First-word problems

What did the earliest writers write about? A new book explores letters about kings, pleas for help from a bereft mother, manuals on how to banish ghosts, as well as poems and fictional tales, classroom exercises and ancient doodles - all dating to before 1500 BCE

- Gowri S

Among the earliest surviving pieces of writing is a sort of bar tab. About 5,300 years ago, in the city of Uruk in present-day Iraq, a man named Kushim was in charge of a storage facility that held nine cereals used to make beer, which was among the rations handed out to agricultural workers.

Kushim had to keep a highly complex log, so he used small clay tokens as memory aids, notes Assyriologist and historian Moudhy Al-Rashid, in her astonishing book, Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (2025).

Such tokens “have been found at numerous sites throughout the ancient Middle East, from Turkey... all the way to Iran... As methods for counting and accounting, they may have been used as early as 7500 BCE,” she writes. In place of letters and words, they used about 2,000 different signs.

“A boot might represent something like walking, a star might represent something divine, and the head of a bull might represent that animal,” Al-Rashid writes.

Then record keepers began to evolve a shared shorthand that could be inscribed with a reed stylus, rather than having to be stamped, on wet clay. Amid the dots and squiggles, cuneiform was born.

As the number of squiggles grew, the scribes who served as managers, accountants and administrators began to collate lists of signs, essentially creating the precursor to the dictionary.