Chapter 2 “Early writing systems and civilizations” from the book Neo-Eneolithic Literacy in Southeastern Europe PDF

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2 EARLY WRITING SYSTEMS AND CIVILIZATIONS 2.A Traditional view on the genesis of writing According to the canonical view consolidated by manuals and schoolbooks, writing was a sudden although not unexpected invention. It appeared at Uruk (Mesopotamia, in the present-day southern Iraq), the biblical ...

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2 EARLY WRITING SYSTEMS AND CIVILIZATIONS

2.A Traditional view on the genesis of writing According to the canonical view consolidated by manuals and schoolbooks, writing was a sudden although not unexpected invention. It appeared at Uruk (Mesopotamia, in the present-day southern Iraq), the biblical Erech, around 3300-3200 BCE, in the framework of the growing authoritarian city-states and under economic-administrative pressure. It matured from more or less stylized drawings to express the sounds of a language. Literacy spread into the neighboring regions stemmed from a common source and found its apogee with the invention of the alphabet (about 3.500 years ago). In brief, the genesis of the homo scribens is traditionally based on a series of postulates.

2.A.a An ex nihilo act We have been trained to consider the invention of writing an abrupt, freeing act of discontinuity with a static past. According to the famed model of “punctuation change” to describe the sudden effects of historically unique moments that radically alter the world, ars scribendi was developed stepwise as a complete break with a long changeless period (Gould 1999: XXII). The proto-cuneiform of Uruk is supposed “to represent ... a system that is different from any other”, to use the words of Piotr Michalowski, professor of Near East Civilizations at the University of Michigan (Wilford 1999). “The script developed in rapid bursts – at our scale of analysis, we can see this in term of a single human lifetime“ (Houston 2004: 6). Consistently, the genesis of writing is ardently narrated as a miracle bursting into the human history. “The pioneers of writing succeeded in some way to make it even without having examples of ‘what’ they were building”, Jared Diamond climes enthusiastically in Guns, germs and steel (Diamond 1997).

2.A.b A single incubating region: Mesopotamia The birthright of the Fertile Crescent is not only commonly accepted, but it constitutes one of the few articles of faith shared by historians. To the extent that in 2002 an international campaign steered by Iraq, not yet ransacked by the post-war, revived the Nineveh library established by King Ashurbanipal, being considered the most ancient collection of written texts. Discovered by English archaeologists halfway through the XIX century, the mythical library comprises about 25.000 tablets in cuneiform. In great majority, they are kept in the British Museum, including the eminent tablet that narrates the epic of Gilgamesh and the myth of the Flood. In the spring 2001, Iraq had promoted an international scientific kermesse to celebrate the anniversary of the first 5.000 years of ars scriptoria.

2.A.c A diffusionist model of origin According to the premises of the schoolbooks based on Gelb’s diffusionist model of writing’s origin (Gelb 1963), at the beginning of the third millennium BCE Babylonian writing stimulated this technique in Elam, in Southwestern Iran, and soon in Egypt, where began the hieroglyphic adventure. About a thousand year later, the invention hit the Indus Valley and, through not very clear means, even China. Subsequently, it involved Syria, Crete, and part of the present-day Turkey. From this bridgehead it, finally, disembarked in Southeastern Europe where the first evidence of writing comes from the 4.000-year-old proto-hieroglyphic (Palaima 1990: 86; Rehak and Younger 1998: 232; Heinig 2007) or Linear A texts (Duhoux 1989a: 40; Galanakis 2005; Godart 2001: XIV) found in funerary buildings 5 and 6 at the necropolis of ArkhanèsPhourni, in Minoan Crete (MM IA-MM II). They are engraved on ivory seals with three or four sides.

