Running Head: EVOLUTION OF WRITING IN MESOPOTAMIA

The Development of Writing in Mesopotamia

Felix Urrutia
Mr. Ignacio Arana
English Composition II
21 October 2015
Keiser University Latin American Campus

EVOLUTION OF WRITING IN MESOPOTAMIA

Abstract
Writing was not the invention of someone who had an explosion of inspiration in one
moment. In fact, writing was the creation of a tool in order to address a necessity. Then
writing came to help people to administrate everything they were doing in a more effective
way. It was very helpful for those who were farmers and needed to have a control of the
amount of goods they had to produce or how many properties they owned. It is difficult to
imagine that writing was, at the beginning, as sophisticated as it is today. The first writing
tools used by the Sumerians were soft wet clay tablets and a stylus, which was used as a
pencil. At first, writing was just a representation of pictures with direct meaning. Later on,
when people needed to keep record of more sophisticated information, they started to
combine different pictures. After a short period of time, not only Sumerians, but those who
were using that writing system realized that there were many limitations when using
pictograms to write. This is the point at which Cuneiform, a new writing system, appeared.
Cuneiform was very sophisticated in comparison with pictograms because concepts of great
complexity could then be described. Due to the new advantages in writing, people started
recording more and more information, which seems to be the beginning of history and
literature. The years between the use of pictographs and Cuneiform is what is known as the
evolution of writing in Mesopotamia.

EVOLUTION OF WRITING IN MESOPOTAMIA

The development of Writing in Mesopotamia

Since the end of the Prehistory (3100 BCE), writing has had a significant role in
humans development. From the time when it was created, writing has become an essential
activity among humans. Nowadays, an enormous quantity of people around the world
knows how to write a certain language by just following some set of rules which belong to
a particular vernacular. It is difficult to imagine how hard it was to build all those set of
terms which established how to write a structured and adequate language. Perhaps, these
aspects were not as important as we might believe at the beginning. The invention of
writing was a plan for finding a solution to a necessity. Indeed, writing was created in
Mesopotamia by the Sumerians for trading goods, recording information, and solving
everyday problems. Due to the complexity of using representational characters,
Mesopotamian writing evolved and kept improving throughout several stages to be useful
among mankind.
In the early stages of writing, pictograms were used to represent and record the
information. As stated in the article The Cuneiform Writing System in Ancient
Mesopotamia: Emergence and Evolution, published by the virtual magazine Humanities,
The writing system, invented by the Sumerians, emerged in Mesopotamia around 3500
BCE. At first, this writing was representational: a bull might be represented by a picture of
a bull, and a pictograph of barley signified the word barley. At that time, there was no
writing tool like the thin piece of paper and the rigid pencil we use. In any case, people
needed to invent an instrument for writing. In order to solve the issue, a pointed tool called
stylus was the first pencil, and a soft piece of wet clay was used as paper. These were very

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tough instruments; many of these written records have recently been found by
archeologists. In fact, as Eby (2007) says The earliest Sumerian Scripts were discovered at
Uruk in 1924 by a group of German archeologists led by Julius Jordan These texts were
found at the Uruk IV stratum and were therefore dated between 4100 and 3800 BC.
For many years, pictograms were very useful tools used in the entire Sumer and its
surrounding countries, which needed to keep record of what was going on every day.
Thanks to the pictograms, people could indeed record a lot of information. For instance,
they could record how much grain each farmer grew, how much grain had to be given to
their gods, and also how much they had prepared for commerce. Event tough pictograms
were factual representations of objects, people needed to find another way to represent their
ideas clearly. Therefore, they decided to start combining one picture with another, so that
the representation meant more than just words. For instance, if they wanted to indicate an
action like a man eating, they could combine the symbol used to represent a man with the
one that represented a bowl of food. As presented by the article History of Writing
(2012), There are several ways in which early writing evolves beyond the pictorial stage.
One is combining a picture to suggest a concept. Another is a by a form of pun, in which a
pictorial version of one object is modified to suggest another quite different object which
sound the same when spoken. Though all the continuing effort made by people of those
ages to preserve the classical system of pictograms, all this procedure was not enough when
trying to represent feelings, adjectives, and concepts. Anything they tried to use in order to
express such things could transfuse the meaning. Thus, these individuals discovered that
writing, through pictograms, was very limited.

