Bureaucracy, Ownership & Writing

1. Together with the developing economy of the Uruk period came a need to effectively keep track of the growing quantities of commodities owned by corporate and private authorities and exchanged, sold, and traded by them.

2. The invention of writing was closely connected with this need to record and manage the accounting associated with the control of people, animal herds, and commodities. This explains the rapid evolution of the small tokens of Ubaid and earlier to the fluid cuneiform style of the Early Dynastic.

3. The evolutionary course of writing commenced in pre-Ubaid periods with small clay and stone tokens of various forms used as simple counters and designating mathematical measures - growing complexity of designs on these tokens may indicate expansion of information.

4. In the Uruk period “bullae” were invented. These were clay cases wrapped around the tokens, thus giving them more security as they accompanied the goods whose numbers they documented. They were also commonly marked with seals as a sign of ownership. Later the bullae were stamped with numerical signs to indicate their contents, a custom that soon made them redundant and led to their replacement by flat clay tablets inscribed with numerical signs.

5. Finally, commodity contents and quantities were recorded on clay tablets, inscribed by a pointed stylus on wet clay. These protocuneiform tablets are the earliest real writing.

7. Future development led from this early pictographic writing to the more versatile cuneiform style. All of the earliest writing was used for economic purposes - mostly bookkeeping.

8. The earliest pictographic arbitrarily associated a sound with a concept and a sign – basically the basis of all written language. Earliest Sumerian was basically a list of these “nouns” without grammatical context. However, because Sumerian evolved through many changes of the associations it is difficult to read all of the earliest writing. Later in by the middle Early Dynastic regular syntactical associations were adopted and the language could be used for literary purposes. It is from this time that the great mythic texts appear.

9. This development of written economic records was very closely associated with the need to document individual or institutional property or economic transactions. This was accomplished by the invention of cylinder seals, decorated stone cylinders with a central hole for a carrying cord, which could record individual or corporate ownership. The specific designs identified the owner. Individuals used the more intricate designs while abstract forms designated communal property and could be used by a variety of administrators.

10. The seals were rolled across wet clay attached to houses, shipments of goods, or legal documents. When dry, these sealings became permanent records of property.

11. There is no full agreement as to whether writing as an abstract narrative form as it developed in the Early Dynastic Period, was invented independently of accounting systems which date far back in prehistory, or, as seems probable, developed from the concepts and techniques developed by this tradition in the context of increasing social complexity. While accounting devices and seals encouraged the development of a centrally managed economy, narrative writing, in permitting the compilation of dynastic king lists, myths that connected specific towns and dynasties with divine support, and codified proclamations and laws, operated on the ideological/political realm, providing support for the rulers of the emerging territorial states of the late early Dynastic period. Together these two forms of documentation represent complementary aspects of florescent southern Mesopotamian civilization.