Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

This was only the beginning. Just as cylinder seals became simpler and easier to mass-produce – to cope with busy life – so too did writing evolve. Writing on moist clay made it awkward to draw these images clearly and quickly (a problem which the Egyptians never had, with their smooth, dry surfaces, which is why they stuck with hieroglyphics), and so signs, words, became more abstract, fewer, aligned much more in the same direction, all developments that enabled the speed of writing to be increased. Figure 6 shows how a few words changed in appearance, over a millennium and more, from the earliest days in Uruk, to the height of Ur’s power, that is, between c. 3800–3200 and c. 2800–2100 BC. We still don’t know why the images were turned through ninety degrees, but this would surely have made the images less legible and that in turn may have provoked a more simple way of writing. Circular and curved marks were always more difficult to produce in wet clay and this is why cuneiform emerged as a system of simple strokes and wedges. The repertoire of signs was reduced and homogenised by the first third of the third millennium.

Figure 4: A bevel-rimmed bowl and the early sign for ‘to eat’ (left); as it begins to be represented in early cuneiform (right)³⁴

[Source: Hans J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East: 9000–2000 BC, translated by Elizabeth Lutzeier with Kenneth J. Northcott. © 1988 by the University of Chicago]

Figure 5: Early pictographs: (a) a group of reeds; (b) an ear of corn; (c) a fish; (d) a goat; (e) a bird; (f) a human head; (g) a form of pot; (h) a palm tree; (i) a ziggurat³⁵

[Source: H. W. F. Saggs, Civilisation Before Greece and Rome, London: B. T. Batsford, 1989, page 62]

Figure 6: The development of pictographs into Babylonian cuneiform script³⁶

[Source: Hans J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East: 9000–2000 BC, translated by Elizabeth Lutzeier with Kenneth J. Northcott. © 1988 by the University of Chicago]

In these early phases, the uses of writing were limited and, because of its basis in trade, consisted just as much of numbers as of words. Among the signs, for example, there was one which had a D-shape: there was a straight edge which was deep-cut and a round end which was much shallower, reducing to nothing. What gave the game away was that these Ds were grouped into clusters, ranging from one to nine. Here then was the making of a decimal system. In some cases, a circular punchhole, formed by means of a cylindrical reed pressed into the clay, was associated with the Ds. ‘It is a reasonable assumption that these “round holes” represent tens.’³⁷ It was common for the early tablets to have a list of things on one side, and the total on the other.³⁸ This helped decipherment.

A system of signs was one thing. But, as we have seen in examples from elsewhere, such a system does not fully amount to writing as we know it. For that, three other developments were necessary: personal names, grammar, and an alphabet.

Personal identification was a problem and a necessity from the moment that economic organisation went beyond the extended family, where everyone knew each other and property was owned communally. Certain names would have been easy, ‘Lionheart’, say.³⁹ But how would one render an abstract name, such as ‘Loved-by-God’? Pictographs would have been developed, much as the heart shape,, has come to mean ‘love’ in our time. In this way, multiple meanings overlapped: the sun,, for example, might mean ‘day’, ‘bright’, or ‘white’, while a star,, might mean ‘god’ or ‘sky’, depending on context. The ‘doctrine of the name’ was important in Babylon, where thought worked mainly by analogy, rather than by inductive or deductive processes as we use in the modern world.⁴⁰ For both the Babylonians and the Egyptians the name of an object or a person blended in with its essential nature.⁴¹ Therefore, a ‘good’ name would produce a ‘good’ person. For the same reason, people were named after the gods and that was also the case with streets (‘May the enemy never tread it’) and canals and city walls and gates (‘Bel hath built it, Bel hath shown it favour’). To cap it all, the practice evolved to adopt a certain tone when uttering proper names. This was especially true when speaking gods’ names and it is still true today, to a certain extent, when people use a different tone of voice when praying out loud.⁴²