, but the relationship between specific seal images and sign forms has barely been explored,” Ferrara said. “This was our initial question: Did image seals contribute significantly to the invention of signs in the region’s earliest writing?”

The team systematically compared cylinder seal motifs with protocuneiform pictographs to see if any of them correlated in shape and meaning. The researchers anticipated making marginal, indirect connections, but instead identified images of seals that appeared to transform directly into protocuneiform signs, suggesting that seals played a role in the developments that led to the birth of the first writing system, Ferrara said.

The images with the strongest connection related to the transport of jars and textiles, said study co-author Kathryn Kelley, a researcher in the department of classical philology and Italian studies at the University of Bologna.

The symbols showed images of fringed textiles and vases being carried in nets, many of which moved toward building facades. The exchanges of these items occurred between or within different cities and likely involved several temples, according to the study authors.

“We focused on seal images that originated before the invention of writing, while continuing to develop into the pre-literary period,” Kelley and study co-author Mattia Cartolano, a researcher at the University of Bologna, said in a joint statement. “This approach allowed us to identify a series of designs related to the transport of textiles and pottery, which later evolved into corresponding protocuneiform signs.”

Establishing an old bond

These similar depictions on seals and protocuneiform signs indicate a close relationship between the two, said Eckart Frahm, the John M. Musser Professor of Near Eastern Languages ​​and Civilizations at Yale University. Frahm was not involved in the study.

“The article does this for the first time, persuasively establishing that several (protocuneiform) signs have close iconographic parallels in the seal imagery repertoire,” Frahm said. “Even more ambitiously, the authors seek to show, through contextual analysis, that clusters of images on seals can be found in similar configurations on inscribed clay tablets.”

It is clear that ancient Mesopotamians used seals with writing for thousands of years, so one form of documentation was not simply replaced by another.

The team is eager to investigate what types of products were transported in the netted vessels and why the image persisted across such a large geographic area for so many centuries — and why the exchanges were important enough to be documented on clay tablets.

Previously, researchers thought that simple tokens contributed to the numeral system used in protocuneiform signs, while complex tokens with incisions and other markings were the basis for non-numeric signs, but this has not been shown to be true, said Dr. J. Cale Johnson, professor of the history of knowledge in the ancient world at Freie Universität Berlin. Johnson was not involved in the new study.

“This gap in the origin story — where non-numerical protocuneiform signs come from — was left unaddressed,” Johnson said. “Although people have often said that non-numeric sign images must come from seal (glyphs) or some other type of representation, there has been very little work to concretely identify precursors. But this paper is an important step in identifying these concrete precursors.”

Deciphering unknown symbols

The more researchers discover about ancient cities like Uruk and the connections between the iconography of ancient civilizations, the more they can decipher the hundreds of unknown protocuneiform pictographs, the study authors said.

“In view of the stylized and often abstract nature of many protocuneiform signs—a sharp contrast to the much more pictorial Egyptian hieroglyphs—a full consensus on what these signs represent and where they originated will probably never be achieved, but this does not mean that one should not try to explore the issue,” said Frahm.

Writing seems like a necessary technology that would develop naturally over time, but it has been invented independently — without knowledge of writing’s existence — only a few times in world history, Ferrara said.

“Therefore, it has long been a question of interest which social and technological conditions encouraged the conceptual and cognitive leaps that resulted in written language,” Ferrara said. “Although the jury is still out on how much linguistic code the first phase of cuneiform writing actually has, it is important that it led to ‘true’ writing within a few hundred years, so the invention of protocuneiform is a watershed moment.”

Understanding that seal motifs are directly related to the pictograms that would eventually lay the foundation for the first writing system shows how meaning was transferred from motifs to writing, the study authors said.

“The conceptual leap from pre-writing symbolism to writing is a significant development in human cognitive technologies,” Ferrara said. “The invention of writing marks the transition between prehistory and history, and the findings of this study fill this gap by illustrating how some prehistoric images were incorporated into one of the first writing systems invented.”

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