Handwriting—How Much Do We Know About It?

Abstract

For a thousand years before the alphabet, the scribal schools in Mesopotamia and Egypt had studied and taught their scripts, cuneiform and hieroglyphics, but no record of the original alphabet or any reference to it has been found among the hundreds of thousands of tablets from scribal archives. The silence in which the origin of the alphabet is shrouded invites comment but receives none. Among the ancient tablets of Sumer are numerous wordlists containing, for instance, the names of animals or of plants or of legal terms and many others. Some word lists are bilingual given the Sumerian words with their Akkadian or their Eblaite translations. Their classified lists of words were used as reference sources in early proto-science and as teaching material in the scribal schools. Scholarly exchange between Ebla and Mesopotamia has been established by more than a hundred word lists in Sumeria found at Ebla that are identical with word lists from cities in Mesopotamia.