A new study's findings open new perspectives on understanding the birth of writing. The post Origins of writing traced to 6,000-year-old cylinder seal designs appeared first on Talker.

“Seals are a key consideration on the path towards writing in southwest Asia. At times, shared seal and sign shapes may reflect common referents in the real world,” like the need to track trade and ...

Example of a cylinder seal and its design imprinted onto clay Image: Frank Raux, Musée du Louvre For centuries, scholars have puzzled over the origins of the world’s first writing system.

Such cylinder seals were used for millennia throughout Mesopotamia, where they were rolled across clay tablets to print their motifs on them — often to verify a transaction or, later, a letter.

Before Mesopotamian people invented writing, they used cylinder seals to press patterns into wet clay – and some of the symbols used were carried over into proto-writing ...

Designs on stone cylinders dating back six thousand years correspond to some signs of the proto-cuneiform script that emerged in the city of Uruk, in southern Iraq, around 3350–3000 BCE.

Egyptian Jewelry, Mesopotamian Seal Found in Cyprus Offer Clues to Bronze Age Trade Networks ... Another notable find was a cylinder-shaped seal made of hematite and inscribed in cuneiform, ...

THE cylinder seal is the typical product of the civilization of those countries and periods where cuneiform writing was employed, as is the scarab in Egypt or the coin on Roman sites. Invented at ...

Some of the seals examined in the new study date to about 4400 B.C. — more than 1,000 years before the development of writing. "We focused on seal imagery that originated before the invention of ...