The Materiality of Writing in the Ancient World: Sumerian, Cuneiform, and Beyond

Harvard FAS

Cuneiform, the world’s earliest writing system, was invented over 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq). It was originally used to write the Sumerian language, a language that continued to be written for over 3 millennia and produced a corpus of well over 100,000 preserved texts. The act of writing—a means of externalizing and visually representing language—has an inherent materiality to it, one that was new and innovative in the ancient world. In this class, we explore the…