for example, with the Sumerian word for water, a , the sign for which was two parallel wavy lines. The context made it clear whether a meant water or the sound. This was when the signs were turned through ninety degrees, to make them easier to write in a hurry, and when the signs became more abstract. This form of writing spread quickly from Shuruppak to other cities in southern Mesopotamia. Trade was still the main reason for writing but it was now that its use was extended to religion, politics and history/myth-the beginnings of imaginative literature. Such a transformation didn't happen overnight. In the early schools for scribes, we find lexical lists-lists of words-and lists of proverbs. This is probably how they were taught to write, and it was through well-known proverbs and incantations, even magic spells, that abstract signs for syntactical and grammatical elements became established (the proverbs had a simple, familiar form). And it was in this way that writing changed from being a purely symbolic system of information-recording and exchange, to a representation of speech . Although the first texts which contain grammatical elements come from Shuruppak, word order was still highly variable. The breakthrough to writing in the actual order of speech seems to have occurred first when Eannatum was king of Lagash ( c . 2500 BC). It was only now that writing was able to convert all aspects of language to written form.44 The acquisition of such literacy was arduous and was aided by encyclopaedic and other lists.45 People-in the Bible and elsewhere-were described as 'knowing the words' for things, such as birds or fishes, which meant they could, to that extent, read. Some lists were king lists, and these produced another advance when texts began to go beyond mere lists, to offer comment and evaluation on rulers, their conflicts, the laws they introduced: history was for the first time being written down.46 The list about the date-palm, for instance, includes hundreds of entries, not just the many parts of the palm, from bark to crown, but words for types of decay and the uses to which the wood could be put. In other words, this is how the first forms of knowledge were arranged and recorded. At Shuruppak the lists included: bovines, fish, birds, containers, textiles, metal objects, professions and crafts.47 There were also lists of deities, mathematical and economic terms. (In the names for gods, females still predominate.) Lists made possible new kinds of intellectual activity. They encouraged comparison and criticism. The items in a list were removed from the context that gave them meaning in the oral world and in that sense became abstractions. They could be separated and sorted in ways never conceived before, giving rise to questions never asked in an oral culture. For example, the astronomical lists made clear the intricate patterns of the celestial bodies, marking the beginning of mathematical astronomy and astrology.48 The texts repeatedly mention other cities, with which Shuruppak had contact: Lagash, Nippur, Umma and Uruk among them. The very first idea, apart from economic tablets and proper names, that we can decipher among the earliest writing is that of the battle between 'kings' and 'priests'. At one stage it was believed that all of a city's inhabitants and all of its land 'belonged' to the supreme city god and that the high priest or priestess administered the city on behalf of this deity, but such a view is no longer tenable: land holding was much more complex than this. The high priest or priestess was known as the en , or ensi . Normally, and to begin with, the en or ensi was the most powerful figure, but there was another, the lugal -literally speaking, the 'great man'. He was in effect the military commander, the fortress commander, who ran the city in its disputes with foreign powers. It does not take much imagination to envisage conflict between these two sources of power. The view preferred now is that Mesopotamian cities are better understood not as religious but as corporate entities-municipalities-in which people were treated equally. Their chief characteristic was economic: goods and produce were jointly owned and redistributed, both among the citizens themselves but also to foreigners who provided in exchange goods and commodities which the cities lacked. This is inferred from the writing on seals, references to 'rations', the fact that everyone was buried in the same way, certainly to begin with, and the discovery of locks by which goods were sequestered in warehouses. To begin with, the en administered this system though, as we shall see, that changed.49
Apart from lists, the other major development in writing was the switch from a pictographic system to a syllabary and then to a full alphabet. Just as it was in the busy trading cities of Sumer that writing began, because it was needed, so the alphabet was invented, not in Mesopotamia but further west where the Semitic languages lent themselves to such a change. A pictographic system is limited because hundreds if not thousands of 'words' need to be remembered (as with Chinese today). In syllabaries, where a 'word' corresponds to a syllable, only around eighty to a hundred entities need to be remembered. But alphabets are even better. Hebrew and Arabic are the best-known Semitic languages today but in the second millennium BC the main tongue was Canaanite, of which both Phoenician and Hebrew are descendants. What made the Semitic languages suitable for alphabetisation was that most nouns and verbs were composed of three consonants, fleshed out by vowels which vary according to the context, but which are generally self-evident. (Professor Saggs gives this English equivalent: th wmn ws cryng and th wmn wr cryng . Most readers have no difficulty in deciphering either phrase.50) The earliest alphabet so far found was discovered in excavations made at Ras Shamra ('Fennel Head') near Alexandretta, the north-east corner of the Mediterranean that lies between Syria and Asia Minor. Here, on a hill above a small harbour was an ancient site excavated in 1929, which in antiquity was known as Ugarit. A library was discovered at the site, situated between two temples devoted to Baal and Dagon. The library belonged to the high priest and consisted mainly of tablets in writing in a cuneiform style but which comprised only twenty-nine signs. It was, therefore, an alphabet. The scholars making the excavation guessed that the language was probably related to Canaanite or Phoenician or Hebrew and they were right: the script was rapidly deciphered. Many of the events portrayed, as we shall see, prefigure stories in the Old Testament.51 This system appears to have been deliberately invented, with no real precursors. As Figure 7 shows, the signs fit into five groups, with patterns of increasing complexity, indicating an order for the letters. Figure 7: Signs of the Ugaritic alphabet 52 [Source: H. W. F. Saggs, Civilisation Before Greece and Rome , London: B. T. Batsford, 1989, page 81] Although the first alphabet occurred at Ugarit, it was restricted mainly to north Syria and a few Palestinian sites. After the twelfth century BC, it died out and the future lay with descendants of the proto-Canaanite language. This alphabet took time to stabilise, with the letters facing either way, and the writing often taking the boustrophedon form.* However, shortly before 1000 BC, proto-Canaanite did become stabilised into what is generally referred to as the Phoenician alphabet (the earliest inscriptions occur at Byblos-now Jublai, north of Beirut in Lebanon-many on bronze arrow heads, saying who the head belonged to). By this time the number of letters was reduced to twenty-two and all the signs had become linear, with no traces of pictographs. The direction of writing had also stabilised, consistently horizontal from right to left. By common tradition, it was the Phoenician alphabet which was imported into classical Greece. In both Mesopotamia and Egypt literacy was held in high esteem. Shulgi, a Sumerian king around 2100 BC, boasted that As a youth, I studied the scribal art in the Tablet-House, from the tablets of Sumer and Akkad; No one of noble birth could write a tablet as I could.53