Behold the Oldest Written Text in the World: The Kish Tablet, Circa 3500 BC

Image by José-Manuel Ben­i­to, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Some refer to the writ­ten Chi­nese lan­guage as ideo­graph­ic: that is, struc­tured accord­ing to a sys­tem in which each sym­bol rep­re­sents a par­tic­u­lar idea or con­cept, whether abstract or con­crete. That’s true of cer­tain Chi­nese char­ac­ters, but only a small minor­i­ty. Most of them are actu­al­ly logographs, each of which rep­re­sents a word or part of a word. But if you dig deep enough into their his­to­ry — and the his­to­ry of oth­er Asian lan­guages that use Chi­nese-derived vocab­u­lary — you’ll find that some start­ed out long ago as pic­tographs, designed visu­al­ly to rep­re­sent the thing to which they referred.

That does­n’t hold true for Chi­nese alone: it appears, in fact, that all writ­ten lan­guages began as forms of pic­to­graph­ic “pro­to-writ­ing,” at least judg­ing by the ear­li­est texts cur­rent­ly known to man. If we look at the old­est of them all, the lime­stone “Kish tablet” unearthed from the site of the epony­mous ancient Sumer­ian city in mod­ern-day Iraq, we can in some sense “read” sev­er­al of the sym­bols in its text, even five and a half mil­len­nia after it was writ­ten. “The writ­ing on its sur­face is pure­ly pic­to­graph­ic,” says the nar­ra­tor of the brief IFLScience video below, “and rep­re­sents a mid­point between pro­to-writ­ing and the more sophis­ti­cat­ed writ­ing of the cuneiform.”

Cuneiform, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, was used by the ancient Baby­lo­ni­ans to label maps and record stew recipes, among oth­er impor­tant tasks. “First devel­oped around 3200 B.C. by Sumer­ian scribes in the ancient city-state of Uruk, in present-day Iraq, as a means of record­ing trans­ac­tions, cuneiform writ­ing was cre­at­ed by using a reed sty­lus to make wedge-shaped inden­ta­tions in clay tablets,” says Archae­ol­o­gy mag­a­zine. Over 3,000 years, this ear­li­est prop­er script “was used by scribes of mul­ti­ple cul­tures over that time to write a num­ber of lan­guages oth­er than Sumer­ian, most notably Akka­di­an, a Semit­ic lan­guage that was the lin­gua fran­ca of the Assyr­i­an and Baby­lon­ian Empires.”

Cuneiform was also used to write the Scheil dynas­tic tablet, which dates from the ear­ly sec­ond mil­len­ni­um BC. That means we can read it, and thus know that it com­pris­es a lit­er­ary-his­tor­i­cal text that lists off the reigns of var­i­ous rulers of Sumer­ian cities. We should note that the Scheil dynas­tic tablet is also, some­times, referred to as the “Kish tablet,” which sure­ly caus­es some con­fu­sion. But for the anony­mous writer of the ear­li­er Kish tablet, who would have lived about two mil­len­nia ear­li­er, the emer­gence of cuneiform and all the civ­i­liza­tion­al devel­op­ments it would make pos­si­ble lay far in the future. His pic­to­graph­ic text may nev­er be deci­phered prop­er­ly or mapped to a his­tor­i­cal­ly doc­u­ment­ed lan­guage, but at least we can tell that he must sure­ly have had hands and feet more or less like our own.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Old­est Known Sen­tence Writ­ten in an Alpha­bet Has Been Found on a Head-Lice Comb (Cir­ca 1700 BC)

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Dic­tio­nary of the Old­est Writ­ten Lan­guage – It Took 90 Years to Com­plete, and It’s Now Free Online

How Writ­ing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Ani­mat­ed Map

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.


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