BEFORE ROME: ANCIENT WRITING

If you had to name the ancient civilization from which the most writing survives, what would you say? Rome? Greece? Egypt? Those are decent guesses, but there’s one that accounts for more writing than those 3 combined. It’s ancient Mesopotamia and it’s my latest fascination.

Civilizations of this region covered modern-day Iraq and parts of Iran, Syria and Turkey ca. 3300 BC to 500 BC. This was roughly the Bronze Age with some extension into the Iron Age.

Mesopotamian civilization consisted of numerous city-states whose diverse peoples spoke many languages and held motley religious beliefs. It endured for roughly 3,000 years. By comparison, ancient Rome spanned around 2,000 years.

The Bronze Age was a vibrant time. The Mesopotamians mastered irrigation and invented the wheel and axle. As world-altering as those achievements were, the subset of Sumerians did them one better: they invented writing. This system of communication proved immediately valuable and was soon adopted by the Babylonians, Assyrians, Akkadians, Hittites and others.

Scribes were highly valued and wrote by impressing the sharpened tip of a reed into soft clay, an abundant resource near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. That writing style, of course, is cuneiform, a word that comes the Latin for ‘wedge.’ Cuneiform is more akin to an alphabet than a language. Much how English, Spanish and French all use the Latin alphabet, cuneiform provided a set of intelligible, if not immutable, symbols for conveying the region’s various tongues.

Once a clay tablet with cuneiform writing was baked in the sun, it became remarkably durable. When fired, it became practically indestructible. Wood was scarce and tended to be used for structures, not burned to preserve writing. Yet wood *was* burned and tablets got fired, and a dark story reveals the source of those flames.

As vibrant as the Bronze Age was, it was also absurdly violent. Cities often met their end in fires set by enemies intent on complete annihilation. The conflagration that incinerated buildings fired innumerable clay tablets kept in libraries, temples, markets, homes and elsewhere, perfectly preserving them for their rediscovery in the late 19th century. What was catastrophic for Nineveh proved invaluable for history.

It’s estimated that half a million cuneiform tablets have been excavated, and only a fraction of those have been translated. As tough as clay is, it can still break into pieces. Even so, cuneiform writing tends to be small, so a fragment can contain a wealth of information, as well as providing a piece in a jigsaw puzzle of inconceivable size and difficulty. Tablet fragments yet to be unearthed likely number in the millions.

What’s the writing about? There are a handful of sagas like the Epic of Gilgamesh, and some law codes like Hammurabi’s. There are also guides to religious practices, astronomical observations, omens, and a surprising number of curses.

But 99% of it is mundane: tax records, receipts, marriage contracts, court cases, schoolwork, inventories and countless other administrative documents. Imagine 500 years worth of such documents from modern-day California and you get a sense of the scale.

Next to the extant literary and philosophical texts of the Romans et al., the Mesopotamian lode, despite its vast size, may seem inutile by comparison. However, it provides data that historians of the other civilizations are starved to collect: that of everyday life, from the experiences of the overworked slave to the garrulous merchant; the devoted wife to the philandering husband; the destitute farmer to the sybaritic king.

The writing answers questions like, how much beer could the city of Uruk produce in a year? Where did they source the ingredients? What jobs were required and how were workers paid? Was there competition? How many slaves were needed and how much did they cost? How were business conflicts resolved?

In short, the cuneiform tablets of ancient Mesopotamia provide a remarkably clear look at life ±4,000 years ago. It’s quotidian information, to be sure, but if we want to understand how we got here, there’s no better place to start than at the very beginning.