The Mesopotamian basin was the birthplace of writing. The Cuneiform writing system developed here was the first form of communication beyond the use of pictograms.
Subject Areas
History and Social Studies
World History - Ancient World
Literature and Language Arts
World
Time Required
Four to Five forty-five minute class sessions
Skills
Interpreting archival documents
Working collaboratively
Gathering, classifying and interpreting written information
Making inferences and drawing conclusions
Map reading
The Emergence and Evolution of the Cuneiform Writing System in Ancient Mesopotamia
Introduction
The earliest writing systems evolved independently and at roughly the same
time in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but current scholarship suggests that Mesopotamia’s
writing appeared first. That writing system, invented by the Sumerians, emerged
in Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE. At first, this writing was representational:
a bull might be represented by a picture of a bull, and a pictograph of barley
signified the word barley. Though writing began as pictures, this
system was inconvenient for conveying anything other than simple nouns, and
it became increasingly abstract as it evolved to encompass more abstract concepts,
eventually taking form in the world’s earliest writing: cuneiform. An
increasingly complex civilization encouraged the development of an increasingly
sophisticated form of writing. Cuneiform came to function both phonetically
(representing a sound) and semantically (representing a meaning such as an object or concept)
rather than only representing objects directly as a picture.
This lesson plan, intended for use in the teaching of world history in the
middle grades, is designed to help students appreciate the parallel development
and increasing complexity of writing and civilization in the Tigris and Euphrates
valleys in ancient Mesopotamia. You may wish to use this lesson independently
as an introduction to Mesopotamian civilization, or as an entry point into the
study of Sumerian and Babylonian history and culture.
Guiding Questions
How did cuneiform writing emerge and evolve in ancient Mesopotamia?
How did the cuneiform writing system affect Mesopotamian civilization?
Learning Objectives
Having completed the activities in this lesson, students should be able to:
Point to specific artifacts to demonstrate the way the writing system in
Mesopotamia was transformed.
Analyze the purposes writing served in Mesopotamia with an emphasis on
how those purposes evolved as the civilization changed.
Gain a basic understanding of the ways in which the development of systems
of writing and the development of civilization are linked.
Background Information for the Teacher
The earliest known civilization developed along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers
in what is now the country of Iraq. The development of successful agriculture,
which relied on the region’s fertile soils and an irrigation system that
took advantage of its consistent water supply, led to the development of the
world’s first cities. The development of stable agriculture through irrigation
meant people no longer had to follow changing sources of food. With this stability
farmers in the region were able to domesticate animals such as goats, sheep,
and cattle. They successfully grew crops of barley and other grains, from which
they began to produce dietary staples and other products, such as bread and beer.
As their agricultural practices became more successful, farmers were able to
create surpluses. In order to ensure the crop yield, a system of canals was
dug to divert water for agriculture and lessen the impact of annual floods.
With these advances, a significant population of successful farmers, herders,
and traders were able to move beyond subsistence agriculture. A series of successive
kingdoms—Sumer, Akkadia (also spelled Accadia), Assyria, Babylonia—built
cities with monumental architecture, in which trade and commerce were thriving,
and even early forms of plumbing were invented for the ruling class.
The development of trade was one of several important factors in Mesopotamia
that created a need for writing. The development of complex societies, with
social hierarchies, private property, economies that supported tax-funded authorities,
and trade, all combined to create a need for written records. The increasingly
sophisticated system of writing that developed also helped the civilization
develop further, facilitating the management of complex commercial, religious,
political, and military systems.
The earliest known writing originated with the Sumerians about 5500 years ago.
Writing was not invented for telling stories of the great conquests of kings
or for important legal documents. Instead, the earliest known writing documented
simple commercial transactions.
The evolution of writing occurred in stages. In its earliest form, commercial
transactions were represented by tokens. A sale of four sheep was represented
by four tokens designed to signify sheep. At first such tokens were made of
stone. Later, they were created from clay. Tokens were stored as a record of
transactions.
