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CHAPTER 1
ORIGINS
Speech, the universal way by which humans communicate and transmit experience, fades instantly: before a word is fully pronounced it has already vanished forever. Writing, the first technology to make the spoken word permanent, changed the human condition. — Denise Schmandt-Besserat
The Greek historian Herodotus tells us that Oroetes, the Persian satrap of Sardis, could reckon with men and arms, but not with the might of the written word.
First appointed to the post around 530 BC by Cyrus the Great, Oroetes had ruled his satrapy (near present-day Izmir in western Turkey) for decades, through the reigns not only of Cyrus but of his successors, Cambyses II and then Darius I. The last transition had been particularly turbulent, and during it Oroetes grew increasingly independent of the empire's capital in faraway Susa, in what is now southern Iran.
With this independence came increasingly erratic behavior. When Mitrobates, the governor of a neighboring province, taunted him for not dealing decisively with Polycrates, the Greek tyrant of Samos, Oroetes first killed Polycrates, then the complaining governor, and finally the governor's son. Later, Oroetes' apparent neutrality in the revolt of the Greek Ionians against the empire further displeased Darius. The last straw came when the satrap began murdering the king's couriers when their messages displeased him. Not for Darius the subtlety of "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?" Oroetes "has made away with Mitrobates and his son, and now he kills my messengers whom I send to summon him," Herodotus records Darius as saying. "This is a defiance of authority which is not to be tolerated. Before he can do us further harm he must be stopped — and the way to stop him is by death."
Dealing with the irritating graybeard, however, would prove problematic. The widespread revolts during and following Darius's accession had sapped the imperial army of its vigor. Moreover, Sardis lay 1,500 miles of mountainous terrain northwest of Susa — a formidable distance even today, let alone 2,500 years ago, in spite of the road built by Darius. In addition, Oroetes commanded a thousand crack Persian troops. Nonetheless, each of Darius's courtiers clamored so loudly for command of this seemingly suicidal mission that the king resolved the matter by lot. The "winner," Bagaeus, realized that brains would have to succeed where brawn could not. He had the royal scribes prepare several papyrus scrolls on various subjects, closed them with the king's seal, and set off for Sardis.
When he arrived, he handed the scrolls to Oroetes' scribe in a carefully choreographed order. The first few scrolls pertained to innocuous topics, but when Bagaeus observed the respectful hearing given those first missives by the satrap's guards, he gathered up his courage and handed the scribe a scroll instructing the guards to refuse further service to Oroetes. Upon hearing this imperial command, they threw their spears down at Bagaeus's feet. The final scroll read: "King Darius commands the Persians in Sardis to kill Oroetes." Problem solved.
In all likelihood, Darius, Bagaeus, and Oroetes could not read or write fluently, if at all — certainly Oroetes could not, since had he been literate he would have read the scrolls himself, interpreted them more favorably, and survived. In fact, the only truly literate participants in the tale likely were the scribes at either end of this 1,500-mile information chain. Such was the magic and power of the written word that Herodotus, who was not shy about expressing his skepticism of many of the tales he related in The Histories, took this particular one at face value.
Archaeologists and paleographers pinpoint the birth of that magic and power to a small area in southern Mesopotamia about five millennia ago. Their discoveries make one paramount fact nearly certain: the first writing arose not from the desire to record history or produce literature, but rather to measure grain, count livestock, and organize and control the labor of the human animal. Accounting, not prose, invented writing.
About a hundred thousand years ago, probably in northeast Africa, humans rapidly evolved the repertoire of behaviors that define our species. These included the desire to cooperate, the ability to conceive abstractions of the physical world, and, critically, the first major communications technology: language. The second major communications technology, writing, is simply the recording of those abstractions.
Humans abstract and record information in five major ways: with writing, mathematical notation, painting/photography/videography, maps, and clocks — that is, we can abstract and record verbal, numerical, visual, spatial, and temporal information. (Scholars might argue about whether to include additional classes, such as musical notation.) Since interpreting a painting, map, or clock requires little training, this book will focus almost exclusively on writing, and to a much lesser extent, numbering.
As measured by standardized testing, human intelligence seems to be increasing at a rapid clip, on the order of several IQ points per decade. This phenomenon, known as the "Flynn effect," cannot possibly be real, since extrapolating the process backward implies that the average IQ would have been approximately zero in Newton's time, and about negative 1,000 in Aristotle's.
