Page 112 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

from symbols drawn on pottery produced by the Gerzean culture in Egypt (circa 3600–3200 BCE). The pith of the papyrus plant, varieties of which were grown in many parts of Africa, but especially along the Nile River, was used in Egypt as far back as the First Dynasty (circa 3100–2980 BCE) for boats, mattresses, mats and as a writing surface. The Egyptian word papy- rus, meaning “that of the king,” may indicate a Pharaonic monopoly during this period. Writing in cuneiform script in Mesopotamia, and hieratic and hieroglyph writing in Egypt, seem to have developed roughly simultaneous- ly, with some of the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs surviving on relief sculp- ture(circa 3200 BCE). The earliest surviving documents written on papyrus include the Prisse Papyrus, the Berlin Papyrus 6619, and the Ramesseum Papyrus, all circa 2,000 BCE.
The durability of clay tablets buried in underground ruins of Mesopota- mia resulted in the survival of remarkably large quantities of business and archival records, the survival of brief mathematical documents, including some of the earliest mathematical tables, and in the survival of some of the earliest western literature. Indeed, it is thought that the burning of the storehouses holding the clay tablets, resulting in heating the clay tablets to high temperatures, may have “fired” the clay, increasing its hardness and durability. Using the hundreds of thousands of surviving cuneiform tablets and fragments, scholars at the University of Chicago completed in April 2011 the twenty-first and final volume of The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. This massive undertaking began in the early 1920s; it defines 28,000 words in their context and their various shades of meaning from the first writing system in the earliest urban and literate civili- zation—the city-states that arose in the Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys, mainly in what is present-day Iraq and parts of Syria, from 2500 BCE to 100 CE. The most complete and “standard” version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known works of literary fiction, was written in standard Babylonian, sometime between 1300 and 1000 BCE. The Epic was recorded on twelve cuneiform tablets, which were among about twelve hundred tab- lets from the library of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria in the mid-seventh
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