In the next stage of development, pictographs (simple pictures of an object)
were drawn into wet clay, and these images replaced the tokens. Scribes no longer
drew four sheep pictographs to represent four sheep. Instead, the numeral for
four was written beside one sheep pictograph.
Through this process writing was becoming disentangled from direct depiction.
More complicated number systems began to develop. The pictographic symbols were
refined into the writing system known as cuneiform. The English word cuneiform
comes from the Latin cuneus, meaning “wedge.” Using cuneiform,
written symbols could be quickly made by highly trained scribes through the
skillful use of the wedge-like end of a reed stylus. Eventually, writing became
phonetic as well as representational. Once the writing system had moved from
being pictographic to phonetic writing could communicate abstractions more effectively:
names, words, and ideas. With cuneiform, writers could tell stories, relate histories,
and support the rule of kings. Cuneiform was used to record literature such
as the Epic of Gilgamesh—the oldest epic still known. Furthermore,
cuneiform was used to communicate and formalize legal systems, most famously
Hammurabi’s Code.
Review all web sites and materials students will view. Download photographs
of artifacts students will be viewing offline. Download and prepare as necessary
handouts from the downloadable PDF for this lesson.
You may wish to consult the following EDSITEment lessons on ancient writing systems, designed for younger
students, which contain elements that could be adapted for middle school:
This first activity will introduce students to the part of the world where
writing first developed- the area once called Mesopotamia, which was located
in what is today the country of Iraq. The earliest cities known today arose
in Mesopotamia, an area that is part of what is sometimes called the Fertile
Crescent. What clues can we get from the geography of the region to explain
why Mesopotamia became the “Cradle of Civilization”? Share with
the students the British
Museum’s introduction to Mesopotamia: Geography, available through
the EDSITEment reviewed resource The
Oriental Institute: The University of Chicago. Then use the Geography:
Explore feature to investigate a variety of maps of the region by choosing
them from the pull down menu.
View the modern political map of the area with the class. Ask the students:
With which of these cities are you familiar?
What do you notice about the locations of these modern cities?
Next view the Ancient Cities map together. Ask the students:
Where were most of the cities located? Why there?
How does their location compare with that of the contemporary cities?
Next, view the Terrain Map with the students and ask them to answer the
following question:
Look to the northeast of Mesopotamia. Why is that area not as hospitable
to agriculture? The southwest?
Finally, view the Natural Resources Map with the class, and ask them to
answer these questions:
Mesopotamia was agriculturally rich. Why did vibrant trade develop in
the larger region shown on the map? One reason is that although the area was rich in agriculture,
it was poor in many natural resources?
What elements in the terrain also enabled Mesopotamia to develop trade
(pay particular attention to the rivers, relatively flat terrain)?
Activity 2. Mesopotamia Timeline
In this activity students will be introduced to the time period in which the
first writing developed, and the major events which coincided with this development
in ancient Mesopotamia.
Distribute the Timeline:
Mesopotamia 4000-1000 BCE activity which is available as a PDF file for
this lesson, or you can do this as an
online activity. Note that the timeline covers an extended period, not all
of which will be covered in detail in this lesson. This activity will give students
who have not had readings about the history of the Middle East, and specifically
about Mesopotamia, the opportunity to gain some contextual understanding of
the development of cuneiform writing. For students who have had the opportunity
to learn about Mesopotamia this exercise will remind them of some of the major
events in the history of the area.
Distribute the Timeline Labels handout, which is available as a PDF file for this lesson. If practical you
may wish to project the timeline onto a screen or redraw the timeline on the
board.
As a class, look through the labels. Which do students hypothesize would appear
earlier/later on the timeline?
Divide the class into small groups of three or four and assign each group one
of the labels. Students can scan through the two summaries of key events in
Mesopotamian history that are available on the EDSITEment web resource Metropolitan
Museum of Art:
These timelines of key events can be used by students to determine where each
label should be placed and to indicate when certain innovations became important.
