USU 1320: History and Civilization |
©Damen,
2016 |
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SECTION 16: The Origins
and Invention of Writing
Denise Schmandt-Besserat points out that writing is one of the great achievements of humankind, for at least three reasons. First, it represents a revolution in communication across space and time. That is, the ability to write allows our words to move far beyond the normal range of the voice and thus extends the expression of our thoughts geographically and chronologically. On this ability rests every sort of human inquiry, including history. Second, writing enables record-keeping, allowing us to study a prophet's words, engrave a tombstone or collect taxes. Crossing this threshold where the voice cannot go, the written word endures, recording the past for later review and consideration. Third, writing give us a means for scrutinizing and editing our ideas which permits us to rewrite our thoughts. As such, it opens the way to revision and greater rigor of thought, essential in logical processes of every sort, including historical investigation. Thus, the introduction of writing marks an important crux in the history
of any civilization, not only because it marks a shift in mentality toward
extending communication, keeping records and re-assessing thought but
also because it allows a people to live on beyond their own lives and
speak to a distant future. On the written word depends every form of learning
ever invented, history especially. II. Theories of the Origins of Writing Whether consciously or not, most people today understand how important writing is. We distinguish people as literate or illiterate, and when trying to better others' lives, one of the first things we do is teach them to read and write. Our ancient ancestors also recognized the significance of writing and many had myths recalling its invention. In Egypt, for example, the god Thoth was said to have created hieroglyphics, along with language, magic and medicine. The Mesopotamians traced the invention of writing back to Nisaba, the goddess of granaries, who they said created it to keep records of the goods coming through her temples. Perhaps most interesting of all, at least to the modern world, is the tale preserved in Hebrew lore that Moses received the gift of writing from God along with the Ten Commandments. The Bible, after all, says explicitly that the Decalogue was "written with the finger of God" (Ex. 31:18, cf. Deut. 5.22). Israelite scholars in antiquity subsequently reasoned that God had inscribed these commandments because Moses could not write and, thus, the Hebrews must have been illiterate up until then. In this tradition, then, the Ten Commandments serve as a lesson in both morality and literacy. If a rather odd way of interpreting the Bible, this bit of folklore shows how important writing was to the ancient Israelites who made a gift from God.
But there were two major problems with postulating a pictographic origin for the great array and breadth of cuneiform signs. First, archaeological investigation has failed to produce any evidence of a forerunner for cuneiform. Instead, the physical evidence suggests this writing system arose very abruptly, seemingly out of nowhere, already in a fairly complex state. For instance, it contained right from the start at least nine hundred symbols, perhaps as many as fifteen hundred. If writing first sprang up at this moment, it came to life with a bang, almost impossibly fast. Second, there were relatively few cuneiform signs which showed a clear lineage from pictures. The vast majority didn't look at all like what they represented, even where it would have been easy to do so. For instance, the word for "sheep" was a simple "X." Where are the legs, the wool, the horns? As early as 1928, long before Schmandt-Besserat began her work, the scholar William Mason had recognized this problem:
But he then went on to blame this on the ineptitude of ancient scribes:
"Primitive" scribes with "crude" ways? Or could it be there was something wrong with theory?
Another issue concerned geography. In Sumeria, the earliest cuneiform tablets come from Uruk, a major hub of civilization in the Near East and the focus of much early archaeology. But later archaeologists found evidence that cuneiform was also being used in Syria far to the west and Iran to the east at almost the same time as it first appears in Uruk. And this raised a further issue. Uruk was at that time an urbanized community with a large economy and population. Syria and Iran were relatively poor areas, sparsely populated. But cuneiform appears in all these places simultaneously. How did a complex form of writing with many abstract signs used mainly to keep a tally of properties and possessions spread with such uniformity so widely and rapidly across both city and country?
But it's not a logical choice. Clay is, in fact, very difficult to write on. First and foremost, it isn't naturally flat. It has to be pressed into a workable shape first, which is usually something rounded, something that will fit in the palm of the hand. And circular is indeed the form in which we find many a cuneiform tablet. But it's still rather difficult to write on clay even when it's carefully molded into a hand-friendly ball. Yet virtually all early cuneiform is found on clay, as if it were somehow to the ancient people of this area their traditional vehicle for writing. In sum, the standard theory of how writing arose in Mesopotamia is full
of holes and contradictions but until Schmandt-Besserat came along, there
wasn't any better way to piece together the evidence. Looking at the abstract
nature of even the earliest cuneiform signs, their widespread use and,
most of all, the material on which they were impressed led her to a new
theory and a better account of this all-important development. III. Denise Schmandt-Besserat's New Theory of the Origin of Writing
Studying Mesopotamian culture in the early 1970's, Schmandt-Besserat first set out to investigate the uses of clay before the development of pottery in early Near Eastern culture. But as she was searching for bits of clay floors, hearth linings, beads and figurines, she kept running into massive piles of small ceramic pieces found in various shapes and sizes.
Schmandt-Besserat noted some important clues, however. Many of these tokens are incised—that is, they have various markings engraved on them—and they come in a wide variety of shapes: spheres, cones, disks, cylinders and so on. Ranging in length from one to five centimeters, though they are clustered in groups of one-to-three and three-to-five centimeters, all are simple to make, in Schmandt-Besserat's words, "the shapes which emerge spontaneously when doodling with clay." That they had, in fact, been molded from wet clay, is evident from the fingerprints still preserved on some of them.
There are several other things notable about the nature and disposition of these tokens. For one, they come from all over the Near East: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Israel. For another, they date to very early times, as far back as 8000 BCE. Furthermore, there is evidence some care went into their creation because many have been fired. Firing signifies a desire to preserve them, which in turn argues that they had value of some sort. They are, in fact, among the earliest fired ceramics known.
