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Proto-cuneiform

A reference page linking a name, group, or concept to the materials that discuss it.

Timeline
From 3350 BCE to 3000 BCE

Early Mesopotamian writing of the late fourth millennium BCE, combining numerical notation and signs, predominantly accounts with limited phonetic use.

Grain account, Met 1988.433.2, ca. 3100–2900 BCE; probably from Uruk, not the first known tablet. Display copy removes empty background around the object
Grain account, Met 1988.433.2, ca. 3100–2900 BCE; probably from Uruk, not the first known tablet. Display copy removes empty background around the objectThe Metropolitan Museum of Art · CC0 · Public domainLicense · Object record

Reading path

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Periods

When does it appear?

  • From 3350 BCE to 3000 BCE

Dates

Dates have distinct roles. The timeline uses creation, composition or historical coverage, rather than publication or discovery dates.

Historical coverage
Approximately From 3350 BCE to 3000 BCE

Text

Emerging writing

Attested in UrukUrukAncient city at Warka in southern Iraq, a major urban centre around 3200 BCE that preserved early writing and accounting tablets.Glossary · Click to read the explanation IV and III tablets, it contains pictorial and conventional signs without ordinarily recording all grammar or spoken word order. Interpretation requires documentary conventions and context. The name distinguishes it from later wedge-shaped cuneiformCuneiformWriting with wedge-shaped signs, developed from Mesopotamian recording traditions and used for several languages from the third millennium BCE.Glossary · Click to read the explanation without automatically identifying every sign’s language.[1]

References and notes

  1. Christopher Woods (2010; corrected reprint 2015). The Earliest Mesopotamian Writing, in Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond, OIMP 32, pp. 33–50. Selected pp. 33–37 and 43–45: Uruk, secondary deposits, sign forms, language, rebus and phonetic development. Page 43 visually checked. Not the complete book. Current CDLI ranges used instead of treating the older 3200 BCE convention as a fixed boundary. Return to the text ↑

Research history

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  1. Edition 2 · 10 October 2026 · editor:aladmin

    Substantive record update

    Read this revision in its original language (Arabic)

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Cite this record

IL Archive, «Proto-cuneiform», Edition 2, https://ilarchive.com/en/entities/proto-cuneiform