The Mystery of Uruk: Unlocking the Secrets of Ancient Writing | Ancient History Wiki

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Bureaucracy enabled the control of the regional economy in urban centers. By the end of the Uruk period, there existed a system of recordkeeping with texts, which was the basis of all subsequent administrative cuneiform writing used for more than three thousand years afterwards. Uruk writing is called protocuneiform because the signs are drawn into the clay with thin lines rather than being impressed with wedges, as is the later cuneiform script. There is no need to see a conceptual difference between the earliest script and later developments, however. This is the first time in history that people developed a writing system, and the oldest evidence for real script comes from the city of Uruk itself. The earliest tablets appear in the Uruk the Fourth and the Third archaeological layers of the Eanna precinct. These terms have become used to refer to stages in the development of the script itself, and as such are applied to texts found outside Uruk. Accounts provide two sets of data: a record of quantities, and an identification of the person or office involved in the transaction as a participant or super-visor. Techniques other than writing can indicate the second element. Seals, for example, can imply a controller, and they were in use long before the Uruk the Fourth period. From the seventh millennium on, stamp seals impressed on jars or on lumps of clay attached to containers identified the authority that guaranteed the contents. In the middle of the Uruk period the cylinder seal replaced the stamp seal. It enabled much speedier coverage because the seal could be rolled over the surface in one smooth movement. Numerous seals are attested with a large variety of pictorial imagery. Each seal belonged to an individual official or to an administrative office whose identity could be recognized through the design. The profusion of distinguishable seals demonstrates the presence of a class of officials in the city of Uruk who supervised transactions and guaranteed their legitimacy by attaching their mark of authority. The seals did not disclose the quantity or actual contents involved in a transaction. Several techniques to record such information seem to have been tried out at the same time or in quick succession, and are documented in various sites throughout the Near East. At Uruk itself the archaeological stratigraphy is too confused to establish a sequence of techniques there. At the west Iranian site of Susa, however, we see, prior to the archaeological level corresponding to Uruk the Fourth, a level where bullae first appeared, followed by one with numerical tablets. Bullae are hollow spheres of clay with seals rolled all over their surface, containing collections of small objects that we call tokens. The latter are stone and clay geometric objects, shaped as cones, spheres, disks, cylinders, and many other forms. These are thought to record the measure of a particular item. The receipt of three units of barley, for example, could have been acknowledged by handing over three tokens representing one unit each. It is likely that larger tokens of the same form indicated a higher unit in a metrological system. They were kept together in the clay envelope, which was sealed to guarantee the contents through the authority of the sealer."