The invention of writing occurred around 5,000 years in ancient Mesopotamia, a result of the trading involved in the world’s first cities. Carved or molded seals were used to make impressions on clay. Cylindrical seals were rolled onto clay to impress the mark of the owner, the symbolic presence of the owner, onto sealed bags of merchandise. Hundreds of these ‘cylinder seals’ remain, and they are the richest artistic expression of their time. Framed in the rectangular impression they make when rolled onto clay, we find illustrations of animals, trees and people, the landscape of their times.

Sometimes there is a blank space in the composition. This was not “white space,” as we use it today to relieve the tension of a cramped space or to improve a composition. This area was left open for the impressions made by the notched end of a stick. This angular mark, wedge-shaped, and later came to be named ‘cuneiform’ writing. Cuneiform is not a particular language, and it is not yet a true alphabet. These marks were used by a variety of Mesopotamian cultures in a many different way. Writing was originally used to help keep track of objects and transact business. In fact, you might say that writing is an advanced form of counting, and that it was city-scale commerce, and taxation in particular, which led to its invention. The vast power of written language, as opposed to spoken language, is not intuitively obvious. And writing, as opposed to speaking, has to be learned.

Cuneiform is a type of pictographic mark making, in which marks which originally represented an object, then begins to represent other concepts as well. For instance, to the ancient Babylonians, who meticulously watched the sky and over time transferred their local divinities to the stars, the pictographic mark for a star eventually came to represent divinity.

Babylon was the center of the Sumerian empire, which extended to many cities. In order to stabilize this society (and to confirm and extend his rule) King Hammurabi drew up a set of laws that were reproduced by the scribes of his time onto stone and placed throughout the land. Only one nearly complete set of these laws survives to this day. It is a black basalt stele which was created in approximately 1780 BCE, and was discovered in 1901 in the Persian mountains, where it had been stashed by ancient looters. This dramatic presentation of the Code of Hammurabi is now on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

It is impressive not only for its size—it stands eight feet tall—but for the dramatic illustration at its peak: the god Shamash, seated on a throne, handing to King Hammurabi a measured staff and a ring, perhaps a coiled rope. These may be the tools used in constructing buildings, and may represent the authority to built a stable society through a commonly understood system of laws.

This illustration, legible even to the illiterate, serves almost as a headline which catches the eye and leads it down into the laws themselves. These have been carefully carved, rather than impressed in clay, and have a striking harmonious and even texture. Hammurabi’s numbered laws wrap around the entire glossy monument, and it is easy to appreciate the authority that these words once held. We do not know how closely other copies of these laws may have resembled this particular stele, but they were on display in cities throughout the Babylonian empire, Kish, Nippur, Eridu, Ur, and others, so that no one could plead ignorance of the law.
—Paul Dean, Letterforms, 2007.