Proto-cuneiform

The proto-cuneiform script was a system of proto-writing that emerged in Mesopotamia ca. 3350-3200 BC (during the Uruk period), eventually developing into the early cuneiform script used in the region's Early Dynastic I period.

It arose from the token-based system that had already been in use across the region in preceding millennia. Other precursors of this system include clay bullae containing tokens, and numerical tablets using only numeral signs. Those devices were used in the institutions of Mesopotamia and western Iran during the 4th millennium BC, in order to record administrative operations. The proto-cuneiform subsequently appeared in southern Mesopotamia, during the 34th century BC. This system is documented by around 5,000 clay tablets coming from various sites, dating from ca. 3350 BC to 3000 BC.

This invention is related to the increasingly complex administrative practices, itself a consequence of the formation of more complex social and political entities, considered to be the first cities and states. Those evolutions are especially visible at Uruk, the site where most of the proto-cuneiform texts were found.

Proto-cuneiform is a writing or proto-writing system, based on a set of numerical signs, related to various metrological systems, used according to what was quantified (discrete objects, surfaces, volumes, duration), and logographic signs (a sign = a word) which for many have a pictographic origin (drawings of the thing designated). The texts are essentially administrative in nature. They record movements of goods entering or leaving the stores of the institutions, quantifying them and indicating the people and offices involved in these operations. Other tablets are inventories of signs organized thematically, ancestors of the lexical lists typical of the Mesopotamian literary traditions.

While it is known definitively that later cuneiform was used to write the Sumerian language, it is still uncertain what the underlying language of proto-cuneiform texts was, given that they are not intended to transcribe a language and contain almost no clues about the language spoken by those who wrote them.