Cities and writing

What makes a city? A city is not just a place with many people. Cities grow when an economy develops beyond food production, into trade, manufacturing and services. City people are no longer self-sufficient; they depend on each other.

Think of a craftsman who carves stone seals. He needs bronze tools he cannot make himself, and coloured stones he does not know how to find. The toolmaker in turn needs copper, tin and charcoal brought in by others. This division of labour, with each person specialising, is a mark of city life. It needs organisation: someone must arrange trade, store goods, and give orders that others follow, and that often means keeping written records.

Goods came from far away. The south had rich farmland but almost no stone, good wood or metal. So Mesopotamians traded their textiles and farm produce for wood, copper, tin, silver, gold, shell and stones from Turkey, Iran and across the Gulf. The earliest cities date to the bronze age, about 3000 BCE; bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was needed for tools and weapons.

Transport mattered too. Animals carrying goods must be fed on the way, but boats are pushed by the river current or the wind. So water transport is the cheapest, and Mesopotamia's canals and river channels became routes for moving goods between settlements.

How writing began. Writing means showing spoken sounds as visible signs. The first tablets, around 3200 BCE, came from the temples of Uruk. They were about 5,000 lists of things like oxen, fish and loaves of bread, with picture-like signs and numbers. Writing began because city life needed records of goods coming in and going out.

• A scribe patted wet clay into a tablet and pressed signs into it with the sharp end of a reed while the clay was still soft. Dried in the sun, the tablet became almost as hard as pottery.
• By about 2600 BCE the signs had become cuneiform (from the Latin cuneus, wedge, and forma, shape) and were used for dictionaries, land deeds, kings' deeds and laws.
• Cuneiform in Akkadian stayed in use until the first century CE, over 2,000 years.

The system of writing. Each cuneiform sign stood not for a single letter but for a syllable (such as -put- or -la-). A scribe had to learn hundreds of signs, many of them complex. So writing was a skilled craft and a great intellectual achievement, and very few people could read and write. A king who could read made sure his inscriptions boasted about it. Letters were usually read aloud: an official's letter would begin 'To my lord A, speak: ...'

Writing, trade and kingship. A Sumerian poem tells of Enmerkar, an early ruler of Uruk, who wanted lapis lazuli and precious metals for a temple from the distant land of Aratta. His messenger crossed mountain range after mountain range, carrying message after message, until he 'grew weary of mouth' and mixed them up. So Enmerkar wrote his words on a clay tablet. The story is not literal history, but it shows that Mesopotamians linked writing, trade and kings together, and saw writing as a sign of their superior city culture.