Notes on The First IT Revolution, Writing Origins, and Early Mesopotamian Cuneiform
The First IT Revolution
This opening frames writing as a time machine: a technology that preserves words across time and lets the past speak to the future.
Writing is so pervasive that we take it for granted today: a world without writing would lack most books, reference works, records, and many other technologies and institutions we rely on.
Civilization and writing
A civilization is distinguished by: social complexity, cities and large public buildings, and economic specialization.
Complex civilizations require record keeping through taxation, tribute, trade, and public works.
Writing becomes a virtual necessity for civilizations because it supports long-term storage and retrieval of information.
Early civilizations that developed writing
Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica, and (probably) India developed writing systems.
The Inca and their predecessors did not use writing; they used quipu (knotted color-coded strings) for records.
Three essential functions of early writing
State administration and bureaucracy
Trade and commerce
Religion
Examples of early uses:
Sumerians: writing invented for administration and trade.
China: writing used to record questions asked of Heaven.
Maya: writing used to establish divine authority of kings.
Egypt: writing used to gain eternal life.
Writing and religion; immortality
The natural affinity between writing and religion may stem from the perceived permanence of the written word (almost immortality).
From Egypt to the modern world, writing has marked burials, dedication of offerings, and recording of words of God.
Independent invention of writing
Writing was invented from scratch at least three times: in Mesopotamia, in China, and in Mesoamerica.
Egypt and the Indus Valley may have invented writing independently or borrowed from Mesopotamia.
History vs prehistory
The first written words around the late 4th millennium BC mark the transition from prehistory to history.
Writing lets us study thoughts and words of earlier peoples; civilization is thereby accessible across millennia.
The time-machine metaphor and information retention
Writing solved the problem that information exists only in memory: external storage was needed as societies grew more complex.
Example: debt and promises can be recorded to avoid the reliability problems of memory and oral transmission.
An imagined contrast: without writing, a simple message could be misremembered through a chain of retelling (telephone game).
Historically, writing predates phonographs, tape recorders, and digital voice recorders by more than years.
Writing as a technology of language
Writing represents language but outlasts spoken language; it translates time into space: words are arranged in space on a page.
Writing is visible and portable, unlike spoken language which is time-bound and ephemeral.
Braille and ASL illustrate that writing can be spatial or tactile, and still represent language transported through time.
Importantly, writing is not language itself: it is a transformation of language into a material form.
Language vs writing; ubiquity and variation
All human societies have language; writing is not universal. The inventory of languages is vast and dynamic.
The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) counts languages spoken today; thousands more have died; many languages lack a writing system.
Writing tends to confer prestige and is associated with education, wealth, and power; many unwritten languages are at risk.
Language preservation requires developing writing systems and literacy programs.
King Ibrahim Njoya and the Bamum script (Shü-mom)
Around 1896, Bamum King Njoya sought a writing system for Shü-mom amid a changing world with new technologies.
He gathered thinkers and artists to help; his advisors lacked prior writing experience, posing core design questions.
Initial approach: logographic morpheme-based signs (465 total) to capture core meanings.
The challenge: a full writing system must also encode pronunciation; thus, Njoya added phonology to the system.
End state: a syllabary with 73 signs plus 10 numerals; used to codify laws, calendars, and schooling.
Logographic, syllabic, and phonemic writing concepts
Logographic (logograms): signs represent morphemes with meaning and often pronunciation; examples from the Bamum approach show morpheme-based encoding.
Syllabary: signs represent syllables; can drastically reduce the number of signs needed vs. logograms for long words.
Phonemic alphabets: signs represent individual phonemes (basic sounds) and can be used to spell many words with relatively few signs.
The trade-off among systems: logograms capture meaning efficiently but scale poorly with languages; syllabaries reduce symbol count but may require more signs for complex syllables; alphabets aim to represent sounds, requiring a robust phonemic inventory.
Akhara/alphasyllabaries: systems that encode vowels as dependent on consonants or split syllables into onset and rhyme; true alphabets fully represent both consonants and vowels.
The natural tendency in writing history has been to encode language (morphemes, syllables, or phonemes) rather than attempt a language-independent representation.
