Ancient Cylinder Seals May Have Led to the First Writing

Writing is one of the most important inventions in the entire history of civilization. The ability to record conversations, agreements and stories is literally what separates history from prehistory, and those civilizations who wrote things down captured their cultural identity for all time in doing so.

And now, in a new study published in Antiquity, a link has been made which may tell us where the first writing came from. The text, known as proto-cuneiform and one of our very earliest writing systems, has been shown to derive from cylinder seals in ancient Mesopotamia.

Proto-cuneiform first appeared in the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk around 3300 BC. The seals, which had been around for a thousand years at this point, feature detailed engravings which appear to directly link to this text.

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Cylinder seals are cylindrical, clearly, and designed to be pressed into clay like a rolling pin, leaving an impression somewhat like a frieze as the designs which cover the surface of the seal are rolled out. The seals predate literacy, but were used to keep track of trades with the designs representing hundreds of different commodities, some instantly recognizable, some obscure to this day.

The new study, authored by Kathryn Kelley, Mattia Cartolano and Silvia Ferrara, makes a clear link between the symbols on these seals and the writing found at Uruk. This makes sense, as Uruk was a major trading hub and the development of the script from the seals would have driven administrative efficiency: it seems we learned to write so we could keep tabs on our goods.

Trade was often linked to religion at this point, and this is borne out by some of the finds. The seals often depict a priestly figure receiving goods. A derivation of this is the figure EN in proto-cuneiform, a religious title which was apparently also used as a sign of quality in that you would be receiving “EN-level goods.”

The goods represented on the seals had themselves became highly stylized over millennia of use. These representations were adopted, pretty much wholesale, by the Sumerians in their writing. Texts commonly start as pictographs in this way, with the most famous example being Egyptian hieroglyphs.

This reveals something perhaps unexpected about this earliest writing, as well: it was collaborative. The fact that Uruk was a trade hub means that the seals came from all over the region, with different cultures providing their own depiction of their particular goods. Proto-cuneiform, and the birth of language, started as a way not for the people to record themselves, but to talk to other peoples and to work together.

Header Image: A cylinder seal from Uruk: the designs on such seals may have been co-opted by the Sumerians and formed the basis for proto-cuneiform, one of the earliest forms of writing. Source: Louvre / Public Domain.