Origin of Writing Traced in Ancient Stone Cylinders

The origins of writing in the ancient Aryan-occupied land of Mesopotamia have traced to the images imprinted by ancient cylinder seals on clay tablets and other artifacts, new research has revealed.

Scientists from the University of Bologna has identified a series of correlations between the designs engraved on these cylinders, dating back around six thousand years, and some of the signs in the proto-cuneiform script that emerged in the city of Uruk, located in what is now southern Iraq, around 3000 BC.

"The conceptual leap from pre-writing symbolism to writing is a significant development in human cognitive technologies," explained Silvia Ferrara, professor in the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies at the University of Bologna and lead researcher. "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."

Typically made of stone and engraved with a series of designs, these cylinders were rolled onto clay tablets, leaving a stamped impression of the design. Starting in the mid-fourth millennium BC, cylinder seals were used as part of an accounting system to track the production, storage, and transport of various consumer goods, particularly agricultural and textile products. It is in this context that proto-cuneiform appeared: an archaic form of writing made up of hundreds of pictographic signs, more than half of which remain undeciphered to this day.

Researchers systematically compared the designs on the cylinders with proto-cuneiform signs, looking for correlations that might reveal direct relationships in both graphic form and meaning. This discovery reveals, for the first time, a direct link between the cylinder seal system and the invention of writing.

"Our findings demonstrate that the designs engraved on cylinder seals are directly connected to the development of proto-cuneiform in southern Iraq," confirms Silvia Ferrara. "They also show how the meaning originally associated with these designs was integrated into a writing system." (Source: “Seals and signs: tracing the origins of writing in ancient South-west Asia,” Antiquity, 05 November 2024.)