Note: Cuneiform continued to be used in Mesopotamia well into
the first millennium BCE, however, as this lesson is concentrating on the early
development of the writing system the timeline in this activity will end before
cuneiform writing ceased to be used.
Moving in chronological order, place the labels on the timeline. Each group
should work together to provide any additional information about the development
that was in the event summary. Challenge students to put together a simple narrative
of developments in the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley based on the events in
the timeline.
What developments in the civilization would have been facilitated by or even
require a system of writing?
Activity 3. Jobs in Mesopotamia
In this activity students will begin to think about the development and urbanization
of Mesopotamian civilization by thinking about the kinds of occupations that
developed over time. Students will also begin to think about the relationship
between the evolution of civilization in Mesopotamia and how writing enhanced
its development.
Students have probably already studied in their classes about the shift of
human societies from the nomadic pursuit of game and wild vegetation, to settled
cultivation, and eventually towards settled villages, towns, and cities. As
societies became, first, more settled as farmers, and then in certain places
more urbanized as some populations became townsfolk, what kinds of new tasks
and jobs would need to be done?
Ask students to return to their timeline worksheets. Based on what students
learned from the timeline activity, what do they think are some jobs that probably
existed in ancient Mesopotamia: Farmer? Trader? Ruler? Builder? Others? Divide
the class into small groups and have each group work together to create a list
of jobs they believe might have existed in ancient Mesopotamia. Ask each group
to contribute one job to a running list that will be written on the board. You
may wish to go around the room two or three times.
You can download a list of some occupations which were part of life in ancient Mesopotamia. This
is not a comprehensive list, but it will give your class an idea of what life
in ancient Mesopotamia was like. You can use this list as a point of comparison
with the list that the class has compiled. Students may be surprised to discover
which occupations were and were not part of life in ancient Mesopotamia. Ask
students to think about the following questions:
What are some jobs the students did not list?
What are some jobs students wouldn’t expect to be on the list, such
as factory worker?
What jobs on the list no longer exist?
Which jobs are unfamiliar to students?
Were the students surprised to learn some of the listed jobs existed in
ancient Mesopotamia?
Which occupations do they think were the most common? Why?
Which of the jobs on the list are part of an industry, trade, or profession
with a need for record keeping? Explain your answers.
Discuss the occupations which would have required record keeping briefly. You
may wish to discuss the role of the priestly class in ancient Mesopotamia, as
elite, Mesopotamian priests had a far more expanded role in society than students
may have experienced with members of the clergy today. The priests of ancient
Mesopotamia were part of the ruling class, and much of the tax money that was
collected went to the priests and the temples. Next, have students discuss the
following questions. You may wish to have them work together in small groups.
Would it have been possible to complete the tasks of these occupations without
being able to write anything down? How?
If there were no written records connected to these occupations how would
that have affected the occupation?
How might it have made it easier? How might it have made it harder?
Do students think that the appearance of these occupations might have affected
the development of writing? How?
Activity 4. Thinking About Writing
In addition to the historical basis for these activities, this lesson is also
about the nature of written language, how it evolves and how it serves civilization.
Ask the students the purposes of writing in the world today. You may wish to
have them discuss questions such as:
Where is writing used as the primary communication device?
What information does it convey?
When is it used in addition to other forms of communication- like speaking?
For what do they use written forms of communication?
Next, ask them to imagine that in an instant all knowledge of alphabetic writing
disappeared. Only the drawing of simple pictures remained as the means of written
communication. Have the class brainstorm: What would be some of the most essential
things for which you would need signs? Which objects, concepts and ideas are
the ones you would make sure were standardized and learned right away?
Review the list of essential signs that the class has compiled. Have students
create a few of them and draw them on the board. See if a few volunteers can
use these “standardized” signs to put together a message someone
else in the class will actually understand. Discuss examples of messages relatively
easy to communicate with pictographs and others that would be more difficult.
Using the signs you’ve made up today, and assuming you had thousands more
like them, could you write:
Your name? (Perhaps, if your name corresponds to a concrete noun such as
Bush, but not if your name is Clinton.