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2.A.d A defined stage of human development: The Bronze Age The canonical chronology considers the invention of writing a sudden and brilliant act that happened during the Bronze Age in discontinuity with the past. Maintaining so, it denies any writing ability – if not in embryo – to the previous Copper Age, Neolithic and Paleolithic cultures. The traditional view on the genesis of the homo scribens places both Neolithic and Copper Age within a symbolic revolution that played as trait of union between the rock art depictions of the Upper Paleolithic and the first written expressions of the historical societies. Throughout the Neolithic and Copper Age time-frame, a psycho-cognitive revolution led to the achievement of basic geometrical principles, the development of symbolisms and the formulation of an image of the universe extended beyond sensible physicality to include supernatural entities. Such an informational and cultural revolution took place, however, in the absence of any writing technique. The standard historical reconstructions on the genesis of writing restricts the legacy of the Upper Paleolithic to iconic and abstract symbols on walls of caves and on small statues depicting human beings or animals even if they are considered often as merely emblematic decorations or scribbles.

2.A.e An established socio-institutional context: Authoritarian city-states According to the Mesopotamian prototype of ancient civilization and writing set-up, the earliest examples of Sumerian script – the proto-cuneiform from Uruk – mainly fixed inventories of goods that were to be recorded and administered by a powerful king who was surrounded by elite of ministers and priests. Other lists were used to remember whoever had donated to a temple (and the amount) or who the owner of land was. The innovation of writing would therefore be at the same time source and support of royal and administrative power. Moreover, it would coincide with the process of social stratification in classes. It would have been a way of recording the official history decided by the royal bureaucracy and would have given an incredible power to it. Putting it briefly, “writing was invented to support the abuse of a human being on another human being” (Claude Levi-Strauss quoted by Schmandt-Besserat 1992). In the Sumerian capital, the written records would have been remarkably melted with the other three classic conditions to “achieve a civilized status” (the surplus of food, the accumulation of capital and the urban development) according to a path to civilization which is claimed to be the only authentic and original.

2.A.f An exclusive need: Storing and organizing economic data The archaeological tradition believes that writing technology was invented in order to satisfy the administrative needs of the growing city-states and, in particular, the requests placed from the monarch, the bureaucratic authority, and the merchants (Chiera 1938). Arnold Toynbee points it as result of the Sumerian challenge to the desert (Toynbee 1958). Being Mesopotamia an arid territory, it was necessary to redirect the rivers through irrigation canals. Such a great and collective effort required an organizational leap forward and a professional drive towards specialization. This society in evolution naturally developed a strong trade flows that, in turn, felt the necessity to employ an administrative management based on an accounting system, which is the bureaucratic-driven writing. Jean Claude Margueron believes that the take-off of agriculture lead to the need of showing the accounts to the landowner who lived elsewhere, perhaps in the city (Margueron 1965). When the calculations of debit and credit became too complex to remember, a memory device was invented: the technique of writing and reading. Goody traces the appearance of literacy back to the economic needs of the bureaucracy that governed the temples (Goody 1987). The priestly city-states of Mesopotamia document in the third millennium BCE the mutual dependence between the origin of writing and modern civilization. They developed around the erection of monumental temples under the supervision of clergy elite who managed the import of building materials, the employment of artisans and slaves, and the organization of agriculture that generated the surplus necessary to feed the work force engaged in the construction. The temple economy required a novel method of keeping records. In addition, an account of receipts and expenses became necessary to administer the wealth of the temple corporations. Records had to be accurate and intelligible in question of time, place, quantity, etc. not only to the official who was in charge of the transaction, but also to colleagues or 27

successors. What was needed was a set of signs, the meanings of which were agreed upon the consensus of all who used them. A private system of reminders, like knots in handkerchiefs, would not do (Coulmas 1989: 9). Through this way, ars scribendi “gradually emerged from accountancy” (Bernal 1954: 119). The above traditional reasoning collides with the growing documentation on the appearance of writing as an independent innovation from different geographic areas,1 which does not allow any more considering the take-off model of the Sumerian civilization as the original to which all the other civilizations have conformed and should have been artificially conformed by scholarship. Even if the general idea of the economic and state driven birth of this technique would vacillate, the budgetary approach is too attractive in contemporary society, motivated by money, dominated by the figure of the State, and voted to production. Thus, in recent years traditional historical thinking is attempting to free the economic-administrative model on the dawn of civilization from the “unrepeatable Mesopotamian peculiarities”, to confirm it as an explanation of universal character. The figurative signs etched on seals or on pottery have been interpreted by many scholars as strong universal passé partout (see, for example, the interpretations on the origin of the Minoan script) to demonstrate an economic mainspring at the origin of the need to write and read. Schmandt-Besserat, instead, proposes a different line of thought to revive the prosaic economic approach to the genesis of the ars scriptoria. She roots it again in the Sumerian area, but emancipating it from what is by now a keystone of the archaeological tradition: the sign-drawings engraved on seals or on ceramics design (Schmandt-Besserat 1992). The scholar identifies the Mesopotamian political, bureaucratic, and trade authorities as the main actors of the innovation, since writing is for her a crucial step in the evolution of the early account recording systems. 2