To resolve this conundrum, it helps to think about the format of the modern IQ test. A typical question runs something like this: Which item does not belong in the following list — gun, arrow, chisel, and deer? The overwhelming majority of modern people would not hesitate to answer "deer," since the other three are inanimate objects. People from preliterate societies, on the other hand, usually give the "wrong" answer to this question: chisel.
Why? Because guns and arrows are used to kill deer, but chisels are not. Simply put, separating the living deer from the other three inanimate objects requires a significant degree of abstraction. Human intelligence has almost certainly not been increasing all that rapidly, if at all, over the past few centuries — but the level of abstraction demanded by modern civilization certainly has.
Among the multitude of abstractions ultimately mastered by humans, arguably the first and most important is counting. Well into modern times, not all societies have emphasized this basic skill; many aboriginal languages contain only three numbers: "one," "two," and "many." (To be sure, all peoples can tell the difference between five and six things, but not all languages have words denoting these quantities.) If writing is nothing more and nothing less than the notation of abstractions, then the first, and easiest, place to look for the development of abstract ability is counting.
Archaeologists have found complex carved notches in bones from as early as one hundred thousand years ago in southern France at sites inhabited by Neanderthal man. By 28,000 BC, more complex notched specimens turn up at sites in Lebanon and Israel, and one particularly complex bone sample, dating to approximately 15,000–12,000 BC, contains scores of elaborately arranged V- and X-shaped incisions.
Precisely what these incised bones represent is anybody's guess. The best-accepted theory — that they compute lunar cycles — remains highly controversial. But something was being counted, and so these specimens are probably the earliest known examples of the physical recording of abstract information for later use. Archaeologists and paleographers have postulated that Paleolithic peoples almost certainly employed other counting devices — knots in string, carvings in wood, and carefully arranged twigs — but only more durable bone and stone have survived through the millennia. Further, the archaeological flashlight shines brightest in dry climates: because moisture destroys, the researcher is far more likely to find interpretable specimens of any type and from any era in the Middle East than in England or Cambodia.
The significance of this escape from the chains of memory is impossible to overestimate. The new recorded abstractions changed the very way that humans thought, behaved, and probably evolved. They made armies more effective and societies more prosperous. Those cultures that understood the value of record keeping would advance, while those that did not would sooner or later succumb to their more abstractly endowed competitors.
After 10,000 BC a new counting technology, based on small tokens, took hold in the Fertile Crescent. Strangely, until very recently these tokens remained largely ignored by paleographers, anthropologists, and archaeologists.
That would change in 1968, when Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a recent graduate of the École du Louvre, headed off to Middle Eastern museums to examine pots, figurines, and fragments of ovens. She also began to notice smaller clay tokens that were frequently scattered around them. For generations before, archaeologists had puzzled over these disks, cones, cylinders, and other, more complex shapes. As noted by one archaeologist, "From Levels 11 and 12 come five mysterious unbaked conical clay objects, looking like nothing in the world but suppositories. What they were used for is anyone's guess."
Over the ensuing decades, Schmandt-Besserat solved this arcane mystery. The earliest tokens, dating to about 7500 BC, were unadorned spheres, cylinders, cones, tetrahedrons, and disks, almost all a centimeter or two in size, and were usually found in association with grain storage sites. That they appeared in the same place, time, and precise locations as storage facilities was no coincidence. Schmandt-Besserat found no evidence of the tokens in the deepest — that is, oldest — levels of excavation, associated with hunter-gatherers; she took particular note that archaeologists found tokens only in levels containing evidence of settled agriculture.
With the spread of farming after 7500 BC, the geographical extent of token finds also expanded; by 6000 BC, their use had spread to many sites in the Fertile Crescent. With the passage of time, their shapes became more complex, and they began to carry incised markings.
The development of settled agriculture and, four thousand years later, of cities, and with them civilization itself, meant increasing specialization of labor. While most people farmed, other groups that did not produce their own food — slaves, industrial workers, soldiers, priests, and bureaucrats — became prominent. An accounting system for transferring food from producers to these groups, or to the state, became necessary. Gradually, Schmandt-Besserat concluded that the tokens served this purpose. One of the most common tokens, the cone, probably represented about a liter of grain, whereas a small sphere signified approximately a bushel, and a large sphere stood for some larger amount. Similarly, a small and a large incised ovoid might have represented small and large jars of oil. A certain quantity of grain might be represented by five small spheres, and a certain quantity of oil by five small ovoids. Note that at this stage, the tokens' users had yet to abstract the actual numbers. The system employed no tokens symbolizing quantities themselves; entirely different tokens stood for a given quantity of grain or of oil. The abstraction of the detached number five, which could be applied to any object, remained millennia in the future.