Verbs like: walk, run, fly?
Adjectives like: delicious, lovely, awesome?
The words: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Any of the following titles of songs released in 2004? Which ones?
A Man and a Woman
Through the Wire
Sunshine
You Don’t Know My Name
Ask students to discuss the following questions:
What does picture writing do well? Students may note that pictographs can
represent nouns, small numbers, and some prepositions—“Two men
on horseback.”
What advantages does picture writing have? Students may note that even
those without specialized knowledge could potentially understand it.
What are its weaknesses? Students should note that pictographic images
have a limited ability to communicate such things as abstractions, sounds
and certain parts of speech.
Can a pictograph convey what the word it is depicting sounds like?
Writing in ancient Mesopotamia arose from necessity—specifically, the
need to keep records. Gradually, civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates River
Valley became more urbanized. Eventually, a number of complex systems developed:
political, military, religious, legal, and commercial. Writing developed as well,
becoming essential to those systems.
Did writing enable those complex systems to arise or did complex systems create
the need for a more sophisticated system of writing? Ask students to recall
a time they started to do a task and then realized at some point that they should
have been writing things down? For example, they might imagine organizing a
collection of trading cards by writing down categories. Did writing change the
way they approached the task? For example, they might think of deciding to make
lists of the cards by category. They could do the task without writing, but
writing would better enable them to do it—now the cards are organized by category
and there’s a list to check against to identify lost cards. Ask students
to think about the following questions as they track the evolution of civilization
and writing in ancient Mesopotamia:
What kinds of tasks can be accomplished without writing?
What kinds of tasks cannot be accomplished without writing?
Could a country be ruled, an army trained, a religion organized, laws maintained,
buildings built, products marketed, crops raised and sold without writing?
How does writing enhance the ability to do those things?
Activity 5. Barley and the Story of Writing
In this activity students will be introduced to the world’s first writing
system—cuneiform—as they work through the British Museum's Mesopotamia site interactive online activity The
Story of Writing, available through the EDSITEment resource The
Oriental Institute: The University of Chicago.
Introduce the activity by asking students to think about our word “barley.”
How many students know what barley is? How is it used? What does it look like
in its natural state? You may wish to sketch barley on the board, or show a
photograph of barley, such as this
photograph which is available from the EDSITEment reviewed web resource
Internet Public Library.
Barley was a very important crop in ancient Mesopotamia. A pictograph, a pictorial
representation of barley—presumably like the one you’ve drawn on
the board--is one of the signs we find on the oldest examples of writing from
the region. The first Mesopotamian written representation of barley was a picture.
Ask students to think about and discuss the following questions:
What’s the relationship between the way our word “barley”
looks and barley itself?
What are the elements of our word for barley- how do we know that the symbols
which make up the word represent the grain?
Students should come to the idea that in the written word “barley”
it is the phonetic representations of the sounds of the word as we say it that
connect the written word to the concept. Barley in Mesopotamia was called “she.”
Next, navigate with the class, or have students navigate on their own, through
The Story
of Writing web site. Each page contains information on the history and
development of the cuneiform character for the word “barley” over
time. Students should complete the quiz Treasure
Hunt: Bowling for Barley, which is available as a PDF file, as well as
in the form of an online activity.
Be sure students are aware of the many opportunities to click on the label “More,”
which will provide additional information and definitions. Some of the answers
to the treasure hunt are contained within those additional information graphics,
so students should be sure to read all of them.
When students have completed the answers to the treasure hunt have the class
discuss the answers to each of the questions, which are available in the teacher’s
rubric. Have students answer the following questions in class discussion.
For larger classes you may wish to divide the class into small groups and have
each group work on answering one of the following questions, which they should
share with the rest of the class.
How did writing evolve in ancient Mesopotamia? Students should note here
the progression from representational picture, to symbol, to phonetic representation.
Why do the students think that the ancient Mesopotamians decided to change
the writing system from just pictures (pictographs) to the cuneiform shapes?
