Whereas people have been making their mark on the surfaces of this Earth for not less than tens of 1000’s of years, it is troublesome to pinpoint the precise second our impulse to report what we noticed tipped into what we’d contemplate ‘writing’.
Now, a staff from the College of Bologna in Italy has linked symbols on historic Mesopotamian seals with an archaic visible communication system known as proto-cuneiform; an artwork kind which might in time evolve into one of many world’s first true writing methods.
“The close relationship between ancient sealing and the invention of writing in southwest Asia has long been recognized, but the relationship between specific seal images and sign shapes has hardly been explored,” says philologist Silvia Ferrara from the College of Bologna.
“This was our starting question: did seal imagery contribute significantly to the invention of signs in the first writing in the region?”
Writing is a fancy system of guidelines that tells us methods to organize and interpret symbols to convey every kind of data, from literal descriptions to summary ideas.
Lengthy earlier than these guidelines had been invented, symbols representing fundamental ideas had been etched, drawn – or on this case printed – onto a fabric to share easy concepts, which over time could have change into standardized as a lexicon for grammarless ‘proto-writing’.
The researchers methodically in contrast the designs they discovered on historic cylinder seals with recognized proto-cuneiform indicators. The collection of cylinder seals they analyzed originated earlier than writing emerged in historic Mesopotamia, by means of to the proto-literate interval.
They argue that similarities in the way in which frequent artifacts had been depicted visually on the cylinder seals – for example, fringed textiles and netted vessels – share components with their corresponding proto-cuneiform symbols.
The proto-cuneiform indicators related to fringed materials, for example, have triangular types with a number of vertical traces pointing downward from a bit of ‘fabric’. Representations of individuals weaving on a cylinder seal from the Mesopotamian metropolis of Susa bear an analogous kind, as do artifacts from town of Uruk.
Related resemblances may be seen between what appear to be depictions of vessels enveloped in netting on the cylinders and a sequence of proto-cuneiform indicators the researchers suspect carry the identical that means.
“The conceptual leap from pre-writing symbolism to writing is a significant development in human cognitive technologies,” Ferrara says.
“The invention of writing marks the transition between prehistory and history, and the findings of this study bridge this divide by illustrating how some late prehistoric images were incorporated into one of the earliest invented writing systems.”
Proto-cuneiform is first seen within the archeological report as a method of accounting. It allowed folks to trace the manufacturing and commerce of on a regular basis gadgets, particularly agricultural and textile gadgets. However earlier than this literacy arose in Mesopotamia, cylinder seals fulfilled that very same function, permitting folks to report commerce by ‘printing’ information into clay tablets.
“Our findings demonstrate that the designs engraved on cylinder seals are directly connected to the development of proto-cuneiform in southern Iraq,” Ferrara says. “They also show how the meaning originally associated with these designs was integrated into a writing system.”
This analysis was revealed within the journal Antiquity.