Distinguishing rules: morpho-phonology and the structure of words
Morphemes: minimal meaning-bearing units; examples include girl, -ish, -ness.
Words are composed of morphemes; the same morphemes combine and recombine to form many words, making a one-to-one symbol-for-word approach impractical.
The term logogram reflects a symbol for a morpheme; the term logographic system emphasizes representing both meaning and pronunciation; in many systems, pronunciation is not directly tied to the sign.
The sign for a morpheme might be reused or repurposed via phonetic or contextual cues; this underlies how logographic systems evolved into more phonologically aware scripts.
The evolution from logograms to phonology
Early logographic signs eventually required representation of pronunciation to support broader literacy.
This led to mixed systems where signs could denote both meaning and sound, gradually giving rise to phonographic components (syllabaries, alphabets).
The structure of alphabets, consonant-only alphabets, and vowelized alphabets
Consonantal alphabets (abjads): primarily consonants; vowels can be implied or added later.
Alphasyllabaries (akvara): consonants with diacritics or appendages to denote vowels.
True alphabets: vowels and consonants both represented with explicit signs.
Cuneiform: Forgotten Legacy of a Forgotten People
Geographic and historical setting
Sumer in southern Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates.
The region experienced climate challenges, leading to irrigation, and enabling agricultural surplus.
Surplus supported trade, specialized professions, and social stratification; administrative complexity demanded record keeping.
The rise of administration and writing
Early technologies included tally systems and tokens to record quantities of goods.
As society grew, these were insufficient; writing emerged as a more effective information technology for accounting and administration.
The invention of writing served to preserve information about trade, yields, taxes, and other records rather than to faithfully capture language from the outset.
Clay as a durable medium and Uruk as the cradle of writing
Clay was abundant and durable when baked, preserving tablets for millennia.
Uruk (Erech) was a key early city where the earliest writing is attested; Uruk IV marks the appearance of writing around .
By Uruk III (roughly ), writing appeared in other Sumerian cities; proto-Elamite in Susa and Egyptian writing also emerged around this period.
Proto-cuneiform and the earliest tablets
Proto-cuneiform signs were scratched or drawn on damp clay tablets (see figure 2.1).
Approximately 85 ext{ ext{%}} of the roughly 800 identified signs were numerals; numerals were used to count different domains (discrete entities, land area, time periods, grain, etc.).
The remaining signs included pictographic signs (e.g., head = sag; fish = ku) and signs that were later abstracted.
Some signs were arbitrary or highly abstract (e.g., sheep = udu).
The problem of representing language with pictographs
A separate sign for every word would require an enormous number of signs; pictographic systems face practical limits because not all words are easily pictured.
The scribes used workarounds: same sign for related concepts; combining or modifying simpler signs (e.g., jar sign dug turned into kaS for beer).
Determinatives and rebus writing
Determinatives: unpronounced signs indicating the class of item (divine names, wooden objects, male/female names) to aid reading.
Rebus writing: using a symbol for its associated sound when the object shared a phonetic pronunciation with another word (e.g., gi = reed and render; ti = arrow and life).
Proto-cuneiform’s use of rebus elements helped establish that signs encoded language, not just concepts.
Telegraphic nature of proto-cuneiform
Proto-cuneiform tablets contain core morphemes with minimal grammatical information; prefixes and suffixes were largely absent.
Signs were arranged in boxes; one statement per box; the internal order did not strictly mirror spoken language; context aided disambiguation.
The typical layout observed patterns: numerals first, then the objects counted, then other details (e.g., “3 sheep temple”).
The emergence of true cuneiform
The shift from curved to angular wedge-shaped signs (cuneiform) and from left-to-right within boxes to lines across the tablet.
The number of signs grew to about early on, then stabilized around by the end of the millennium as phonology became central.
Language and structure of Sumerian
Sumerian is an agglutinative language: grammatical information is encoded using prefixes and suffixes attached to words.
Similar to English’s past tense -ed, possessive -’s, and plural -(e)s, but Sumerian extended affixation to numerous grammatical features.
Nouns could carry up to three suffixes; verbs could have up to six prefixes; some nouns had one or no affixes.
Literacy and the long arc of writing’s adoption
Literacy in cuneiform required extensive training; students studied long sign lists and practiced scripts.
