Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

To begin with, there was no grammar. Words – nouns mainly, but a few verbs – could be placed next to one another in a random fashion. One reason for this was that at Uruk the writing, or proto-writing, was not read, as we would understand reading. It was an artificial memory system that could be understood by people who spoke different languages.

Writing and reading as we know it appears to have been developed at Shuruppak in southern Mesopotamia, and the language was Sumerian. No one knows who the Sumerians were, or where they originated, and it is possible that their writing was carried out in an ‘official’ language, like Sanskrit and Latin many thousands of years later, its use confined only to the learned.⁴³ This next stage in the development of writing occurred when one sound, corresponding to a known object, was generalised to conform to that sound in other words or contexts. An English example might be a drawing of a striped insect to mean a ‘bee’. Then it would be adapted, to be used in such words as ‘be-lieve’. This happened, for example, with the Sumerian word for water, a, the sign for which was two parallel wavy lines. The context made it clear whether a meant water or the sound. This was when the signs were turned through ninety degrees, to make them easier to write in a hurry, and when the signs became more abstract. This form of writing spread quickly from Shuruppak to other cities in southern Mesopotamia. Trade was still the main reason for writing but it was now that its use was extended to religion, politics and history/myth – the beginnings of imaginative literature.

Such a transformation didn’t happen overnight. In the early schools for scribes, we find lexical lists – lists of words – and lists of proverbs. This is probably how they were taught to write, and it was through well-known proverbs and incantations, even magic spells, that abstract signs for syntactical and grammatical elements became established (the proverbs had a simple, familiar form). And it was in this way that writing changed from being a purely symbolic system of information-recording and exchange, to a representation of speech.

Although the first texts which contain grammatical elements come from Shuruppak, word order was still highly variable. The breakthrough to writing in the actual order of speech seems to have occurred first when Eannatum was king of Lagash (c. 2500 BC). It was only now that writing was able to convert all aspects of language to written form.⁴⁴ The acquisition of such literacy was arduous and was aided by encyclopaedic and other lists.⁴⁵ People – in the Bible and elsewhere – were described as ‘knowing the words’ for things, such as birds or fishes, which meant they could, to that extent, read. Some lists were king lists, and these produced another advance when texts began to go beyond mere lists, to offer comment and evaluation on rulers, their conflicts, the laws they introduced: history was for the first time being written down.⁴⁶ The list about the date-palm, for instance, includes hundreds of entries, not just the many parts of the palm, from bark to crown, but words for types of decay and the uses to which the wood could be put. In other words, this is how the first forms of knowledge were arranged and recorded. At Shuruppak the lists included: bovines, fish, birds, containers, textiles, metal objects, professions and crafts.⁴⁷ There were also lists of deities, mathematical and economic terms. (In the names for gods, females still predominate.)

Lists made possible new kinds of intellectual activity. They encouraged comparison and criticism. The items in a list were removed from the context that gave them meaning in the oral world and in that sense became abstractions. They could be separated and sorted in ways never conceived before, giving rise to questions never asked in an oral culture. For example, the astronomical lists made clear the intricate patterns of the celestial bodies, marking the beginning of mathematical astronomy and astrology.⁴⁸