Limestone tablet with Sumerian cuneiform (late 4thmillennium BC, during Uruk III).This is possibly a

Limestone tablet with Sumerian cuneiform (late 4thmillennium BC, during Uruk III).This is possibly a list of names in a personnel register. The signat top left, representing a hand, represents the office or officialon which these people depended.The first cuneiform documents appear during Uruk IV (c. 330 BC), andthey were usually records or inventory lists. Drawings or pictogramsrepresented animals, commodities and the names of people, and notchesor circular impressions represented numerals.During the second half of the 4th millennium BC, a complexnew social order arose in Mesopotamia, resulting from the birth ofcities and the idea of the a state. This led to the development ofcuneiform writing.The earliest tablets appear in the Sumerian city-states around 3300BC, especially in Uruk. About 5,000 Uruk IV and III labels and claytablets (and some stone tablets) have been unearthed in Uruk sincethe late 1920s AD. Scattered archival elements from the same periodhave also been found further north, mostly at Habuba Kabira and TellBrak (also in Sumer). These findings show that writing was spreadover a wide area within Sumer, not just in the city of Uruk.The logograms (letters, symbols or signs representing a whole word)can be grouped into four broad categories:pictograms (realistic images) representing all or part of an objectrealistic or abstract symbols, representing a concept or an ideawhose meaning was not immediately recognizablenumerical signs represented by notches or circles impressed into theclaycomplex signs that were formed by combining two signs, in order toconvey elaborate pieces of information.For example, an ear of grain in front of a stylized head (symbolizinga person) indicates a barley ration (the daily wage of a labourer). The image of a bowl would be sketched next to this – similar to thecoarse earthenware bowls found at Uruk and elsewhere (known asbevelled-rim bowls), which were used to hold the amount offood allotted to each worker (about 800 mL of barley).The need to record proper nouns stimulated attempts at a phoneticalphabet. Signs were used for their sound as well at their meaning,even though the writing of proper nouns in this early period wereprobably based on graphic conventions. One tablet in the Louvrebears the ideogram of Dilmun (modern-day Bahrain). This is proofthat this system of commercial exchange was already well-establishedand quite elaborate.Cuneiform tablets dealt with earnings and expenses, the movement ofmerchandise (e.g. food, fabrics and livestock), and employment ofpersonnel. Some tablets document how to raise cattle; others showhow to calculate surfaces or tend the fields. The surface of atablet is divided into columns and cells, each with a single piece ofinformation. They were part of a sophisticated archive system inwhich each item of information supplemented another, which makes itmore difficult for us to decipher.Another problem is that the scribes of Uruk IV and III (c. 3300 –300 BC) were concerned only with essential facts, so they wrote downisolated words rather than a whole sentence with its grammaticalstructure. Without grammatical elements, it is not possible toascertain the nature of the transaction. There were also severaldifferent numbering systems depending on the type of goods listed. -- source link
Tumblr Blog : mostly-history.tumblr.com

More pics about