The System of Writing

The system of writing in Mesopotamia is the story of how human speech was first captured in a visual, permanent form. The key to understanding it is that cuneiform did not work like the English alphabet. In English, each sign (a letter) stands for a single consonant or vowel — like m or a. In cuneiform, each sign stood for a whole syllable, such as say, put, la, or in. This single fact explains why the system was so demanding to learn.

The word cuneiform itself comes from two Latin words: cuneus, meaning ‘wedge’, and forma, meaning ‘shape’. The signs were literally wedge-shaped marks pressed into wet clay. A clay tablet written on both sides in cuneiform, for instance a mathematical exercise, shows a triangle with lines drawn across it on the top of the obverse side, and the letters visibly pressed into the clay.

Because each sign represented a syllable rather than a single sound, the number of signs a scribe had to master ran into the hundreds. On top of that, the scribe had to work with a wet tablet and finish writing it before the clay dried. Writing was therefore a skilled craft — but it was far more than that. It was an enormous intellectual achievement, because it succeeded in conveying, in visual form, the system of sounds of a particular language.

Literacy was extremely rare. Very few Mesopotamians could read and write. The reasons are clear: there were hundreds of signs to learn, and many of these signs were complex. The difficulty of the skill made it a mark of distinction. If a king could read, he made sure this fact was recorded in one of his boastful inscriptions — literacy itself was something to boast about.

For the most part, however, writing reflected the mode of speaking. It was not a silent, private activity but was tied to the spoken word. A letter from an official would have to be read out to the king, and its form shows this. It would begin: ‘To my lord A, speak: … Thus says your servant B: … I have carried out the work assigned to me ...’ The letter is structured as speech addressed to a listener, not as silent text for a reader. …