Ancient Near Eastern Art: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v ...

About 3000 B.C. writing was invented in
Mesopotamia as a method of recording
and storing primarily economic information.
In Egypt early records were kept on
papyrus. But since Mesopotamia was
located along the banks of the Tigris and
Euphrates, where clay was plentiful and
inexpensive, this material was used for
the earliest documents. Writing was done
with a reed or bone stylus on small pillowshaped
tablets, most of which were only
a few inches wide and fit easily into one's
palm. The stylus left small marks in the
clay that we call cuneiform, or wedgeshaped,
writing.
The earliest script was pictographic
-rendering realistic drawings of objects
familiar in everyday life. It is not certain
who developed this picture writing; we
can only infer from archaeological records
that it was the Sumerians, who
soon after developed a system in which
drawings in clay were replaced by signs
representing the sounds of the Sumerian
language.
Cuneiform was adopted by other
cultures, and its use quickly spread
throughout the Near East. The early
Elamites, who lived to the east of Mesopotamia
(in the area of modern-day Iran),
and various groups of Semitic-speaking
peoples, who dwelt along the Tigris and
Euphrates, also used cuneiform signs in
their writing. By the second millennium
B.C., cuneiform writing was widely used
by many cultures in the Near East. Later
the Urartians, in the northernmost parts of
Mesopotamia, also used cuneiform, which
can be seen on the band above the second
arcade on the Urartian bell (fig. 74)
inscribed with the king's name, Argishti.
Hundreds of thousands of cuneiform
tablets have been excavated in the Near
East, while countless others still lie buried
beneath the rubble of ancient, unexcavated
cities. The Museum has over five
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