The World’s Earliest Writing System May Have Been Influenced by Older Symbols Found on Stone ‘Cylinder Seals’

While historians know roughly where and when humans first began writing, they have many unanswered questions about how and why the practice arose.

Now, a new paper suggests that one of the world’s earliest writing systems may have been influenced by older symbols engraved on small cylinders. These stone “cylinder seals” helped our ancestors keep track of goods and transactions, according to a study published this week in the journal Antiquity.

“The invention of writing marks the transition between prehistory and history, and the findings of this study bridge this divide by illustrating how some late prehistoric images were incorporated into one of the earliest invented writing systems,” says co-author Silvia Ferrara, a scholar of classical philology and Italian studies at Italy’s University of Bologna, in a statement.

The earliest known writing system, called cuneiform, was invented around 3100 B.C.E. in Mesopotamia. Before cuneiform, however, humans used a simpler writing system called proto-cuneiform that appeared around 3350 to 3000 B.C.E. These early writing systems featured symbols that were pressed or carved into wet clay.

But where did those symbols come from? The team behind the new paper argues they have roots in cylinder seals, which were used for thousands of years to track the production, storage, transportation and sale of textiles and farm products.

Cylinder seals were engraved with patterns and images, then rolled across wet clay to leave indentations. Some were used before the invention of writing.

The researchers looked at cylinder seals that date to 4400 to 3400 B.C.E., with an emphasis on those used before the development of writing. When they compared symbols on the cylinder seals with those used in the proto-cuneiform writing system, they found several matches.

For example, on both preliterate cylinder seals and proto-cuneiform, they found images of a fringed cloth, as well as a vessel in a net. In both instances, those symbols refer to the transport of goods. These findings suggest the preliterate cylinder seals helped give rise to proto-cuneiform and, later, cuneiform.

“The crucial link that we’re presenting in the paper is a first concrete set of a few signs where we can explicitly say: These are there before writing, and they’re used in similar ways, and they have some sort of semantic association that is carried over into the invention of writing,” says co-author Kathryn Kelley, also from the University of Bologna, to the Independent’s Julia Musto.

This is not a new theory: Holly Pittman, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, proposed the idea some 30 years ago. However, Pittman tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe that her theory was brushed aside at the time. The new paper takes up Pittman’s theory once again and adds new details to support it.

In addition to the cylinder seals, other sources—including engraved tokens—may have also contributed to proto-cuneiform. If that’s true, then the invention of writing in Mesopotamia may have been “much more decentralized than we think,” Ferrara tells New Scientist’s Michael Marshall.

People in various roles and locations throughout Mesopotamia—including traders, administrators and leaders in the city of Uruk—may have made their mark on proto-cuneiform.

“There’s evidence for having a more widespread … and more distributed prompt to writing,” Ferrara adds.

Still, not everyone is convinced that symbols on cylinder seals were “stimuli for the invention of writing,” Gordon Whittaker, an anthropologist at Germany’s University of Göttingen who was not involved with the research, tells Live Science.

“In the few instances in which the same item appears to be depicted in both a seal and a proto-cuneiform sign, there is no obvious causal relationship that would link the one with the other,” he adds. “Furthermore, several of the shapes—such as a narrow oblong without internal detail—are simply too general or vague to be helpful to the authors’ argument.”

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.