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Much of the earliest known writing is bookkeeping. Between about 3350 and 3000 BC, scribes in southern Mesopotamia, mostly in the city of Uruk in today's Iraq, pressed signs into clay tablets to record grain, sheep, beer and land; about 85 per cent of these tablets are accounts.

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LanguageHistory

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Scholars call this early script proto-cuneiform. It grew out of an older system of small clay tokens that stood for goods, and its signs were drawn or pressed with a stylus. Around 5,000 such tablets survive, and those that are not accounts are mostly sign lists used to train scribes. Many quantities were counted in base 60, a system later handed down by Babylonian astronomers that survives in our 60 minutes. Over the following centuries the signs became wedge-shaped marks, which gave cuneiform its name, from Latin cuneus, 'wedge'. Cuneiform was used for about 3,000 years to write Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite and other languages; more than 23,000 tablets left by Assyrian merchants have been found at Kültepe near Kayseri. Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared at roughly the same time.

Türkçe oku
Bilinen en eski yazıların büyük bölümü hesap kaydıdır. MÖ 3350–3000 yılları arasında Güney Mezopotamya'da, çoğu bugünkü Irak'taki Uruk kentinde çalışan kâtipler, kil tabletlere işaret bastırarak tahıl, koyun, bira ve tarla hesabı tuttu. Bu ilk tabletlerin yaklaşık yüzde 85'i muhasebe kaydıdır.

Araştırmacılar bu erken yazıya proto-çivi yazısı der. Bu yazı, malları temsil eden küçük kil pullarla yapılan daha eski bir sayma sisteminden gelişti; işaretler sivri uçlu bir kalemle çiziliyor ya da bastırılıyordu. Bu tür yaklaşık 5.000 tablet günümüze ulaştı; hesap kaydı olmayanların çoğu, kâtip yetiştirmek için hazırlanmış işaret listeleridir. Pek çok miktar 60 tabanlı bir sistemle sayılıyordu; Babil gökbilimcileri aracılığıyla bize ulaşan bu sistem, bir saatin 60 dakika olmasında bugün de yaşıyor. Sonraki yüzyıllarda işaretler kama ya da çivi biçimli çentiklere dönüştü; çivi yazısı adı da buradan gelir. Çivi yazısı yaklaşık 3.000 yıl boyunca Sümerce, Akadca, Hititçe ve başka dilleri yazmak için kullanıldı. Kayseri yakınlarındaki Kültepe'de, Asurlu tüccarların bıraktığı 23.000'i aşkın tablet bulundu. Mısır hiyeroglifleri de aşağı yukarı aynı dönemde ortaya çıktı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Cuneiform
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