#MESOPOTAMIA NOTEA ARCHIVE#

Writing evolved when someone decided to replace the pointed drawing tool with a triangular reed stylus. From Pictures to Writing in Everyday Life This tablet reflects bureaucratic accounting, but similar lists were used in the following centuries by individuals to keep track of personal property and business agreements.

#MESOPOTAMIA NOTEA ARCHIVE#

Tablets like these helped local leaders organize, manage, and archive information. Pictographs and numbers show amounts of grain allotted to cities and types of workers, including pig herders and groups associated with a religious festival. This early administrative tablet was used to record food rations for people, shown by a person’s head and bowl visible on the lower left side. Writing began with pictographs (picture words) drawn into clay with a pointed tool. In Babylonia itself, the script survived for two more millennia until its demise around 70 C.E. Other peoples within and near Mesopotamia, from Turkey, Syria, and Egypt to Iran, adopted the later version of this script developed by the Akkadians (the first recognizable Semitic people), who succeeded the Sumerians as rulers of Mesopotamia. At about the same time, or a little later, the Egyptians were inventing their own form of hieroglyphic writing.Įven after Sumerian died out as a spoken language around 2000 B.C., it survived as a scholarly language and script. The development of a Sumerian script was influenced by local materials: clay for tablets and reeds for styluses (writing tools).

in an area called Sumer near the Persian Gulf. The earliest known writing was invented there around 3400 B.C. Mesopotamia was a region comprising many cultures over time speaking different languages. Archaeological discoveries in ancient Mesopotamia (now mostly modern Iraq) show the initial power and purpose of writing, from administrative and legal functions to poetry and literature.

Mesopotamia notea