ABSTRACT
A long time ago in a far-away land history was made when people-one or more, man or woman-invented writing. As far as we know this happened around the year 3000 BC in the city of Uruk in southern Iraq,2 where a truly urban culture had developed independently from any outside influence or inspiration. Uruk was an enormous city, perhaps some 5.5 square kilometers in size, with majestic temples, monumental art, a society with unprecedented complexity and social hierarchy, which required a method of record keeping that was sufficiently flexible to represent the spoken language. The exact definition of “writing” is not so easily established, but it has to be distinguished from marks and signs that convey information without a connection to the phonetic form of the language spoken by the writer. “Writing is written language” (Gelb 1952:13). Thus in many non-literate or prehistoric cultures marks of ownership exist, but these do not represent the pronunciation of the owner’s name; they are only symbols recognized by more than one person as the identification of individuals. When, however, a name is phonetically rendered we can speak of writing. For the first 600 years at least the script remained limited in its ability to render language, and texts written are barely intelligible to us, because they were primarily mnemonic devices (Bottéro 1992:67-86). They differ, however, from the record-keeping devices that preceded them in that they show that the concept of representing the sounds of words was understood. This was a Mesopotamian invention, or more precisely one made in Sumer, the southernmost region of Mesopotamia. Thus “history begins at Sumer” as the title of a popular book proclaims (Kramer 1959), if we accept the dictum that writing is the characteristic that separates history from prehistory. And since the present book deals with cuneiform writing and history I will take the invention of writing in Sumer as its starting point.
