The emergence of writing was a factor that boosted, in a surprising way, the development of the various cultures and civilizations of the Ancient Age. It was from its birth that human beings began to leave imprinted the facts that occurred around them.
Newsroom (01/11/2022 09:34, Gaudium Press) It is not so unusual to find people who suffer from memory problems. When they learn a new piece of information, they easily forget the previous ones… Now, several techniques allow such a deficiency to be overcome: repetition or establishing connections for example, but none of these methods is as widely used as writing.
There is an adage that says “verba volant, scripta manent” – words fly, but writings remain. This is why the emergence of writing was a factor of such great importance: it allowed historical events not to disappear from the “memory” of mankind.
The appearance of writing marked in an amazing way the development of the various cultures and civilizations of the Ancient Age. It was from its birth that the evolution of societies accelerated, and human beings began to leave printed events that occurred around them.
It remains to be seen how this art emerged and what its history is. To know its slow development, it is necessary to go back in time, to an age and a world quite different from today’s.
The cuneiform system
In the lands of Western Asia, located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa – called the Near East – there is a region that became known as Mesopotamia, a name derived from a contraction of two Greek words (μέσω = between and ποταμός = rivers), because it is located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (present-day Iraq and eastern Syria). There, in the fourth millennium before Christ, around 3,200 B.C., the first writings on record were found, and they were all in “cuneiform.”
This writing system was probably the work of the Sumerian Empire which was located in southern Mesopotamia. It got the name “cuneiform” from the fact that it is engraved with triangular incisions that are marked by a wedge. Little by little, the neighboring peoples realized the practicality of this system of encoding their own language by means of signs stamped in stone or baked clay, and eventually adopted it and adapted it to their own languages, so that by the second millennium B.C., cuneiform had spread throughout the Near East. The great Assyrian Empire, Babylonian Empire, and the Persian Empire all used this form of writing.
“In its origins, cuneiform writing was nothing but a pictographic writing system, that is, each sign was a drawing of one or several concrete objects and represented a word whose meaning was identical. However, because of the need to have a large number of signs, which made it an unagile system for practical use, the Sumerian scribes, a little later, reduced the number of signs and subjected it to certain limits by means of various resources, among them – the most important – that of substituting ideographic values for phonetic ones.”[1]
An Italian pilgrim named Pietro della Valle, was one of the pioneers to report something about this enigmatic writing. A German explorer and physician, Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), was responsible for naming it “cuneiform writing”. Much is also due to Casten Niebuhr (1733-1815), who, traveling to the Middle East as an explorer in the service of the King of Denmark, brought reliable news about the objects of those ancient countries to the West. But deciphering this writing is, properly speaking, a work of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Hammurabi and his important code of laws
Among the most famous writings composed in cuneiform script is the great code of Hammurabi.[2] As much as the Sumerians already had their set of laws, they did not have them organized. This Hammurabi did, collecting the legislative texts and adapting them to his era. All this work took years, and was only completed at the end of his reign (around 1750 B.C.). Engraved on a diorite stone, measuring approximately 2.25 m high by 55 cm wide, and consisting of 282 paragraphs, this code applies in many of its sentences the law of Talion, popularly known by the phrase “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”
The most obvious example is found in §196: “If a man plucks out another man’s eye, the eye of the first man should be plucked out.” The crime of theft was also punishable by death, if the theft was an object from the royal palace or the temple (§6). Depending on the circumstances, the one who tried to steal and did not succeed received the same death penalty according to §21: “whoever opens a breach in the wall of a house, shall be killed and buried in front of the breach.”
No doubt these are crude, primitive and cruel methods, especially since we are used to a Christian outlook on life. But we must remember that, in ancient times, it was not uncommon for people to be treated this way. In the Mosaic Law itself, one finds many punishments resembling those promulgated by Hammurabi.[3] This was necessary because of the hardness of men’s hearts at that time, who often only followed the right path when they were guided by fear and were often prone to vengeance without limits instead of justice.
Also among the number of famous cuneiform writings are other examples such as the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, one of the earliest known literary works, and the great stone of Beishtún – an inscription made on a wall in the province of Kermanshah in northwestern Iran, which is a proclamation of the achievements of Darius I of Persia.
By João Pedro Serafim
[1] NOAH KRAMER, Samuel. La historia empieza en Sumer. Madrid: Alianza editorial, 2017, p.373 (personal translation).
[2] Hammurabi was the sixth ruler of the first dynasty of the Babylonian empire
[3] See, for example: Ex 21:1-25; Lev 20:1-15; Num 1:51; Deut 21:18-21.
