Thinking Outside the Box: Uruk Glyptic as Pictorial Organization
The Uruk Period in southern Mesopotamia has long been viewed as seminal in the development of writing. The glyptic tradition leading up to and during the three main phases of the Uruk period existed alongside the earliest ‘proto-cuneiform’ documents. Such documents ranged in complexity from things such as small ‘tags’ bearing single signs to more extensive tablets inscribed with multiple signs and numerical notations in columned and cased compositions. Iconography and composition are two components of visuality common between glyptic and proto-cuneiform. This paper will explore the iconographic and compositional evidence in a group of seal images from the Middle to late Uruk periods from the site of Uruk. In doing so, it will identify an underlying visual system that functioned pictorially to convey and allow access to information in a codified way; it is evidence of organized thinking in an external form prior to the emergence of written language. It will be argued that glyptic, while not a visual representation of language, nevertheless existed as one of many visual systems that contributed to the Kulturtechnik milieu of cognitive, social, and environmental changes that defined fourth millennium BCE Mesopotamia.
