Whereas people have been making their mark on the surfaces of this Earth for at the least tens of 1000’s of years, it is troublesome to pinpoint the precise second our impulse to file what we noticed tipped into what we might take into account ‘writing’.
Now, a workforce from the College of Bologna in Italy has linked symbols on historic Mesopotamian seals with an archaic visible communication system referred to as proto-cuneiform; an artwork kind which might in time evolve into one of many world’s first true writing techniques.
“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,” says philologist Silvia Ferrara from the College of Bologna.
“This was our starting question: did seal imagery contribute significantly to the invention of signs in the first writing in the region?”
Writing is a fancy system of guidelines that tells us methods to prepare and interpret symbols to convey all types of data, from literal descriptions to summary ideas.
Lengthy earlier than these guidelines had been invented, symbols representing fundamental ideas had been etched, drawn – or on this case printed – onto a cloth to share easy concepts, which over time might have grow to be standardized as a lexicon for grammarless ‘proto-writing’.
The researchers methodically in contrast the designs they discovered on historic cylinder seals with identified proto-cuneiform indicators. The choice of cylinder seals they analyzed originated earlier than writing emerged in historic Mesopotamia, via to the proto-literate interval.
They argue that similarities in the best way widespread artifacts had been depicted visually on the cylinder seals – as an illustration, fringed textiles and netted vessels – share components with their corresponding proto-cuneiform symbols.
The proto-cuneiform indicators related to fringed materials, as an illustration, have triangular varieties with a number of vertical strains pointing downward from a chunk of ‘material’. Representations of individuals weaving on a cylinder seal from the Mesopotamian metropolis of Susa bear an analogous kind, as do artifacts from the town of Uruk.
Comparable resemblances will be seen between what appear to be depictions of vessels enveloped in netting on the cylinders and a sequence of proto-cuneiform indicators the researchers suspect carry the identical that means.
“The conceptual leap from pre-writing symbolism to writing is a significant development in human cognitive technologies,” Ferrara says.
“The invention of writing marks the transition between prehistory and history, and the findings of this study bridge this divide by illustrating how some late prehistoric images were incorporated into one of the earliest invented writing systems.”
Proto-cuneiform is first seen within the archeological file as a way of accounting. It allowed individuals to trace the manufacturing and commerce of on a regular basis gadgets, particularly agricultural and textile gadgets. However earlier than this literacy arose in Mesopotamia, cylinder seals fulfilled that very same function, permitting individuals to file commerce by ‘printing’ data into clay tablets.
“Our findings demonstrate that the designs engraved on cylinder seals are directly connected to the development of proto-cuneiform in southern Iraq,” Ferrara says. “They also show how the meaning originally associated with these designs was integrated into a writing system.”
This analysis was printed within the journal Antiquity.
