Chapter 1 CLAY AND REED

The Sumerians invented writing, and we don’t know where they came from.

1.1 The Scene

Imagine the city of Uruk in 3100 BCE.

You’re standing in what is now southern Iraq, but there’s no Iraq yet—no nation-states at all. The world’s human population is perhaps fifteen million, scattered across a planet that won’t be circumnavigated for another four and a half millennia. Most people live in small villages, growing what they can, knowing nothing of lands beyond the horizon.

But Uruk is different.

Forty thousand people live here—the largest concentration of humanity on Earth. The city sprawls across six hundred hectares, ringed by walls ten kilometers long. At its heart rise temple complexes built of millions of mud bricks, painted and decorated, visible from a day’s walk away. Priests in the temples conduct rituals for gods whose names—An, Inanna, Enki—will echo through thousands of years of religious texts.

The streets are narrow and unpaved, thick with dust in the dry season, mud in the wet. Donkeys carry goods; there are no horses yet, no camels domesticated for this work. The smell is overwhelming to modern senses: animal dung, human waste, fermenting grain, roasting meat, incense from the temples. The sound is a constant buzz of Sumerian voices, punctuated by bleating sheep, bellowing oxen, the rhythmic thud of hammers and grindstones.

In one of the temple complexes, in a small room with light filtering through a high window, a man sits cross-legged before a lump of clay. He’s not a priest—his work is more mundane than that. He manages accounts for the temple’s economic activities: the fields the temple owns, the workers it employs, the goods it receives and distributes.

In his right hand he holds a stylus—a reed stalk cut at an angle. He presses it into the soft clay, making marks. A vertical wedge, then two horizontal wedges, then a circle with a cross inside.

He’s writing.

He probably doesn’t know he’s making history. He’s doing his job, the same job he did yesterday and will do tomorrow. The marks he makes represent quantities—thirty jars of oil, perhaps, or fifty bushels of barley. The system he uses has been developing for generations, passed from teacher to student, gradually becoming more sophisticated.

The clay will dry in the sun. Someone will file it, stack it with other tablets in a storage room. In that room it will sit, accumulating dust, as the centuries pass—as Uruk falls to Akkad, as Akkad falls to Gutians, as dynasties rise and crumble, as the language the scribe spoke becomes archaic, then dead, then forgotten, then rediscovered by Europeans with shovels and curiosity four thousand years later.

The tablet survives. We can read it. We know what he wrote.

But we don’t know where his ancestors came from, or how they arrived at this place, or why they—of all the peoples on Earth—were the first to press meaning into clay.

1.2 The Invention

Writing did not spring into existence fully formed. It evolved.

The process took centuries, perhaps millennia. We can trace its stages through archaeological evidence, watching symbols become simpler, more abstract, more powerful.

Stage one: tokens. Long before Uruk, Mesopotamian peoples used small clay objects—spheres, cones, disks of various shapes—to represent goods. One sphere might mean one jar of oil. Two cones might mean two measures of grain. The tokens were ancient counting devices, three-dimensional tally marks.

Stage two: envelopes. Around 3500 BCE, people began enclosing tokens in hollow clay balls. If you’re sending a shipment of goods with a messenger, and you don’t trust the messenger, you seal the tokens representing the shipment inside a clay envelope. The recipient breaks it open and checks: do the tokens match the goods?

But there’s a problem. To verify the contents, you destroy the envelope. So people started pressing the tokens into the outside of the envelope before sealing them inside—a record of what’s within. Now you can verify without destroying.

Stage three: impressions. Someone noticed: if the impressions on the outside carry all the information, why bother putting tokens inside? The envelope becomes a tablet. The three-dimensional tokens become two-dimensional marks.

Stage four: pictographs. The marks evolve. They no longer represent only quantities but also the things being counted. A sketch of a sheep means “sheep.” A sketch of a head means “head.” A sketch of a barley stalk means “barley.”

Stage five: abstraction. Pictographs are slow to draw and limited in what they can represent. Gradually, the pictures become simplified, stylized, reduced to quick combinations of wedge-shaped strokes—cuneus in Latin, hence “cuneiform.” The sign for “sheep” no longer looks like a sheep. It’s an abstract symbol that means “sheep” only because scribes agree it does.

Stage six: phonetic values. This is the crucial leap. Some Sumerian words sound alike but mean different things. The word ti means both “arrow” and “life.” A scribe needs to write “life” but there’s no pictograph for abstract concepts. So he uses the arrow sign—because it sounds the same.

