Although humans have been leaving traces on the surface of the Earth for tens of thousands of years, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when our impulse to record what we see became what we would call "writing."
A team from the University of Bologna, Italy, has linked the symbols on ancient Mesopotamian seals to an archaic visual communication system called proto-scuneid; an art form that would eventually become one of the world's first true writing systems, Science alert reports.
"The close link between ancient seals and the invention of writing in Southwest Asia has long been recognized, but the relationship between specific seal images and sign forms has hardly been explored," says philologist Silvia Ferrara of the University of Bologna.
"This was our initial question: did seal images contribute significantly to the invention of signs in the region's first writing system?"
Writing is a complex system of rules that tells us how to arrange and interpret symbols to convey all kinds of information, from literal descriptions to abstract thoughts.
Long before these rules were invented, symbols representing basic concepts were engraved, painted, or in this case printed on material to share simple ideas that over time may have become standardized as a lexicon for "proto-literacy" without grammar.
The researchers methodically compared the designs they found on the ancient cylindrical seals with known proto-written signs. The cylindrical seals they selected originated before the advent of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, before proto-writing.
They argue that similarities in the way common artifacts are visually depicted on cylindrical seals-for example, fringed textiles and net vessels-have common elements with their corresponding proto-scriptural signs.
For example, the proto-truncheon marks associated with the fringed material have triangular shapes with multiple vertical lines pointing downward from the piece of 'cloth'. Images of people weaving on a cylindrical seal from the Mesopotamian city of Souza have a similar shape, as do artifacts from the city of Uruk.
Similar similarities can be seen between the images of vessels wrapped in netting on the cylinders and a series of proto-Cuneiform signs that researchers suspect carry the same meaning.
"The conceptual leap from prescriptive symbolism to writing is a significant advance in human cognitive technology," Ferrara said.
"The invention of writing marks the transition between prehistory and history, and the results of this study bridge that boundary by showing how some late prehistoric images were incorporated into one of the earliest invented writing systems," the expert added.
The protoskuneif appears for the first time in the archaeological record as a means of record keeping. It allowed people to keep track of the production and trade of household items, especially agricultural and textile products. But before this writing system emerged in Mesopotamia, cylinder seals served the same purpose, allowing people to record trade by "printing" records on clay tablets.
"Our findings show that the designs engraved on the cylinder seals are directly linked to the development of proto-scene in southern Iraq," Ferrara said. "They also show how the meaning originally associated with these designs was integrated into the writing system." | BGNES