Around 3300 BC, with the appearance of large administrative municipal centers, the Sumerians began to seal groups of tokens within spherical clay containers, or "envelopes," upon which was incised a symbolic representation of the contents. One of the first such envelopes found contained three cones and three spheres, representing three small and three large measures of grain. Archaeologists have found a surprising number of sealed, intact envelopes, suggesting that they perhaps served as a sort of legal document, which might be opened in the event of a dispute. In the most likely scenario, the contents of the envelopes referred to debt.
Sometime around 3250 BC, the tokens began to disappear, and the envelopes rapidly evolved into flat tablets upon which only the token symbols were written. Because the "backup information" of the contents was lacking, the clarity of the symbols impressed upon the tablets became critical. Did an impressed design represent a disk or a sphere, a triangle or a tetrahedron? At this point, the need for a more clear and definitive system of notation arose. Schmandt-Besserat contends that the first writing system — the familiar Sumerian cuneiform script — evolved in this way directly from the token system.
Precisely how, or even if, the Sumerians extended their accounting notation to written language will probably never be known. Schmandt-Besserat's work caused a stir mainly because it seemed to contradict the "pictographic theory," that writing evolved directly from pictures — a theory that is still taught to schoolchildren. Her "token hypothesis" was so bold and so different from the pictographic theory that it could not help but evoke controversy. In reality, there's no real contradiction between the token and pictographic hypotheses; after all, Schmandt-Besserat's tokens are nothing if not "three-dimensional pictographs."
The token hypothesis need not be accepted to understand the importance of the cuneiform script that appeared around 3150 BC. Both tokens and early scripts had three pivotal effects: First, they freed humans from the limitations of memory. Second, they almost certainly imparted to those who mastered them enormous advantages over those who did not; it is not difficult to imagine the token users as the administrative elite of preliterate Sumerian society who dealt out life and death according to how much food each member contributed and how much each received. Third, these tokens probably served a central role in the formation of history's first city-states around 3300 BC. The Sumerian economy was based on the temple, and its priests collected and accounted for "gifts to the gods," particularly the monthly festivals.
The older pictographic theory still has some virtues. First proposed by William Warburton, an Anglican cleric who eventually became bishop of Gloucester and who wrote in the 1730s, it was, and probably remains, the most commonly accepted theory about the origins of writing. Warburton, who appears never to have traveled outside Europe, propounded his theory in The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated. He proposed that written language passed through three stages of development: a "Mexican" painting stage, based on Spanish reports of Aztec storytelling with the use of pictures painted on cloth; a "hieroglyphic" stage, in which pictures were gradually abstracted and simplified; and a final, "Chinese" phase, in which the actual images were discarded in favor of more abstract symbols that increased dramatically in number to the tens of thousands over the subsequent millennia. In Warburton's scheme a hieroglyphic eye represented God's omniscience, while a serpent in a circle stood for the universe.
To the modern eye, and certainly to Warburton's, Egyptian hieroglyphics look pictographic. What he could not know was that the "eye of god" and the "serpent" actually conveyed a meaning that was simultaneously far more banal, but ultimately far more powerful, than the mystical, abstract meanings he ascribed to them.
Egyptian writing went undeciphered until Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, when, in the process of fortifying the port of Rosetta on the Nile Delta, French engineers came upon a stone inscribed in three different scripts: Greek, hieroglyphic, and demotic (the cursive form of hieroglyphic used in the first millennium BC for everyday writing). After the British ejected the French from Egypt, the stone found its way to London, where both British and French scholars struggled with the three texts. Paleographers generally give credit for its ultimate decipherment to Jean-François Champollion, whose knowledge of the later Egyptian Coptic alphabet enabled him to translate the stone's demotic passage, since the two scripts share several characters. As demotic is simply a different rendition of hieroglyphic, Champollion soon deciphered it as well.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Masters of the Word"
by .
Copyright © 2013 William J. Bernstein.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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