In the s, she catalogued similar pieces found across the region, from Turkey to Pakistan, some of which were 9, years old. Schmandt-Besserat believed the tokens had a simple purpose: correspondence counting. The tokens that were shaped like loaves could be used to count loaves. The ones shaped like jars could be used to count jars. Correspondence counting is easy: you don't need to know how to count, you just need to look at two quantities and verify that they are the same.
The 20,year-old Ishango Bone - found near one of the sources of the Nile in the Democratic Republic of Congo - seems to use matched tally marks on the thigh bone of a baboon for correspondence counting.
But the Uruk tokens took things further: they were used to keep track of counting lots of different quantities, and could be used both to add and to subtract. Remember, Uruk was a great city. There was a priesthood, there were craftsmen. Food was gathered from the surrounding countryside. An urban economy requires trading, and planning, and taxation too.
Picture the world's first accountants, sitting at the door of the temple storehouse, using the little loaf tokens to count as the sacks of grain arrive and leave. Denise Schmandt-Besserat pointed out something else revolutionary. The abstract marks on the cuneiform tablets matched the tokens.
Everyone else had missed the resemblance because the writing didn't seem to be a picture of anything. But Schmandt-Besserat realised what had happened. The tablets had been used to record the back-and-forth of the tokens, which themselves were recording the back-and-forth of the sheep, the grain, and the jars of honey. In fact, it may be that the first such tablets were impressions of the tokens themselves, pressing the hard clay baubles into the soft clay tablet.
Then those ancient accountants realised it might be simpler to make the marks with a stylus. So cuneiform writing was a stylised picture of an impression of a token representing a commodity. No wonder nobody had made the connection before Schmandt-Besserat.
And so she solved both problems at once. Those clay tablets, adorned with the world's first abstract writing? They weren't being used for poetry, or to send messages to far-off lands. They were used to create the world's first accounts. The world's first written contracts, too - since there is just a small leap between a record of what has been paid, and a record of a future obligation to pay.
The combination of the tokens and the clay cuneiform writing led to a brilliant verification device: a hollow clay ball called a bulla. On the outside of the bulla, the parties to a contract could write down the details of the obligation - including the resources that were to be paid. On the inside of the bulla would be the tokens representing the deal. The writing on the outside and the tokens inside the clay ball verified each other. We don't know who the parties to such agreements might have been - whether they were religious tithes to the temple, taxes, or private debts, is unclear.
But such records were the purchase orders and the receipts that made life in a complex city society possible. The term actually encompasses several different kinds of writing systems that developed over time, all of which consisted of individual signs made up of wedge shapes. Over time, pictographs gave way to syllabic and alphabetic signs. Cuneiform as created by the Sumerians adapted and evolved through the writings of many other peoples, including the Akkadians, Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians, and Hurrians.
Cuneiform inspired the Old Persian alphabet, but was eventually replaced by the Phoenician alphabet. By 1, A.
No one knew how to read it. It was essentially a lost writing system until researchers began to decipher it in the 19th century. In fact, the great literary works of Mesopotamia, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, were written in cuneiform but remained unknown until they were deciphered and translated into English in the mids.
Perhaps you could be the next great cuneiformist! Today, there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world. This explains why only a fraction of the approximately two million cuneiform tablets that have been excavated have ever been deciphered and translated. Who knows what ancient stories are out there still to be told? Wasn't it fun to learn all about cuneiform today in Wonderopolis? Grab a couple friends and family members and ask them to help you have even more fun with the following activities:.
Great question, Chontale! We encourage you to take a Wonder Journey to find out how cuneiform impacts our world today! We're so glad that this Wonder is helping you with your project, Rhiannon! Let us know how the project goes!! Hi there, Nanfrt45r! Thanks for stopping by Wonderopolis. We hope you found a Wonder you enjoyed exploring! Good afternoon, Blair Whitfield! Many words have Latin roots, even dinosaur names!
We hope this Wonder was helpful, Johnzell! T's Grade 3's! Hi charles thompson! Good morning, Anna shields! You're right! Many words have Latin roots. Great thinking, christopher! Cuneiform was how people communicated around 3, B. Language eventually evolved to what what have today. We are undergoing some spring clearing site maintenance and need to temporarily disable the commenting feature. Thanks for your patience.
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We sent you SMS, for complete subscription please reply. Follow Twitter Instagram Facebook. Who invented cuneiform? What drove the development of the earliest writing systems? Where was cuneiform developed? Tags: See All Tags Akkadian , alphabetic , ancient , archeology , Assyrian , Babylonian , clay , communicate , cuneiform , decipher , Hittite , Hurrian , language , Latin , letter , Mesopotamia , museum , Old Persian alphabet , Phoenician , pictograph , read , reed , self-expression , stylus , Sumerian , symbol , The Epic of Gilgamesh , word , writing.
Wonder What's Next? Try It Out Wasn't it fun to learn all about cuneiform today in Wonderopolis? In his book-filled office at the British Museum, he explains how the script was slowly deciphered thanks to a multi-lingual inscription about a king, just like the Rosetta Stone that helped researchers make sense of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Algorithms trained to recognise features on ancient tablets are helping researchers to match them to the original stone seals that made them Credit: Jacob Dahl.
Few of us will ever cradle a 5,year-old tablet in our palm. It was built in Nineveh by Ashurbanipal, a powerful and book-loving Assyrian king. Some of the surviving tablets from his library are displayed at the British Museum as part of a special exhibition on Ashurbanipal. Although blackened and hardened by fire when Nineveh was sacked in BC, the text they carry can still be read. New imaging techniques are making the job of working with such ancient, often damaged texts easier. With highly detailed images, it is possible to pick out marks that may be too obscure to see with a human eye.
Dahl and his colleagues have been digitising tablets and seals stored in collections in Teheran, Paris and Oxford for a project known as the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. Without sprawling digital resources like this, training machines to do translation would not even be possible.
New imaging techniques, combined with advanced machine vision tools, are helping to transform efforts to decipher ancient languages like Proto-Elamite Credit: British Museum. Digitisation is also helping researchers to piece together links between texts scattered in collections around the world. Dahl, along with researchers at the University of Southampton and the University of Paris-Nanterre, has digitised 3D images of about 2, stone seals from Mesopotamia. In a pilot project , they then used AI algorithms to examine a group of six tablets and identify matching seal impressions found elsewhere in the world.
The algorithm correctly selected a tablet that is currently stored in Italy , and another that is stored in the United States ; both had been stamped by the same seal. Matching seals and impressions has been notoriously difficult in the past, as many are stored thousands of miles apart.
Dahl estimates that all seals could be digitised within about five years, which would then make it possible to trace other patterns. There is some indication, for example, that certain types of stone were favoured by women. He hopes that as artificial intelligence evolves, it will help us unravel the full potential of the rich information contained in collections around the world.
Imaging is also changing research into undeciphered scripts. Humans tend to be better than machines at this type of decipherment, which typically involves small amounts of text, creative mental leaps, and an understanding of how people lived and organised themselves.
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