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  • The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer
  • Stephanie Dalley (bio)
The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer. By Jean-Jacques Glassner, trans. Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pp. xvii+266. $42.

Did writing evolve from multiple stimuli into a script that represented a particular language? Or was it invented by a genius at a particular place and time? How did it happen? Jean-Jacques Glassner sets out to answer these questions in this stimulating book, translated from the French, in which he presents his own view—that writing was invented not as a recording device, nor as a primitive linkage of symbols representing objects, but as a purposeful rendering of the Sumerian language. Taking his cue from a passage in a Sumerian tale, he deduces that this purpose belongs both to the initial invention and to the Sumerians' later understanding of it.

Linking very early written documents with associated buildings, Glass-ner explains problems of stratigraphy and their interpretation at Uruk—that most complicated of sites—and adds more recent material from sites in Syria and Turkey. He concludes that writing in Mesopotamia circa 3400 B.C.E. preceded writing in Egypt by at least a century.

In his third chapter, Glassner describes the many attempts that have been made since cuneiform was discovered to extract a theory of origins from exiguous evidence. He dismisses a popular model, that pictograms unconnected with any particular language were eventually used as phonograms, because the proportion of genuine pictograms in the early assemblage of signs is so small. Instead, he favors an intellectual approach, that writing created human consciousness and power to reason, and criticizes the idea that pragmatic administration produced the impetus. He denies validity to the work of Denise Schmandt-Besserat, whose theory grew from the collecting of three-dimensional tokens and bullae and her analysis of their shapes and markings. Inconsistent as her work was, Schmandt-Besserat is an easy target, and yet many scholars still see her contribution as relevant to understanding the invention of written language. Glassner does not, but he agrees that early iconography may sometimes be classed as pictograms even though unconnected with pictographic signs in written language.

Glassner describes the earliest tablets, from Uruk, Susa, and Habuba Kabira, with find-spots, which allows him to suggest whether they belong to [End Page 408] private or institutional archives. All but one are administrative records; the exception is a list of professions. Laconic as these are, the arrangement of signs on the surface is suggested as being equivalent to syntax in language.

The important leap was "the institution of a system of signs." In Glassner's book, categories of early signs with their extensions, modifications, and the names by which they were known, are shown with drawings. Glassner also shows the way in which a phonetic element is fitted into a sign, making it more complex, and the linkage between purposeful complexity in signs for types of sheep and goats. Lexical lists of objects are classified by distinct categories. Intending to demonstrate a nonpragmatic stimulus, Glassner writes that the driving force was the wish to find graphic codes belonging to the divine sphere, and so to gain control over the future. He adduces omen texts, although textual evidence for them is much later. In gathering evidence for early literacy of kings and their relationship to divinity, he highlights Naram-Sin, king of Agade, and Shulgi, king of Ur, and he digresses on assemblies, elite titles, and costumes, hairstyles, and appurtenances. Kingship recognizable from later periods may begin with the Semitic rulers of Akkad, by which time kings were closely associated with writing.

Glassner concludes that "Uruk society . . . at a specific moment in its history asked its intellectuals and scholars to get to work"—a conclusion that this reviewer does not believe the evidence supports. Too often Glassner cites data from a thousand or more years later than the supposed invention, allowing for no subsequent innovation. Berossos's sage tradition cannot be traced back beyond the mid-second millennium. Esarhaddon's seventh-century inscriptions cannot throw light on thought processes of the fourth millennium. The Sumerians' view of...

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