Dr. Irving Finkel

But in principle, this was the received law when I was a student.

And one of the reasons which makes it compelling is you have their massive architecture, which requires a great deal of organization and dedication and

with people in charge and people doing what they were told and all that.

So it was in that milieu of small urban conglomerations united by the name of the place, the local deity, the festivals and so forth that ran through the air, all those things for sure were in place, that set these up as more or less independent uses.

And the same situation prevailed in many of them

And there's a horizon whereby, not that somebody rang everybody else and said, listen, guys, we've got to invent writing because we can't cope with everything here.

We're going to do that.

But somehow, and this also shows that there was some level of contact of a harmonious type, you get the emergence of the first idea of recording on clay using these drawn characters and

on this material, which once finished, once completed, will be put in the shadow of the sun by a wall, and half an hour later the surface will be, you could pick it up, it wouldn't smudge or smear, it was ideal in a way, you just wrote the thing, dried it, and there you were.

So this got off the ground gradually and gradually.

And so you have, as we are led to understand it by the great sages who run seriology, that you have this panoply of drawn

shapes with curvy lines if necessary to represent what they're talking about like you'd have a drawing of a foot which looked like a foot with a heel and a bit curving round above the toes with curvy lines and everything that you draw unless you're a robot when you draw things there are curves in all of them and what actually happened is there was a shift at some point from the drawings on clay

into a system whereby you could do the same images with a straight edge, like the edge of a chopstick or something, where you'd analyze, say, the ankle and foot, which is a curvy picture like a child would draw a foot, to make two long ones and one at the bottom and another bit on top to make the shape of the foot out of small straight lines.

And when that border is crossed,

from realistic drawings, or what people like to call curvy linear, into cuneiform, where they're reduced to straight edges within the whole of the picture, the individual sign picture, then you get the appearance of cuneiform.

And that took place probably at the beginning of the third millennium.

So originally the drawings, what you would do, very simply, if you want to do a river, you draw two parallel lines.

If you want to do a woman, you do a triangle with a hole in the middle.

If you wanted to do an animal, you do the animal head.

All those sorts of things, very simple.