Get inspired by a weekly roundup on living well, made simple. Sign up for CNN’s Life, But Better newsletter for information and tools designed to improve your well-being.Researchers have uncovered links between the precursor to the world’s oldest writing system and the mysterious, intricate designs left behind by engraved cylindrical seals that were rolled across clay tablets about 6,000 years ago.Scholars consider cuneiform the first writing system, and humans used its wedge-shaped characters to inscribe ancient languages such as Sumerian on clay tablets beginning around 3400 BC. The writing system is thought to have originated from Mesopotamia, the region where the world’s earliest known civilization developed that’s now modern-day Iraq.Before cuneiform, however, there was an archaic script using abstract pictographic signs called proto-cuneiform. It first appeared around 3350 to 3000 BC in the city of Uruk, in modern southern Iraq.But the origins of proto-cuneiform’s emergence have been murky, and many of its symbols remain undeciphered.Researchers conducting a careful analysis of proto-cuneiform symbols were surprised to uncover similarities when they studied the engravings of cylinder seals invented in Uruk in 4400 BC and used to imprint motifs on soft clay. Not only do some of the symbols match exactly, but they also appear to convey the same meanings in relation …