When tokens first appeared around 8000 BCE, the vast majority of people in the world subsisted as hunter-gatherers, constantly on the move, with little or no need for counting things since nomads don't usually own much and what little they have is by necessity portable. Thus, it's surprising to find counters among the remains of civilizations dating to seventh-millennium BCE. What do they have to count? To the contrary, a settled community where goods can be stored is where one expects to find an accounting system develop, but to the first users of tokens urbanization lay far off in a distant future they could hardly have imagined.
This makes it easy to understand how tokens would have been deployed in counting, as Schmandt-Besserat argues. Say, for instance, you're a tribal chieftain and want to hold a feast. You send a runner, a young boy perhaps, off with a handful of tokens that function as a sort of "shopping list." You could also keep for yourself an identical set as a reminder of what you'd put on your "list." And you could even change your mind later and send off another boy with more tokens, in other words, a revised list. With all that, tokens clearly serve as a writing system, at least inasmuch as they are a form of communication and record-keeping in which it's possible to edit one's "words," all the hallmarks of writing.
And one final piece of evidence attests to the use of tokens as a system of communication, the fact that many later ones have perforations, doubtlessly designed to allow them to be strung together. But why? As a filing system of some sort? Or, were they threaded on a string—a string, of course, is biodegradable and would not have survived over time—with its loose ends sealed together with a bulla, a stamped clay seal of some sort. That the more complex tokens are the ones most often found with perforations argues in favor of such an interpretation of the evidence.
But the evidence that made Schmandt-Besserat's theory most compelling came with her study of a particular type of cuneiform document, the envelope-tablet. As noted before, it was common practice in Mesopotamian society after the invention of cuneiform to enclose a contract in a clay envelope, with a copy of the contract on the outside. This ensured no one had tampered with the details.
Even more important, though, some of these clay balls contained the impressions of cylinder seals, long narrow stone tubes with images engraved on them in reverse so that, when they're rolled over wet clay, they leave behind a picture in relief. Because each cylinder seal is unique, Mesopotamians used them as a way of "signing" documents. Indeed, some ancient Near Eastern contracts have numerous cylinder seal impressions on them, which are, in effect, the signatures of the individuals involved in the contract.
Schmandt-Besserat's contribution, arguably one of her greatest, was to show how old this practice really was, that in its earliest manifestation the envelope-tablet didn't utilize cuneiform writing but tokens themselves pushed into the wet clay of an envelope which left their impression on it. While the clay is still wet, the tokens themselves were sealed inside, and the whole package was left to dry or be fired. The copy of the tokens on the envelope is itself an important conceptual leap, a first step toward representing tokens abstractly as two-dimensional cuneiform signs, not three-dimensional tokens. The next step was to stop impressing the tokens on the envelope and instead draw their picture on the envelope's wet clay, an advancement which followed soon thereafter. This was especially necessary for incised tokens, because their marks which are crucial to their meaning do not transfer well onto wet clay. And as incised tokens became more popular in the economic boom starting around 3500 BCE, the need to represent them precisely on envelopes would only have increased. Finally the ancient Mesopotamians must have realized that, if the tokens inside are represented on the envelope and the tablet is fired making it impossible to alter it in any way, the tokens themselves inside the envelope aren't necessary. All a contract really needed to ensure its lasting validity was the symbolic signs on the outer envelope, originally an exterior copy of the contract but now the whole contract itself. With this, it makes sense that cuneiform signs derived from the shapes and markings on tokens, which do, indeed, constitute a "picture" of sorts but not the sort of picture expected in the standard view of a pictograph. It's a picture of a token, not a picture of the thing itself. Schmandt-Besserat sums it up this way:
The last step to a full and independent writing system was the creation of new cuneiform signs not based on an original token design. That must first have happened when the thing being represented wasn't a commodity of exchange at all in the traditional token economy, no "sheep" or "bar of metal," but something like "star" or "man." And this explains why true pictographic cuneiform signs date, for the most part, to later, not earlier times. It also clarifies why many are expressed as a rebus, a "word-picture" in which the elements of the word are written as separate and unrelated pictures, like writing "carpet" by drawing an automobile and a cat or dog. Besides that, it also shed light on two idiosyncrasies of Mesopotamian writing: why the Mesopotamians wrote on clay as opposed to some more convenient—or, at least, naturally flatter—medium, and why many cuneiform tablets are round. Ever since the earliest use of tokens, clay was the traditional medium of accounting transactions in Mesopotamia. And not just because it was convenient to hold clay in a ball did cuneiform tablets tend to come in a rounded form, but because it was also the traditional shape used for early clay envelopes enclosing tokens. Much like changing people's minds today about writing on paper, "hard copy" that is, or using a size of paper other than eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inches, cultural traditions can be deeply entrenched, even after technical advancements make them obsolete. IV. Conclusion: The Origin of Writing in Tokens Thus, as a system of communication, tokens fulfill the three fundamental purposes which make writing the monumental invention it is. First, the use of tokens allowed ancient peoples to communicate across unprecedented expanses of space and time far exceeding the range of the voice. Second, they constituted a form of record-keeping, permitting the precise determination of how many there were of something, and even to distinguish between different types of item. And finally, the ability to re-send messages, to renegotiate contracts, to string tokens together and then re-string them entails perhaps the most important feature of this writing system, the revision process which admits scrutiny and editing of thought. Perhaps most important of all to note, the discovery of all this came not from digging up new information but the study of what had already been uncovered and was sitting in museums, and in some cases had been for decades. It took fresh insight, a newcomer's eyes, to realize all that it represented. Little wonder, then, Schmandt-Besserat's theory was nominated as among the top one-hundred scientific theories of the twentieth century. It illuminates, after all, one of the top twenty inventions in a hundred centuries.
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