The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer

by Jean-Jacques Glassner

As the first known system of writing, the cuneiform symbols traced in Sumerian clay more than six millennia ago were once regarded as a simplistic and clumsy attempt to record in linear form the sounds of a spoken language. More recently, scholars have acknowledged that early Sumerian writing―far from being a primitive and flawed mechanism that would be "improved" by the Phoenicians and Greeks―in fact represented a complete written language system, not only meeting the daily needs of economic and government administration, but also providing a new means of understanding the world. In The Invention of Cuneiform Jean-Jacques Glassner offers a compelling introduction to this seminal era in human history. Returning to early Mesopotamian texts that have been little studied or poorly understood, he traces the development of writing from the earliest attempts to the sophisticated system of roughly 640 signs that comprised the Sumerian repertory by about 3200 B.C. Glassner further argues―with an occasional nod to Derrida―that the invention of writing had a deeper metaphysical significance. By bringing the divinely ordained spoken language under human control, Sumerians were able to "make invisibility visible," separating themselves from the divine order and creating a new model of power.

Genres: History, Language, Linguistics

288 pages, Hardcover

First published November 17, 2003

Reviews

[Gavin White · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only in-depth look at the very beginnings of the cuneiform writing system that I have found. There is plenty of food for thought here, even though I disagree with several of the author's contentions.
Early on the book addresses the nature of different systems of communication that use visual signs. The practice and principles of pictography are explored as well the development of syllabic values. Another chapter establishes the time and era of the invention as Southern Mesopotamia in the 34th century BCE. This covers the preliminaries, Only then do we get into the early signs themselves and the accounting context in which they appear. Subsequent chapters deal with how many signs were combined with one another or otherwise differentiated and multiplied. The author is always asking the question of how the signs, individually and collectively, convey the information that they do. Along the way many individual signs are explored in detail, along with some of the quirks - there are several signs that depict a human foot which mean 'to walk, stand, run etc however a human or animal 'foot' is consistently written with a sign that depicts an donkey's head. Even the ingenuity of the author cannot give any explanation for this unexpected anomaly!
For me, some sections did go on a bit and some parts were not explained very well. Part of the problem is intrinsic to the study - as you need to develop a vocabulary to analyse the script and its functions. As Sumerian writing is so different from modern western scripts this need can only be met by a terminology derived from semantics and semiotics. Naturally this can make some discussions quite heavy-going. And I must admit at times, the Gallic flare and rather flowery language of the author were a little grating.

[C. B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's obviously a lot of great information in this, and it gave me ways of thinking about cuneiform which hadn't occurred to me before, but there's something about it that feels a bit disorganised or meandering. Is this just my attention span? Anyway, I'm left with a very joyful sense that we should see cuneiform as its own fully-fledged system, rather than as a mere antecedent of writing as we know it.