Writing first appears with the beginnings of urban civilisation and the emergence of the state in Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq) and Egypt’s Nile Valley at the end of the 4th millennium bc. This chapter describes the many and different contributions of the technology of writing and the force and impacts achieved with the revolutionary innovation.

This chapter surveys cuneiform texts that reflect various degrees of linguistic awareness, providing the reader with a general perspective on Babylonian semiotics and linguistics. The chapter begins with a discussion of the scholarly settings in which cuneiform developed and goes on to explore how this writing system, together with practices of divination and magic, influenced the linguistic consciousness of scribes. It examines a variety of texts, including the basic elementary school exercise SA A, which Assyro-Babylonian scholars often interpreted as an esoteric text describing the very first human words. It also investigates the conceptions of language in epic narratives such Adapa and the South Wind and Gilgamesh.

The setting of the city within the environment of Mesopotamia, on a branch of the river Euphrates, was without special advantages amid more ancient cities with older fame. Sumerian and Semitic Akkadian were very different languages integrated into the urbanized written culture, whereas Amorite immigrants from the west were tribal outsiders who often assimilated in the cities. Water management by canals, sluices, and flood control, and the extension of land for agriculture and settlement were duties of kings reflected in early myths. Merchants travelled abroad, west to the Mediterranean, north into Anatolia, east across the river Tigris into Iran, where they encountered the rival civilization of Elam, and south down the Arabian Gulf. They brought in precious metals, stones, timber, and plants. After 1,300 years, Babylon became a ceremonial centre without indigenous kings, but foreign kings still came to have their claim to rule legitimized in a city where the bearing of arms was prohibited. King-lists and chronicles underpinned Babylonians’ understanding of their own history; prayers, songs, epics, technical manuals, rituals, records of divination, and astronomy as well as archival and administrative texts were written on various media, of which only clay, being inorganic, survives. Temples, a palace, a harbour, city walls, and gates characterized urban space.

Chapter 11 focuses on one of the most important events of the last 5,000 years: the development of writing. Writing is defined as a system of more or less permanent marks used to represent an utterance in such a way that it can be recovered more or less the same way without intervention. Writing is distinguished from ideograms that represent things or concepts directly. Readers are introduced to alphabets in which, though imperfectly, each letter represents one sound, syllabaries which represent the syllable, abjads, in which, typically, only consonants are written, and abujidas, in which each consonant is represented with a basic vowel. The chapter includes examples for each type of writing from many different languages. The history of writing is summarized, from its beginnings in Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica, to modern day writing in different parts of the world. Each new concept introduced is amply illustrated with images from different types of writing systems, and readers are encouraged to try to understand how reading should proceed in each case.

Human sacrifice was a rare practice among the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia. Our best-sourced occurrences are the archaeological remains from the royal death pits at Early Dynastic Ur (c. 2600–2450 BCE) and textual records of the substitute king ritual that was practised at least from the early second millennium BCE down to the time of Alexander the Great. Such sporadic occurrences of ritual human sacrifice require an investigation as to why it happened at all. This chapter examines the practice of human sacrifice in the light of its respective historical and cultural contexts to better understand this extreme form of ritual violence. It finds that while there are rather different contexts, in both instances it is clear that the office of kingship held absolute power over the subjects who were disposed of for the sake of the ruler.