The Legacy of Writing

The story of writing in Mesopotamia is, above all, a story of clay. Almost everything we know about this civilisation comes from the thousands of tablets that survive, and the reason they survive is the material itself. A scribe would take wet clay, pat it into a flat shape that fit comfortably in one hand, and carefully smoothen its surfaces. Then, with the sharp end of a reed cut obliquely — that is, at an angle — he would press wedge-shaped signs into the moist surface. These signs are what we call cuneiform, from the Latin word for 'wedge'.

Once the tablet was inscribed, it was left to dry in the sun. The clay hardened and became almost as indestructible as pottery. This durability is the single most important reason we know so much more about Mesopotamia than about contemporary India. Indian sites of the same period have yielded far fewer written records, but Mesopotamian sites have produced tablets by the hundreds.

There is a second reason for this abundance, and it lies in the nature of the material. Once a tablet dried, no new signs could be pressed onto it. A scribe could not erase, correct, or add to a finished tablet. So every transaction, however minor, required a separate written tablet. If a delivery of pieces of metal was recorded, that record had its own tablet; when it ceased to be relevant, the tablet was simply thrown away. The result is a vast accumulation of small, individual records — the very wealth of sources that lets historians reconstruct Mesopotamian life in such detail.

By around 2600 BCE, the script had become fully cuneiform, and the language of writing was Sumerian — the earliest known language of Mesopotamia. At this stage, writing was no longer used only for keeping records of goods and deliveries. Its uses expanded dramatically. Scribes now made dictionaries, gave legal validity to land transfers, narrated the deeds of kings, and announced changes a king had made in the customary laws of the land. Writing had moved from simple bookkeeping to the recording of law, history, and language itself.

The dominance of Sumerian did not last. After 2400 BCE, it was gradually replaced by the Akkadian language. Cuneiform writing in Akkadian continued in use until the first century CE — a span of more than 2,000 years. So the script outlived the language that had given it its earliest form, and the tradition of writing on clay endured across millennia, carrying Mesopotamian civilisation's records, laws, and stories far beyond the lifetime of any single dynasty or tongue.

Around 1800 BCE, tablets survive that contain multiplication and division tables, square- and square-root tables, and tables of compound interest. The Mesopotamians even calculated the square root of 2. They expressed it as:

If you work this out, you get 1.41421296 — only slightly different from the correct value, 1.41421356. That is an astonishingly accurate approximation for a civilisation that had no modern notation.

Students had to solve practical problems, such as: a field of a given area is covered one finger deep in water; find out the volume of water. These were not abstract exercises — they trained students to handle real, everyday calculations.

The divisions of time that we take for granted today all come from Mesopotamia: the year divided into 12 months according to the revolution of the moon around the earth, the month divided into four weeks, the day into 24 hours, and the hour into 60 minutes. These divisions were adopted by the successors of Alexander, transmitted from them to the Roman world, then to the world of Islam, and then to medieval Europe. Whenever solar and lunar eclipses were observed, their occurrence was noted according to year, month, and day. There were also records of the observed positions of stars and constellations in the night sky.

None of these momentous achievements would have been possible without writing and without the urban institution of schools. In these schools, students read and copied earlier written tablets. Some boys were trained not merely to become record keepers for the administration, but to become intellectuals who could build on the work of their predecessors.

An Early Library

We would be mistaken to think that the preoccupation with the urban world of Mesopotamia is a modern phenomenon. Two early attempts to locate and preserve the texts and traditions of the past show how seriously the Mesopotamians themselves took their own heritage.

In the Iron Age, the Assyrians of the north created an empire that, at its height between 720 and 610 BCE, stretched as far west as Egypt. The state economy was now a predatory one — it extracted labour and tribute in the form of food, animals, metal, and craft items from a vast subject population. The great Assyrian kings, who had themselves been immigrants, acknowledged the southern region, Babylonia, as the centre of high culture. The last of these kings, Assurbanipal (668–627 BCE), collected a library at his capital, Nineveh, in the north.

Assurbanipal made great efforts to gather tablets on history, epics, omen literature, astrology, hymns, and poems. He sent his scribes south to find old tablets. Because scribes in the south were trained in schools where they all had to copy tablets by the dozen, there were towns in Babylonia where huge collections of tablets were created and acquired fame.

A crucial point: although Sumerian ceased to be spoken after about 1800 BCE, it continued to be taught in schools through vocabulary texts, sign lists, and bilingual tablets (Sumerian and Akkadian). So even in 650 BCE, cuneiform tablets written as far back as 2000 BCE were still intelligible — and Assurbanipal's men knew exactly where to look for early tablets or their copies.

Copies were made of important texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. The copier stated his name and wrote the date. Some tablets ended with a reference to Assurbanipal himself:

'I, Assurbanipal, king of the universe, king of Assyria, on whom the gods bestowed vast intelligence, who could acquire the recondite details of scholarly erudition, I wrote down on tablets the wisdom of the gods … And I checked and collated the tablets. I placed them for the future in the library of the temple of my god, Nabu, at Nineveh, for my life and the well-being of my soul, and to sustain the foundations of my royal throne…' …