2.A.g A single task: To express the sounds of a language The still prevailing attitude among linguists is to relegate writing to a sequence of graphic expressions that faithfully reproduces the sounds of a spoken language (Daniels 1996: 8). 3 If “the only reason for writing is the representation of language”, as Ferdinand de Saussure summarized (de Saussure 1915), it is then traced back to an “an external stratagem, like the use of the phonograph, thanks to which parts of past talks can be preserved for our observation” (Bloomfield 1935). From the traditional prospective, the term 'writing' suggests 'writing language', denoting the strictly linguistic writing as the only ‘true writing’ (DeFrancis 1989). Coherently but unreasonably, has one to identify as “false writing” “the relatively early scripts that tend to be logographic rather than phonographic”? (Sampson 1985: 36). The connection between writing and spoken language is often considered so strict to lead Coulmas pointing that the former is not a merely guide or garment of the latter, but has a deep and lasting effect on the development of language itself (Coulmas 1989). The conventional definition of writing keeps out forms of sign use that represent the initial stage in the emergence of writing systems, which are mainly not language-related but predominantly utilized logographic and ideographic sign types. The expungement of earlier forms of writing is problematic since in ancient scripts the emergence of the phonographic phase is inconceivable without the preceding non-phonographic phase. Only by recognizing the early speech-free stages of development, it is possible to perceive the gradual process of phoneticization (Haarmann 2008b: 17).

2.A.h A path to maturation always starting from stylized drawings The mainstream researchers on writing still now follow the late nineteenth century proposal of Isaac Taylor regarding an evolutionary trajectory for ars scribendi from pictorials to pictograms, to verbal forms. The docking to phonography started from logography, traversed syllabicity and finally arrived to the absolutely efficient alphabet (Taylor 1883: I: 5-6). Ignace Gelb systematized this scheme adding the postulate that any writing system develops necessary through these successive stages (Gelb 1963: 205, 252). Still today, at school we learn that writing technology followed a progression starting from the figurative language. It 1

