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- Human civilization is often dated
to the moment we invented written language,
some 5,000 years ago
in the Middle East, in Mesopotamia.
But why did we first put pen to paper?
Or well, stylus to clay tablet?
Was it to document stories?
Or for religious purposes? Or for poetry or love letters?
No!
According to the latest research,
written language was developed in order to do business.
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The first writing system was the Cuneiform,
named for the wedge-shaped impressions
on clay tablets to write the Sumerian language
in what is now Iraq.
But an abstract system can't come from nothing.
They had to have some sort of beginning.
Archeologists first started understanding
the origins of cuneiform after digging up thousands of small clay tokens
of various geometrical forms in the Middle East.
After many years studying these tokens,
the French archeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat
understood that they were actually
an early accounting system -
a way of keeping track of goods.
Cones represented grain, ovoids were jars of oil
and cylinders were domestic animals.
As trade increased, there was apparently a need
for a system to record goods
in a way that could be understood by people.
To make sure that they got the number of jars
that the tokens promised.
The real revolution in understanding came
when Schmandt-Besserat realized
that the abstract cuneiform on tablets matched the tokens.
Remarkably, they had begun as a way to record these tokens
and as this more universal system
of writing became more developed and more abstract,
it removed the need for tokens all together.
After tokens, we got word-based writing systems
and then they developed
into sound-based syllabic systems and the alphabet.
Only then did writing also start to be used
to record myths, religion, politics and poetry.
During the late second millennium B.C.,
the "Epic of Gilgamesh" was written in Mesopotamia -
the first great work of literature that has survived.
Eventually, we got the Homeric poems,
we got Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Human beings made great art, but first, they made money.
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New and Improved, with me - Johan Norberg.