Students might think some of the following questions in order to help them
understand the process: Did the change allow the ancient Mesopotamians to
include a greater or a lesser number of ideas and objects in their writing?
Did the shift towards cuneiform allow scribes to write more quickly?
How did the uses of writing expand over time? Remind students that the earliest
written records were made to document buying and selling things like barley
or domestic animals. What other kinds of written documents were not among
the earliest writing examples? Students should think about the shift from
the recording of simple economic transactions to personal letters and stories.
What kinds of documents would have been developed later?
How did the change from pictures (direct representation) to cuneiform (abstract
representation) affect who could use the system? Students should ponder the
idea that an abstract writing system would require learning the system of
signs. They should think about our own writing system- were they able to understand
it before someone taught them how to read and write? Once the writing system
had changed to cuneiform, who might have learned how to read and write?
Who do you think would want the have a record of the buying and selling
of barley? You may wish to remind students that these records were similar
to receipts. Why do people make and keep receipts? This may help them to think
about why people wanted to keep track of the buying and selling of barley.
Activity 6. Learning from Artifacts
In this activity students will be challenged to make hypotheses about civilization
in ancient Mesopotamia. It will be helpful for students to return to the timelines
they created in the second activity as a reference point while completing this
exercise.
To help them understand the task they will be completing in this activity,
begin by asking students to look at one contemporary object on which writing
is found, such as a penny. They should imagine they are from the distant future.
They know the English language, but they know little else about America in the 21st
Century. What hypotheses can they make from a penny? The members of this unknown
civilization:
could work metal;
constructed buildings as shown on the reverse of the coin;
wore facial hair;
believed in a Supreme Being… and so forth.
Cuneiform writing was understood before we knew much about civilization in
Ancient Mesopotamia. How did that happen? In what is now Iran, there is an inscription
carved high on a rock face with the same message in three different languages.
One is in Persian (the language that is still used in Iran today) and another
is Assyrian cuneiform from Mesopotamia. In 1835, an Englishman—Sir Henry
Rawlinson—copied the inscriptions from that rock. Once he had translated
the Persian, he was able to use the Persian as a key to decipher the cuneiform.
As a result, people were able, for the first time, to read the writing on clay
tablets found in the vicinity of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
Ask students to think about the previous lesson in which they learned about how the
use of writing might have evolved in Mesopotamia. The first writing recorded
agricultural transactions. What kinds of thoughts, ideas, actions, or things
were easiest to put into pictures? What kinds of things did they believe were
the most necessary to keep a record of? After thinking about both of these questions
ask students to try to imagine why it is that agricultural transactions—the
buying and selling of grains or livestock- were among the first written messages
on earth.
Why was it so important to have a written record of agricultural transactions?
Why do you think the first records recorded the sale of grains and livestock?
Why not something else?
Who would want to have this record?
Next, students should think about what kind of an effect this type of record
keeping might have on the rest of society. If there is a record of who bought
what kind of grain, how much they bought, and from whom, what else becomes possible?
Who besides the seller and the buyer might want a record of these transactions?
For example, authorities expecting to take a portion of the revenue from taxes
might be interested in having a record of the financial transactions which took
place. Now instead of trying to guess how much they should tax someone they
had a record of how much the transaction was worth. Having a written record
of those transactions would make the collection of taxes both more exact
and more efficient.
What other records might have been useful for authorities to keep?
Might they want to keep track of marriages? Births? Deaths? Land sales?
Why?
How else might rulers be able to use writing to legitimize and extend their
power?
You may wish to begin by working through the model below. For beginning students
you may wish to design an additional model in order to make the process explicit
to your students. Next, divide the class into small groups of two or three and
assign each group of students an artifact from ancient Mesopotamia from the
list below. Each group will describe its artifact while showing a photograph
of the object, such as the images listed below which are available below through
the EDISTEment web resources The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, The Oriental
Institute: The University of Chicago, and Internet
Public Library. Then, each group will present its hypotheses about what
the object can tell us today about life in ancient Mesopotamia. Presentation
to the class will proceed in chronological order, and should try to answer the
following questions:
What can be learned about civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley
at the time of the artifact’s creation?
