Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Imagine for a moment that it’s 1776 BC. Two Marians are quarrelling over possession of a wheat field. Jacob insists that he bought the field from Esau thirty years ago. Esau retorts that he in fact rented the field to Jacob for a term of thirty years, and that now, the term being up, he intends to reclaim it. They shout and wrangle and start pushing one another before they realise that they can resolve their dispute by going to the royal archive, where are housed the deeds and bills of sale that apply to all the kingdom’s real estate. Upon arriving at the archive they are shuttled from one official to the other. They wait through several herbal tea breaks, are told to come back tomorrow, and eventually are taken by a grumbling clerk to look for the relevant clay tablet. The clerk opens a door and leads them into a huge room lined, floor to ceiling, with thousands of clay tablets. No wonder the clerk is sour-faced. How is he supposed to locate the deed to the disputed wheat field written thirty years ago? Even if he finds it, how will he be able to cross-check to ensure that the one from thirty years ago is the latest document relating to the field in question? If he can’t find it, does that prove that Esau never sold or rented out the field? Or just that the document got lost, or turned to mush when some rain leaked into the archive?

Clearly, just imprinting a document in clay is not enough to guarantee efficient, accurate and convenient data processing. That requires methods of organisation like catalogues, methods of reproduction like photocopy machines, methods of rapid and accurate retrieval like computer algorithms, and pedantic (but hopefully cheerful) librarians who know how to use these tools.

Inventing such methods proved to be far more difficult than inventing writing. Many writing systems developed independently in cultures distant in time and place from each other. Every decade archaeologists discover another few forgotten scripts. Some of them might prove to be even older than the Sumerian scratches in clay. But most of them remain curiosities because those who invented them failed to invent efficient ways of cataloguing and retrieving data. What set apart Sumer, as well as pharaonic Egypt, ancient China and the Inca Empire, is that these cultures developed good techniques of archiving, cataloguing and retrieving written records. They also invested in schools for scribes, clerks, librarians and accountants.

A writing exercise from a school in ancient Mesopotamia discovered by modern archaeologists gives us a glimpse into the lives of these students, some 4,000 years ago:

I went in and sat down, and my teacher read my tablet. He said, ‘There’s something missing!’

And he caned me.

One of the people in charge said, ‘Why did you open your mouth without my permission?’

And he caned me.

The one in charge of rules said, ‘Why did you get up without my permission?’

And he caned me.

The gatekeeper said, ‘Why are you going out without my permission?’ And he caned me.

The keeper of the beer jug said, ‘Why did you get some without my permission?’

And he caned me.

The Sumerian teacher said, ‘Why did you speak Akkadian?’^*

And he caned me.

My teacher said, ‘Your handwriting is no good!’

And he caned me.⁴

Ancient scribes learned not merely to read and write, but also to use catalogues, dictionaries, calendars, forms and tables. They studied and internalised techniques of cataloguing, retrieving and processing information very different from those used by the brain. In the brain, all data is freely associated. When I go with my spouse to sign on a mortgage for our new home, I am reminded of the first place we lived together, which reminds me of our honeymoon in New Orleans, which reminds me of alligators, which remind me of dragons, which remind me of The Ring of the Nibelungen, and suddenly, before I know it, there I am humming the Siegfried leitmotif to a puzzled bank clerk. In bureaucracy, things must be kept apart. There is one drawer for home mortgages, another for marriage certificates, a third for tax registers, and a fourth for lawsuits. Otherwise, how can you find anything? Things that belong in more than one drawer, like Wagnerian music dramas (do I file them under ‘music’, ‘theatre’, or perhaps invent a new category altogether?), are a terrible headache. So one is forever adding, deleting and rearranging drawers.