Even though cuneiform began as an accounting tool, it gradually expanded to support history, literature, and science texts.
The evolution of cuneiform illustrates how a practical information technology can transform into a medium for a broad range of human knowledge over centuries.
Summary takeaways
Writing arose to solve the problem of memory limits in complex societies.
It is an external storage technology that enables reliable transmission and preservation of information across time.
Writing is a language-encoding technology that evolves from logographic representations of morphemes to phonological systems (syllabaries and alphabets).
The development of writing is deeply tied to social needs (trade, administration) and material constraints (clay as a durable medium).
The Mesopotamian cuneiform tradition demonstrates the longest continuous evolution of a writing system from accounting to a full writing system capable of recording language, history, and science over many centuries.
Key Concepts and Terms
Civilization: complex social organization, cities, public works, economic specialization, recorded information systems.
Logographic system: signs encode morphemes (meaning) and may encode pronunciation; e.g., early logograms used by Njoya and proto-cuneiform signs.
Morpheme: the smallest meaning-bearing unit of language (e.g., girl, -ish, -ness).
Phonology: the system of sounds; phonemes are the abstract units of sound used in a language.
Logograms vs syllabaries vs alphabets: different strategies for encoding language.
Determinatives: unpronounced signs that clarify category (divine name, wooden object, etc.).
Rebus writing: using signs with related sounds to convey meaning.
Agglutinative language: a language that forms words by stringing together morphemes with affixes.
Proto-cuneiform: early logographic signs on damp clay; telegraphic writing with limited grammar.
Cuneiform: true writing system with wedge-shaped signs; angular signs; development from proto-cuneiform to true cuneiform.
Uruk IV and Uruk III: historical periods marking the appearance and spread of writing in Mesopotamia.
Numerals in early signs: about numeral signs among roughly total signs in proto-cuneiform.
Sign counts over time: proto-cuneiform had ~ signs; true cuneiform ~ signs by the end of the millennium; number later stabilized.
Timeline anchors
Proto-cuneiform attested around at Uruk (Uruk IV).
Writing appears in Uruk III: ; later spread to other centers.
Examples and metaphors
Writing as a “time-to-space” transformation; writing makes language visible and manipulable.
A road sign or a mathematical expression like rac{d}{dx}igg( rac{1}{a+bx^2}igg)^2 illustrates how certain signs convey operations beyond spoken language; such signs are portable across languages because they encode universal concepts.
Connections to Broader Themes
Writing as an information technology parallel to agriculture, the wheel, and fire control: one of humanity’s foundational inventions for record-keeping and knowledge preservation.
Writing’s interplay with power and education: societies with writing systems often gain prestige; unwritten languages face endangerment without literacy efforts.
Language, literacy, and cultural survival: many languages survive through developing writing systems and literacy programs.
The evolution of scripts shows how writing systems balance representational capabilities (morphemes vs phonology) with practical constraints (number of signs, ease of learning).
The transition from pictographic to phonetic writing exemplifies the generalization of language as a system of signs that must encode both meaning and sound to be usable across diverse contexts and languages.
Formulas and Numerical References (LaTeX)
Basic historical dates:
(Uruk IV)
(Uruk III)
Sign counts:
Proto-cuneiform signs: approximately ; numerals: about
True cuneiform: about signs initially, stabilizing to about by the end of the millennium
Language and numbers in proto-cuneiform:
"three" [example of a typified transaction: "3 sheep temple"]
Noun/verb morphology complexity: nouns with up to suffixes; verbs with up to prefixes; agglutinative structure
Linguistic inventory:
Number of languages: (as counted by SIL)
Expressive content example (mathematical symbol):
A percentage example:
Numerals in proto-cuneiform accounted for of the early signs
Writing was originally invented to solve the problem of memory limits in complex societies. As societies grew more complex, particularly with the development of social complexity, cities, and economic specialization, there was a need for external storage to reliably transmit and preserve information across time. This included keeping records for taxation, tribute, trade, public works, and basic accounting, such as recording debts and promises to avoid the unreliability of human memory and oral transmission. Early applications, especially in Sumer, focused on administration and trade rather than faithfully capturing spoken language.