![]() ![]() ![]() Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account. When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution.Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.Click Sign in through your institution.Shibboleth / Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.Ĭhoose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways: Writing in Iraq from Sumer to the Islamic period An overview of writing in Iraq from Sumer to the Islamic period, with objects to investigate.Get help with access Institutional accessĪccess to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. Mesopotamian and other Flood stories Mesopotamian and other Flood stories The Flood Tablet A History of the World in 100 objects: the Flood Tablet listen to the programme or read the transcript. The origins of writing in Sumer Article on the origins of writing in Sumer. īrief account of Uruk Brief account of Uruk with further links. The development of writing An introduction to the development of writing on the British Museum website. Another tablet, deciphered only recently, gives instructions for building the boat.Ī discussion on a similar tablet A History of the World in 100 objects: this discussion is based on a similar tablet listen to the programme or read the transcript. Probably the most famous cuneiform tablet relates an episode in the story of the hero Gilgamesh, in which a man survives a great flood sent by the gods by building a boat. Later cuneiform tablets provide examples of scientific observation, religious ritual, treaties, letters, poetry and insights into how life worked in the Mesopotamian world. While record-keeping and administration were the reason for the development of writing, it was soon used for stories, beliefs, memories and other creative outputs. The scribes formed, in effect, a civil service and we know from later tablets that they worked in different aspects of the administration such as the palace, the weaving mills or the temples. These in turn required a body of professional scribes and an organised, regulated system of training them. It required a high level of accuracy, mathematical competence, and a standardised set of measurements appropriate to the different commodities being recorded. ![]() Once writing had been invented, it quickly became the preferred system of record-keeping, replacing the earlier methods. We can tell from the written tablets what needed to be recorded: quantities of crops such as barley and emmer, foodstuffs such as beer and bread, the numbers of sheep and cattle, the numbers of labourers in the workforce, the size of fields and the amount of seed required to sow them. The uses of early writingĪs the activities of the early Mesopotamian city-states became increasingly complex, organisational structures were put in place to administer and control the economy, and methods of keeping records were developed based on clay tokens and simple mark-making. The simpler back of the tablet is the sum of the calculations on the front. Other signs record the official responsible for the transaction. There are four distinct numeral signs: large and small circles with and without two extra strokes. The symbol for barley appears six times front and back, represented by a single stalk with ears at the top. This tablet is marked with symbols showing quantities of barley rations for workers. The writer used a stylus made from a stick or reed to impress the symbols in the clay, then left the tablet in the air to harden. Most writing from ancient Mesopotamia is on clay tablets. Cuneiform script spread from Sumer and eventually was used to write around fifteen different languages in ancient Iraq and other parts of the Middle East down to the 1st century AD. In later cuneiform there were more than 600 symbols which could be used to write very efficiently. Gradually, these pictograms were made more abstract and developed into a form of writing known as cuneiform which used wedge-shapes to form symbols. The first Sumern writing used simplified pictures called pictograms which represented objects. The earliest examples of writing known anywhere in the world are from Sumer and date to around 3200 BC. ![]()
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