5,500-12 months-Previous Seals Provide New Clues Concerning the Beginning of Writing

For hundreds of years, students have puzzled over the origins of the world’s first writing system. Now, a research by Italian researchers reveals that a few of these earliest proto-cuneiform indicators could have advanced instantly from motifs on prehistoric cylinder seals.

The analysis, revealed in Antiquity, recognized particular person symbols carved into historic Mesopotamian seals—used for monitoring items and conducting commerce—that appear to have instantly reworked into proto-cuneiform indicators, a script that emerged in Macedonia over 5 thousand years in the past. These connections not solely make clear the primary invention of writing, however might additionally assist decipher extra proto-cuneiform symbols, greater than half of that are nonetheless a thriller to students.

Consultants extensively agree that cuneiform, invented by the Sumerians in what’s now modern-day southern Iraq in the course of the fourth millennium BCE, is the oldest writing system on the earth—and so far as we all know, the universe. All the main Mesopotamian civilizations, together with the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hittites, used it till at the least 100 BCE. Cuneiform advanced from proto-cuneiform, a precursor script composed of easy symbolic pictographs that step by step included syllabic elements. The earliest proof of proto-cuneiform seems within the extremely influential historic Sumerian metropolis of Uruk and dates to between 3350 and 3000 BCE.

Researchers have lengthy suspected that proto-cuneiform itself developed from historic accounting strategies. Now, the Italian analysis workforce means that some proto-cuneiform symbols could have been tailored instantly from motifs discovered on fifth and fourth-millennium cylinder seals—a kind of hole cylindrical stamp that, when pressed and rolled throughout mushy clay, leaves behind a rectangular-shaped design.

Amongst different issues, cylinder seals and proto-cuneiform tablets have been historic accounting instruments. Cylinder seals have been additionally invented in Mesopotamia, and directors used them to trace principally agricultural and textile commerce beginning within the mid-fourth millennium BCE. Consultants agree that proto-cuneiform tablets have been utilized in accounting as nicely, although proof of that is restricted to southern Iraq.

“The shut relationship between historic sealing and the invention of writing in southwest Asia has lengthy been recognised, however the relationship between particular seal photographs and signal shapes has hardly been explored,” Silvia Ferrara, a philologist from the College of Bologna who participated within the research, defined in a press release. “Did seal imagery contribute considerably to the invention of indicators within the first writing within the area?”

To reply the query, the workforce determined to seek for particular person similarities between cylinder seal motifs and proto-cuneiform indicators, with the intention of figuring out hyperlinks not simply in form but additionally in regard to that means. They centered on cylinder seal motifs that originated earlier than the invention of writing and continued to develop alongside the emergence of proto-cuneiform.

In the end, the researchers recognized quite a lot of seal motifs associated to the transport of jars and material which they recommend have been the direct precursor to particular proto-cuneiform indicators—highlighting “a particular continuity between pre-literate image techniques and the invention of writing,” for the primary time, they wrote within the research.

“The conceptual leap from pre-writing symbolism to writing is a major improvement in human cognitive applied sciences,” Ferrara concludes within the assertion. “The invention of writing marks the transition between prehistory and historical past, and the findings of this research bridge this divide by illustrating how some late prehistoric photographs have been included into one of many earliest invented writing techniques.”

In the end, this revelation sheds gentle on the potential origin of the primary written script—arguably one of many best achievements of historic civilizations—which allowed for different essential developments, comparable to long-distance communication, record-keeping, and literature.