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Through time, as civilizations became more dependent on writing, pictograms
became a non practical writing technique. People noticed that pictograms were not, at the
end, as useful as the beginning and that something had to be done to change that. This fact
forced Sumerians to establish the basis of Cuneiform. According to Mark, A freelance
writer and part-time Professor of Philosophy at Marist College, New York, (2011), All of
the great Mesopotamian civilizations used cuneiform (the Sumerians, Akkadians,
Babylonians, Elamites, Hatti, Hittites, Assyrians, Hurrians and others) until it was
abandoned in favor of the alphabetic script at some point after 100 BCE. In contrast to
pictograms, Cuneiform was phonetic, which means that it represented sounds, and semantic
as well. The difficulty with pictograms was that it could not to represent concepts of great
complexity; the use of pictograms was limited to represent only simple nouns. As stated in
the article The Cuneiform Writing System in Ancient Mesopotamia: Emergence and
Evolution (2010), Cuneiform came to function both phonetically (representing a sound)
and semantically (representing a meaning such as an object or concept) rather than only
representing objects directly as a picture. This improvement in writing was still very
significant because it became easier for the writer to convey the meaning of a word-noun.
As presented by Mark (2011), The number of characters used in writing was also reduced
from over 1,000 to 600 in order to simplify and clarify the written word.
The new advantages of Cuneiform were so great that people got motivated to start
writing more interesting facts. After the creation of Cuneiform, people began to write
stories, to record myths, to record information for businesses purposes, and even to create
poems. According to Mark (2011), The great literary works of Mesopotamia such as the
Atrahasis, The Descent of Inanna, The Myth of Etana, The Enuma Elish and the famous

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Epic of Gilgamesh were all written in cuneiform and were completely unknown until the
mid 19th century CE, when men like the brilliant translator George Smith (1840-1876 CE)
and Henry Rawlinson (1810-1895 CE) deciphered the language and translated it into
English. As we know, Cuneiform was not a language. Actually, it was a writing technique
and other languages were written by using it. As it appears in the virtual British Museum
(2010), The cuneiform script was used to write different languages. In Mesopotamia it was
used to write both Sumerian and Akkadian. It was also used to write other languages like
Elamite. Cuneiform was a very useful tool even for those who did not have their own
writing system, but still they needed to record essential information in their languages. As
presented by the British Museum (2010), Cuneiform script was used by other peoples
because they needed to be able to record information but they did not have their own
systems for writing down their languages.
In summary, writing in Mesopotamia evolved in three stages. The first stage was at
the time Sumerians used pictograms as a writing tool. Then, in order to make more sense of
what was written people decided to combine images in a script. Later on, with the creation
of cuneiform, possibilities of writing more complex concepts arose, and this was the
starting point of history and literature. Thanks to all these efforts, we can now write and
enjoy the benefits of this amazing activity. Without the creation of writing, humanity would
not be as developed as it is today.

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References
Eby, A. (2007). The Origin and Development of Writing in Mesopotamia: An Economic
Interpretation. Retrieved October 10, 2015.
HISTORY OF WRITING. (2012). Retrieved October 16, 2015.
Mark, J. (2011, April 28). Cuneiform. Retrieved October 10, 2015.
The British Museum (2010). Writing - Story. Retrieved October 8, 2015.
The Cuneiform Writing System in Ancient Mesopotamia: Emergence and Evolution |
EDSITEment. (2010). Retrieved October 12, 2015.