Viz. § 2.B.b. See § 2.B.a. 3 See chapter 1 “Conveying meaning in writing”. 2

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supposedly was born from an ever-growing stylization-simplification of elementary drawings as a circle with rays to communicate the idea of the sun or horizontal semicircles placed in sequence to indicate a mountainous landscape. Any system of writing becomes capable to reach the most advanced stage only after having passed through the preceding stages. It is considered not for a case that several early Semitic letters apparently stylize an object which name began with that sound. The Sumerian itinerary is traditionally considered as “exemplar”. The cuneiform signs etched 3200 BCE on the cylindrical seals have been considered the first form of writing by the textbooks. Between 4100 and 3800 BCE, at Uruk IV, pictographic signs expressed names of persons, places, and objects that were administrated or traded. Artifacts and locations were represented through images, names with combinations of figures, and numbers by lines and circles. For example, the symbol indicated either a woman or the feminine gender. These images, of aesthetic or religious origin, did not fix graphically sounds, but showed conventional, realistic, and recognizable depictions of what was represented. For this reason, they were adopted and adapted as memory aids. Being “readable” graphs, but with no grammar, the pictograms of the tablets, the images of the seals and the engraved or painted motifs on the ceramics supposedly were the constitutive elements of an illustrated language that would have made up the incipit of writing. Proto-cuneiform, however, included more than 700 signs; a system that was too much complicate to write up and to remember. To make things even more difficult, the Sumerian script gradually began to express abstract concepts through corresponding abstract signs. Five centuries later, the graphic fixing of the spoken language took place through an additional abstraction leap that was hastily carried out by geometries that conventionally indicated words and, successively, syllables (Gelb 1952). Here was the apparition of the cuneiform writing, so called from Latin cuneus (wedge) and forma (shape) for the particular outline of the signs through which the early texts were carved on clay tablets. According to this innovative method of writing, in Babylonia the word “woman” (no longer the mere concept of woman) was graphically expressed by rotating the pubic triangle of the ancient pictorial writing 90° and placing it within a vertical arch: .4 According to the manuals, the Sumerian script purportedly evolved from painting of “things” (more or less realistic or essential), to embedding abstract concepts and, finally, to expressing oral language in writing. The same path towards writing is claimed for the other geographic areas and different periods. The final origin of writing in drawing had been already traced back by the Greek and Latin writers. One for all, Diodorus Siculus (III, 4) believed the Egyptian hieroglyphics were “similar to animals of every species and extremities of the human body, but tools as well … in fact, their writing expresses the concept through the image of the copied things”. Obviously, this viewpoint is acknowledged that only some images stored in the wide collective visual memory were transformed into signs of writing. “Writing therefore has its roots in the graphic arts, in meaningful design … Both the intentions and the consequences of these drawings can be defined as communicative or expressive… (It is) a sort of graphic monologue that aims at externalizing thoughts and emotions” (Goody 1987). Starting both from original and archetypal drawings, painting, and writing supposedly evolved together as components of the same cultural environment that encouraged experimenting communication through symbols. In particular, writing gradually matured through phases of increasing abstraction because of a stylization and simplification process of the sign forms due to practical reasons. Therefore, the carriers of the innovation moved from pictograms to ideograms made up of abstract symbols, and then to characters able to fix oral language in space word-by-word, syllable-by-syllable and finally letter-by-letter.

2.A.i The invention of the alphabet as historical fulfillment The early (phonetic) development of writing is traditionally interpreted as a universal process leading from a crude representation of words through pictures to the more efficient representation of words dismembered into phonemes through syllabic signs and, finally, to the alphabetic letters. Writing was an achievement that came to fulfillment with the invention of the alphabet. Paul Sethe (1939) and later Ignaz Gelb (1952) have developed influential theories on the origin of writing based essentially on such assumptions. Taking into account this perspective, the remotest systems of writing, however imperfect and limited, have been a historical necessity whose final aim was ‘the triumph of the alphabet, that is considered the tool for thought par excellence” (Cardona 1981). 4

See § 6.B.b.3 “Semiotic variables to investigate if an early literacy existed in Southeastern Europe”. 29

The next paragraphs are mired to challenge these eight pillars of the traditional and a-historical vision proposing a new approach that is rooted in the comparative history of writing.

2.B A different vision through a comparative analysis of the history of writing The assessment of the concept of ars scribendi proposed by the authors is not a theoretical utterance, but a historical observation on cultural processes that grounds on a comparative viewpoint that challenges the canonic view consolidated by manuals and schoolbooks on how writing came out. A plethora of historical examples on the genesis of the homo scribens can be condensed in eight fundamentals.

2.B.a An invention set in time: Accounting, symbolic code and linear decoration A late Sumerian epic celebrates the abrupt achievement of writing more than 5,000 years ago (Wilford 1999): Before that time writing on clay had not yet existed, / But now, as the sun rose, so it was! / The king of Kullaba [Uruk] had set words on a tablet, so it was! (Kullaba was ancient Uruk; the exclamation points have been provided by modern editors). How did the invention happen? According to the Sumerian epic, the king of Uruk sent to the court of a distant ruler a messenger who arrived so exhausted from the journey to be unable to deliver the oral message. Therefore, the king of Uruk came up with the clever solution to mould some clay as a tablet and set down the words of his next messages. Consistently, the archaeological tradition shows a tendency to make a sharp distinction in human culture between the literate age and an earlier long length of time characterized by illiteracy and to consider the invention of writing a sudden, freeing, and almost magical act of discontinuity with the past. Instead, from the perspective of those living in ancient societies, there would have been a very gradual progression in signs systems over millennia interrupted by cognitive jumps. Given a great variety of nonlinguistic structures, functions, and techniques in knowledge representation, enquiring into the genesis and the development of writing is quite problematic. What w...