Writing

‘‘Prehistory’’ is as biased as ‘‘pre-pottery.’’ Writing’s transformation of human life was not entirely for the better. The earliest texts in the Near East, from the end of the Uruk period, about 3100 bce, were primarily economic; and it is tempting to believe there could be no bias in such basic documentation. But the texts belonged to temple-palace institutions and were instrumental in our vision of the Uruk state as economically centralized. The absence of economic texts from villages does not mean an absence of economic behavior there. The Late Uruk ‘‘Professions List’’ presents us with an indigenous vision of society’s vertical and horizontal categories, but this list was written by scribes firmly located near the top (Nissen, Damerow, and Englund 1993: 110-15).

Most scholars believe that numeracy and information storage in the Near East had had a long history (Schmandt-Besserat 1992; Nissen, Damerow, and Englund 1993; Englund 1998). Accounting was present from the Neolithic, in the form of clay and stone tokens, initially loose, then from the late fourth millennium bce encased in clay bullae, or tags. The idea is that the patterns of the tokens were reduced to impressions and ultimately to incised signs on flat clay tablets, resulting in the earliest writing. This is an elegant theory, linking disparate elements of the archaeological record. Among tokens there were definable size and shape categories, and repetition that implies agreed meanings. But equally there were unique tokens, and we do not know when or how the tokens might have been transferred to two dimensions (Nissen 2002). The archaeological evidence for the relevant period is ambiguous and limited, with tokens in bullae and early numerical and pictographic tablets overlapping in time and a gap in the data existing for the Early Uruk.

And then there is the problem of the transition from numeracy to literacy. compared to the long life of tokens, writing developed rapidly and surely was a response to the state’s need to deal with complex record keeping and transactions (Nissen, Damerow, and Englund 1993; Michalowski 1993b). The complexity of transferal of an aural, oral, and mental code to a visual code does imply that writing was the conscious solution to a problem. And the distance created by such transferal potentially made written communication into something esoteric and restricted. Restricted literacy meant restricted knowledge, and writing itself could be an avenue for bias and deception.

Discussion of the development of writing in Mesopotamia often involves the question of whether writing always signifies or encodes speech. Pictographic writing, such as that of the earliest tablets, can evade connection with speech; a symbol for a ziggurat, for instance, might relate to either a mental image of a temple tower or the spoken word ‘‘ziggurat.’’ Neither system of translation, sound to symbol or mental image to symbol, can be called more logical.