The Anatomy of the First Texts
The world's earliest writing was not for poetry or royal decrees, but for bookkeeping. Around 3200 BCE, administrators in the Sumerian city of Uruk began using a script known as proto-cuneiform to track the temple's goods. These early texts were inscribed on pillow-shaped clay tablets, often about the size of a credit card, using a pointed stylus made from a reed. The script consisted of pictographs—simplified drawings of objects like a head of grain or a fish—and impressed marks representing numbers.
Archaeologists have unearthed roughly 5,000 of these tablets from Uruk, most discovered in the sacred temple precinct called Eanna, a complex dedicated to the goddess Inanna. The tablets were not intended for long-term preservation; most survived because they were used as backfill during later construction projects. Their contents detail the inflow and outflow of resources from the temple's vast agricultural and manufacturing operations. Records list quantities of barley, heads of livestock, and jars of beer intended as rations for workers. One text, for instance, records a transaction of 29,086 measures of barley over 37 months.
The numerical system itself was complex, utilizing at least five different counting systems depending on the commodity being tallied. A sexagesimal system (base 60) was used for counting animals and humans, which is the origin of our 60-minute hour and 360-degree circle. A different system was used for grain and another for areas of land. This shows a context-dependent approach to data management.
From Pictures to Phonetics
Proto-cuneiform was a system for recording information, but it did not fully represent spoken language. A scribe could record "two sheep," but not "two sheep were delivered to the temple." Over the next several centuries, this pictographic system evolved into true cuneiform, a script capable of capturing complex grammar and abstract ideas. The need to record nouns the need to record nouns and numbers.
An important innovation was the rebus principle, where a sign for an object could also represent its sound. For example, the Sumerian word for "arrow" was "ti," which was also the word for "life." An arrow symbol could therefore be used to write the abstract concept of "life." The consistent use of this phonetic writing appeared after 2600 BCE.
As the script developed, the signs became more abstract and wedge-shaped. Scribes found it more efficient to impress wedge shapes with the end of a reed stylus rather than drawing curved lines. Sometime before 2300 BCE, scribes also began rotating the tablets 90 degrees counter-clockwise to write, which permanently shifted the orientation of the signs. By the middle of the third millennium BCE, the number of distinct signs had been reduced from over 1,000 pictographs to about 600 cuneiform signs, making the script more efficient. This fully-realized writing system allowed the Sumerians and their successors to record laws, letters, and literature, including the Epic of Gilgamesh.