Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization by A. Leo Oppenheim

Author:A. Leo Oppenheim [A. Leo Oppenheim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

The Scribes

The cuneiform source material is such that in it we have the unique opportunity of observing the evolution of a writing system. Nearly all but the very first stages are discernible, and enough, if not too much, material is available to allow an extensive discussion of the paleography and the history of the system, the dynamics of its development, diversifying as well as standardizing tendencies, several adjustments of the system to internal changes, and its adaptation to foreign demands—to mention at random some of the many aspects of this problem.

In the early, Sumerian, stage of the cuneiform system of writing, we are able to observe better than in similar systems the change from a “logographic” to a “phonographic” technique of writing. In a bureaucracy in which officials had to account periodically for the movements of goods, staples, and animals belonging to an authority, the use of word signs (logograms) for these items and for a number of typical transactions was as essential and probably as natural to the scribes as the use of signs to render numbers and measures. Once the practice of keeping written records became established, such symbols were freely used to record quantities, qualities, and types of objects as well as types of transactions. When, thereafter, the need arose to refer to new objects, to new materials, to proper names (personal or geographical), the inventors of this system made ingenious use of the accepted word signs, combining them as signs for syllables to write the new terms—in short, used them as “phonograms.” The syllables (normally monosyllables) were read without regard to the meaning content which they had when used as logograms. The result was a fateful mixture, for the scribes neither discarded the use of a sign as a logogram when elsewhere in the text it might appear as a phonogram nor differentiated graphically or in any other way between logograms and phonograms. This mixed system, employing signs in two different functions, led to a number of complications which made it necessary for scribes to undergo a long and difficult training and brought about, in the long run, the disappearance of the entire system. But one should stress that this innate handicap must not be connected with the collapse of the Mesopotamian system of writing because of the competition with much simpler alphabetic systems. This would represent an unwarranted simplification.

Alphabetic systems as such go back to a prototype which represents an adaptation of the Mesopotamian technique of writing, in the sense that the earliest known alphabetic signs were written in wedges on clay.¹² Whether the later technique of writing alphabetic signs with ink on parchment and wood represents a direct development from the clay writing prototype, or whether the latter should be assumed a locally restricted transfer from a still earlier ink writing to the use of clay, is immaterial. The alphabetic systems did succeed, from the last third of the second millennium B.C. onward, in crowding out the cuneiform system, restricting it more and more to its home territory, and they eventually invaded the latter.

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