Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The origin of writing is a contentious issue at the moment, for there are three possibilities. For many years it was assumed that the cuneiform script of Mesopotamia was the earliest true writing, but it was associated with a problem. Cuneiform consists of more or less abstract signs, whereas many people thought that writing proper would show a stronger link with paintings, or pictographs – symbols that were part pictures of objects and part symbols. This is where the work of archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat comes in.

In the late 1960s she noticed that thousands of ‘rather mundane clay objects’ had been found throughout the ancient Near East and regarded as insignificant by most archaeologists. Schmandt-Besserat thought otherwise, that they might have formed an ancient system that had been overlooked. She therefore visited various collections of these ‘tokens’, as she called them, in the Near East, North Africa, Europe and America.²² In the course of her study, she found that the tokens were sometimes geometrical in form – spheres, tetrahedrons, cylinders – while others were in the shape of animals, tools or vessels. She came to realise that they were the first clay objects to have been hardened by fire. Whatever they were, a lot of effort had gone into their manufacture. Whatever they were, they were not mundane. Eventually, she came across an account of a hollow tablet found at Nuzi, a site in northern Iraq and dated to the second millennium BC. The cuneiform inscription said: ‘Counters representing small cattle: 21 ewes that lamb, 6 female lambs, 8 full-grown male sheep . . .’ and so on. When the tablet had been opened, inside were found forty-nine counters, exactly the number of cattle in the written list.²³ For Schmandt-Besserat, this was ‘like a Rosetta stone’. For the next fifteen years she examined more than 10,000 tokens, and came to the conclusion that they comprised a primitive accounting system and one which led to the creation of writing. Words, in a sense, began with numbers. This is, after all, what writing is, a form of communication which allows the two communicating parties to be spatially and temporally separated.

The first tokens dated to 8000–4300 BC and were fairly plain and not very varied. They were found in such sites as Tepe Asiab in Iran (c. 7900–7700 BC), where the people still lived mainly by hunting and gathering. Beginning around 4400 BC, more complex tokens appeared, mainly in connection with temple activity. The different types represented different objects: for example, cones appear to have represented grain, an ovoid stood for a jar of oil, while cylinders stood for domestic animals.²⁴ The tokens caught on because they removed the need to remember certain things, and they removed the need for a spoken language, so for that reason could be used between people who spoke different tongues. They came into use because of a change in social and economic structure. As trade increased between villages, the headman would have needed to keep a record of who had produced what.

The complex tokens appear to have been introduced into Susa, the main city of Elam (southern Iran), and Uruk, and seem to have been a result of the need to account for goods produced in the city’s workshops (most were found in public rather than private buildings). The tokens also provided a new and more accurate way to assess and record taxes. They were kept together in one of two ways. They were either strung together or, more importantly from our point of view, enclosed in clay envelopes. It was on the outside of these envelopes that marks were made, to record what was inside and who was involved. And although this chronology has recently been queried by French scholars, this still seems to be the best explanation for how cuneiform script came about. Of course, the new system quickly made the tokens themselves redundant, with the result that the impressions in the clay had replaced the old system by about 3500–3100 BC. The envelopes became tablets and the way was open for the development of full-blown cuneiform.²⁵