page_title: Uruk period
section_title: Writing
hierarchical_section_title: Uruk period / Society and culture / Intellectual and symbolic life / Writing
caption_attribution_description: Tontäfelchen aus Mesopotamien, 3200 v. Chr., Verwaltungstext aus Uruk (links: Zahlzeichen 4, rechts: drei Eintragungen) Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Vorderasiatisches Museum, VAT 14674 Fotografiert in der Ausstellung "Am Anfang war das Formular", Museum für Kommunikation Frankfurt, 2008
context_page_description: The Uruk period existed from the protohistoric Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age period in the history of Mesopotamia, after the Ubaid period and before the Jemdet Nasr period. Named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia and the Sumerian civilization. The late Uruk period saw the gradual emergence of the cuneiform script and corresponds to the Early Bronze Age; it has also been described as the "Protoliterate period".
  It was during this period that pottery painting declined as copper started to become popular, along with cylinder seals.
context_section_description: Writing appeared very early in the Middle Uruk period, and then developed further in the Late Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods. The first clay tablets inscribed with a reed stylus are found in Uruk IV (nearly 2000 tablets were found in the Eanna quarter) and some are found also in Susa II, consisting solely of numeric signs. For the Jemdet Nasr period, there is more evidence from more sites: the majority come from Uruk III (around 3000 tablets), but also Jemdet Nasr, Tell Uqair, Umma, Khafadje, Tell Asmar, Nineveh, Tell Brak, Habuba Kabira, etc. as well as tablets with proto-Elamite writing in Iran (especially Susa), the second writing system to be developed in the Near East.
  The texts of this period are mostly of an administrative type and are found principally in contexts that seem to be public (palaces or temples), rather than private. But the texts of Uruk, which constitute the majority of the total corpus for this period, were discovered in a trash heap rather than in the context in which they were produced and used; this makes it difficult to identify them. Their interpretation is equally problematic, on account of their archaic character. The writing is not yet cuneiform, but is linear. These texts were misunderstood by their first publisher in the 1930s, Adam Falkenstein, and it was only through the work of the German researchers Hans Nissen, Peter Damerow and Robert Englund over the following 20 years that substantial progress was made. Alongside the administrative texts, were discovered from the beginning of writing, some literary texts, the lexical lists, lexicographic works of a scholarly type, which compile signs according to different themes (lists of crafts, metals, pots, cereals, toponyms, etc.) and are characteristic of Mesopotamian civilization. A remarkable example is a List of Professions (ancestor of the series Lú.A, which is known from the 3rd millennium BC), in which various different types of craftsmen are listed (potters, weavers, carpenters, etc.), indicating the numerous types of specialist workers in late Uruk.
  The causes and course of the origins of writing are disputed. The dominant theory has them derive from more ancient accounting practices, notably those of the calculi mentioned above. In the model developed by Denise Schmandt-Besserat, the tokens were first reported on the clay envelopes, then on clay tablets and this led to the creation of the first written signs, which were pictograms, drawings which represent a physical object (logograms, one sign = one word). But this is very contested because there is no obvious correspondence between the tokens and the pictograms that replaced them. In general, a first development (occurring around 3300–3100 BC) is however retained as being based on accounting and management practices, and has been explored in more detailed by H. Nissen and R. Englund. This writing system is pictographic, made up of linear signs incised in clay tablets using a reed pen (both reeds and clay being very easily accessible in southern Mesopotamia).
  The majority of the texts of the Uruk period are concerned with management and accounting, so it is logical to imagine that writing was developed in response to the needs of the state institutions which engaged in more and more management over time, since it offered the possibility of recording more complex operations and of creating an archive. From this point of view, the pre-writing system which developed around 3400–3200 BC functioned as an aide-mémoire and was not capable of recording complete phrases because it only had symbols for real objects, especially goods and people, with a vast number of numerical signs for the multiple different metrological systems, and only a few actions (Englund calls this the stage of the 'numerical tablets' and of the 'numero-ideographic tablets'). The signs then began to take on a larger number of values, making it possible to record administrative operations more precisely (approximately 3200–2900 BC, Englund's 'proto-cuneiform' phase). In this period or even later (at latest around 2800–27
caption: Administrative tablet from Uruk, from Uruk IV (c. 3350–3200 BC), with signs in a pictographic form.[129] Pergamon Museum.
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