Centers
of Progress, Pt. 2: Uruk (Writing)
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Human Progress: 5.08.2020 by Chelsea Follett
Today marks the second installment in a series of articles
by HumanProgress.org called Centers of Progress. Where does progress happen?
The story of civilization is in many ways the story of the city. It is the city
that has helped to create and define the modern world. This bi-weekly column
will give a short overview of urban centers that were the sites of pivotal
advances in culture, economics, politics, technology, etc. Part 1 can be found
here.
Our second Center of Progress is Uruk,
the world’s first large city and the birthplace of writing around 3200 BCE. By
creating the first writing system, the people of Uruk revolutionized humanity’s
ability to exchange information.
Before the invention of writing, the only way people could
communicate was by speaking to each other in person. Communication over vast
distances and across long stretches of time was restricted by the fallibility
of human memory. It was possible to send a messenger to a faraway city, but
there was always a risk that the messenger would not recite the message
accurately. People were able to pass down knowledge and histories through oral
traditions from one generation to the next, but the details tended to change
over time.
Today, Uruk is an uninhabited archeological site preserved
in the desert of southern Iraq. It is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, honoring the
“relict landscape of the Mesopotamian cities.” You can still see the remains of
the city walls and gates, make out the shape of the streets and the layout of
the houses from their crumbling foundations, and view the cracked steps of the
temple mounds.
Today’s Uruk is quiet and ghostly. But if you were to visit
Uruk in the late 4th millennium BCE, you would have entered a thriving hub of
art and commerce populated by around 10,000 inhabitants. That would increase to
between 30,000 and 50,000 inhabitants by the beginning of the 3rd millennium
BCE.
For perspective, Uruk’s population in the late 4th
millennium BCE was about the same as the population of the small town of Brattleboro,
Vermont, today. But Uruk was among the first settlements to achieve a
population of that size and is considered by many to be the world’s first large
city. In the year 3200 BCE, Uruk was the largest city in Mesopotamia and
possibly in the entire world.
As Uruk’s population grew, its society became more complex
and the Sumerian civilization (the world’s first true civilization, which
flourished in southern Mesopotamia between 4500 BCE and 1500 BCE) reached its
creative peak. Surviving tablets indicate that Uruk had over a hundred
different professions, including ambassadors, priests, stonecutters, gardeners,
weavers, smiths, cooks, jewelers and potters.
Near one of the temple’s entryways, you may have witnessed a history-altering breakthrough. You may have seen an accountant or record-keeper marking a clay tablet each time a pitcher of grain entered the temple. He would have made a small picture of a grain stalk next to his tally marks, like the city’s record-keepers had done for centuries.
But if you looked more closely, you would have observed
that his picture was not really a picture at all. That is because, over the
course of many years, the record-keepers’ pictures had become simpler to make
taking inventory of goods faster. Eventually, the image that was used to
represent grain in the temple records no longer even vaguely resembled a grain
stalk. The pictographs evolved, in other words, to become non-pictorial symbols
that represented concepts—such
as grain.
By agreeing on a set of abstract symbols to represent
common goods stored in their temple warehouses, Uruk’s accountants were able to
avoid the laborious chore of making detailed drawings on their clay tablets.
Eventually, the people of Uruk used these written symbols
to not only represent different concepts, like grain or fish or sheep, but to
also represent the spoken sounds that people used to express those concepts.
Once they had symbols for different sounds, it became possible to write out
names or other words phonetically. After that innovation, the Sumerians were
able to write down more than simple inventory lists. They could also create
increasingly complex documents. Their written output ranged from lengthy epic
poems and wisdom literature, to genealogies and lists of kings. READ MORE ➤➤
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