ATLANTA — A groundbreaking discovery has been made by researchers who have found connections between the world’s earliest known writing system and the mysterious symbols found on engraved seals, which were used to imprint on clay tablets approximately 6,000 years ago.
The first known writing system, cuneiform, is widely recognized by scholars. This system, which was used to inscribe ancient languages such as Sumerian on clay tablets, began around 3400 B.C. It is believed to have originated from Mesopotamia, an area that is now part of modern-day Iraq.
However, before the advent of cuneiform, there was a script that utilized abstract pictographic signs, known as proto-cuneiform. This script first emerged between 3350 and 3000 B.C. in the city of Uruk, located in what is now southern Iraq. The origins of proto-cuneiform’s emergence have been unclear, and many of its symbols are yet to be deciphered.
Upon conducting a detailed analysis of proto-cuneiform symbols, researchers were astonished to find similarities when they examined the engravings of seals that were created in Uruk in 4400 B.C. and used to imprint on soft clay. Some of the symbols were an exact match, and they also seemed to convey the same meanings related to trade.
The study, which details these similarities, was published on Tuesday in the journal Antiquity.
“Our findings demonstrate that the designs engraved on cylinder seals are directly connected to the development of proto-cuneiform in southern Iraq,” said Silvia Ferrara, the lead study author and a 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.”
From accounting to writing
Uruk, now known as Warka, was one of the earliest cities to emerge in Mesopotamia. It served as a cultural hub, with its influence extending from what is now southwest Iran to southeast Turkey.
Seal-cutters engraved designs on cylinders, which were then rolled across wet clay to transfer the motifs. These seals were widely used in an early accounting system by a preliterate society to track the production, storage, and movement of crops.
“The close relationship between ancient sealing and the invention of writing in southwest Asia has long been recognized, but the relationship between specific seal images and sign shapes has hardly been explored,” Ferrara said. “This was our starting question: Did seal imagery contribute significantly to the invention of signs in the first writing in the region?”
The team compared motifs from the seals with proto-cuneiform pictographs. They expected to find small and indirect connections, but instead, they identified seal images that directly connected to proto-cuneiform signs. This suggests that seals played a significant role in the developments that led to the birth of the first writing system, according to Ferrara.
The images with the strongest connection related to the transport of jars and cloth, said study coauthor Kathryn Kelley, a research fellow in the department of classical philology and Italian studies at the University of Bologna.
“We focused on seal imagery that originated before the invention of writing, while continuing to develop into the proto-literate period,” said Kelley and study co-author Mattia Cartolano, research fellow at the University of Bologna, 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 proto-cuneiform signs.”
Deciphering unknown symbols
The more researchers uncover about ancient cities such as Uruk and the connections between the iconography ancient civilizations used, the more they may be able to decipher the hundreds of unknown proto-cuneiform pictographs, the study authors said.
“In view of the stylized and often abstract nature of many proto-cuneiform signs — a strong contrast with the much more picture-like Egyptian hieroglyphs — a full consensus on what these signs represent and where they originated will probably never be reached, but that does not mean one shouldn’t try to explore the issue,” said Eckart Frahm, the John M. Musser Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. Frahm was not involved in the study.
Writing seems like a necessary technology that would naturally develop over time, but it was only invented independently — without knowledge of the existence of writing — a few times in world history, Ferrara said.
“So, it has long been a question of interest what social and technological conditions encouraged the conceptual, cognitive leaps that resulted in written language,” Ferrara said. “While the jury is still out on how much language coding the earliest phase of cuneiform actually has, importantly, it led to ’true’ writing within a few centuries, so the invention of proto-cuneiform is a watershed.”
Disagree – Interpreting symbols without context could lead to incorrect conclusions.
Disagree – context is essential for accurate interpretation of symbols.
Disagree – context is crucial for understanding the meaning behind symbols in ancient writing.
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