What in the artifact itself supports their hypothesis?
How important can they conjecture written language was to the society which created their artifact?
Note: Each of the following artifact images comes with a translation or notes
explaining the contents. All of the pages online offer the opportunity to click
for additional views of the artifact (usually a larger view) and/or information.
The following is a model for the process of this activity with the following
artifact: Cuneiform
Tablet (account of small cattle, ca. 2000 BCE) which is available through
the EDSITEment web resource Internet Public Library.
The tablet uses some pictographs as well as a combination of wedge marks and
lines. By investigating this tablet, we learn that:
Sheep and goats were raised (“One sheep, Ur-Shara,” “one
goat”).
There was at least one forest in the area (“individual sheep from
the Forest of the Great Canal” and the job of “forester”
existed)
At the time the tablet was written, canals had been built (The name “Great
Canal” implies the existence of at least one lesser canal.)
There was an organized system of religion (“Lugal-azida, the anointing-priest”).
Fleece was taken from sheep and presumably used (“fleece plucked”).
Careful records of livestock were made (“Total: 9 sheep”).
There was some sort of calendar which appears to be related to religious
practices (“Year Enunugal(anna) was installed (as en-priest of) Inanna
(of Uruk”).
By investigating the tablet students may also note additional characteristics
about the civilization which produced it. For example, the presence of an established
calendar indicates the existence of a fairly sophisticated number system and
understanding of astronomy. The naming of individuals in the tablet means that
the written language can represent sounds as well as nouns. There are no verbs
in the tablet, though the word “plucked,” used here as an adjective,
is close.
You may wish to distribute to each group this graphic
organizer for writing down the information they gather. It is available
as a PDF file for this lesson, or as an online interactive activity.
Group presentations should be conducted as if this were a convention of archaeologists
trying to piece together a portrait of the evolution of life and writing in
ancient Mesopotamia by combining the work of all the groups. Assign one artifact
to from the following list to each group:
When each group has completed their investigation of the artifact, gathered
their evidence, compiled, and presented their hypotheses, have the class discuss
and debate the following questions:
What picture of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia arises from the combined
hypotheses of the groups?
Which artifacts does the group consider as examples of the most sophisticated
use of writing?
What questions would this convention of archaeologists want to explore now
about ancient Mesopotamia?
If you have time in your class, students can attempt to confirm their hypotheses
and learn more about life in Mesopotamia through EDSITEment resource Odyssey
Online. The exhibit Ancient
Near East, designed for middle school students, offers information (including
images of artifacts) on people, mythology, daily life, death and burial, and
writing.
Assessment
Using what they’ve learned about the symbols and their evolution, the
students should be able to place the following artifacts in the chronological
order of their creation. Here they are in chronological order. Present them
to the students in random order.
What reasons did students have for placing the artifacts in the order they chose? Have students
write an explanation for why they placed the examples in the order they chose.
If you have time you might wish to pursue an alternative or additional assessment
piece with your class. Each student should compose a brief essay of no more
than one page explaining how writing was important to the development of civilization
in ancient Mesopotamia. How would writing have been useful for record keeping,
legal matters, passing on history and stories to future generations and other
activities represented in the artifacts students analyzed? Why would picture
writing be difficult to use for some of these purposes?
Extending the Lesson
There are a number of ways in which you might extend this lesson using EDISTEment
resources. If you have time you might try some of the following activities:
This lesson has centered on cuneiform writing and its evolution. Mathematics
also flourished and developed in ancient Mesopotamia. For example, ancient
Mesopotamia is the place where the concept of value and the zero were invented.
Students can learn more about cuneiform numerals and the Babylonian system
of Base 60 with the online exhibit Sumerian
and Babylonian Numerals from The School
of Computing and IT, both links from the EDSITEment resource The
Oriental Institute: The University of Chicago.
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