Suddenly, signs can represent sounds, not just things. You can write words that have no picture. You can write grammar—verb endings, case markers, particles. You can write anything that can be spoken.

The technology has escaped its origins. It was invented for counting sheep. Now it can preserve poetry, law, love letters, lies. It can carry a voice across centuries to listeners not yet born.

1.3 The Mystery

We can trace writing’s evolution. We can read the texts it produced. We can reconstruct the society that created it.

But the Sumerians themselves remain mysterious.

Their language is an isolate—a term linguists use for languages with no known relatives. Basque is an isolate, surrounded by Indo-European speakers but unrelated to any of them. Korean may be an isolate, or may be distantly related to Japanese; scholars debate. But these languages have living speakers we can interview, record, study.

Sumerian has been dead for four thousand years. We reconstruct its sounds, grammar, and vocabulary from texts alone—and those texts show a language unlike anything else.

Consider the possibilities. When a new people appears in the historical record, their language usually connects them to something we know:

The Akkadians who conquered Sumer spoke a Semitic language—related to Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic. We can trace the family.
The Hittites who ruled Anatolia spoke an Indo-European language—distant cousin to English, Greek, Sanskrit. Again, the family is known.
The Elamites in Iran spoke… another isolate, actually, but one with possible distant connections to Dravidian languages of India.

The Sumerians connect to nothing. Their verb morphology, their noun cases, their phonology—none of it matches any known family. Scholars have proposed connections to everything from Finnish to Chinese to languages of the Caucasus. None have withstood scrutiny.

And there are stranger clues. Within Sumerian vocabulary, linguists identify words that don’t follow Sumerian phonological patterns—probable loanwords from some earlier language. City names like Ur, Eridu, Nippur don’t have clear Sumerian etymologies. Agricultural terms—apin (plow), engar (farmer), nimbar (date palm)—may come from a pre-Sumerian population that the Sumerians absorbed or displaced.

We call this hypothetical earlier language “Proto-Euphratean” or, half-jokingly, a “banana language”—because it seems to have favored reduplicated syllables like the names of gods (Bunene, Zababa) and places.

But Proto-Euphratean is a ghost. We infer it only from what Sumerian borrowed. It left no texts, no inscriptions, no voice of its own. Whatever people spoke it vanished into the Sumerians, who then vanished into the Akkadians, who then vanished into history’s long succession.

The first words we can read emerge from people we cannot trace. The origin of writing is itself unwritten.

1.4 Why It Matters

Why should you care about a dead language from five thousand years ago?

One answer is practical: Sumerian left descendants. Not linguistic descendants—the language has no children—but cultural ones. The Akkadians who conquered Sumer adopted Sumerian writing, Sumerian literature, Sumerian religion. They passed it on. Babylonians, Assyrians, and eventually, through chains of contact and influence, the entire ancient Near East inherited something from Sumer.

When Hebrew scribes wrote Genesis, they drew on Mesopotamian creation myths that trace back to Sumerian originals. When Greek astronomers developed their theories, they built on Babylonian observations recorded in cuneiform—a script invented by Sumerians. When you check the time and see that an hour has sixty minutes, you’re using a Sumerian counting system.

But there’s a deeper answer.

The Sumerians faced a problem no one had faced before: how to make thought permanent. They solved it. Their solution was imperfect, cumbersome, limited to a priestly elite—but it worked. For the first time, human knowledge could accumulate across generations without relying on fallible memory and oral transmission.

This was not just a technical achievement. It was a new kind of existence. Before writing, human culture was like a river—constantly flowing, never the same twice. After writing, culture could be a lake—accumulating, deepening, preserved.

Everything that followed—libraries, universities, science, this book—depends on that original insight. You can make marks that carry meaning. You can read marks that others made. The conversation extends across centuries.

The Sumerians gave us this gift. They probably didn’t know they were giving it. They were tracking sheep, recording taxes, praising kings. But in doing so, they invented the technology that would preserve their world—and enable ours.

The irony is that we cannot trace them. The first people to leave a record left no record of their own origin. They emerge from silence, speak volumes, and in speaking, ensure that nothing fully disappears again.

The silence before them is permanent. The silence after them is over. That transition—from the unwritten to the written, from the lost to the preserved—is where human history, in the fullest sense, begins.

We cannot go further back. We can only go forward, following the words.