Writing

People invented writing for economic purposes, possibly because transactions involving camels, cows and bushels of barley were becoming too numerous for a man to keep track of everything in his head (1).

This means to say something more than the modern mind might imagine. People today have a hard time remembering their own telephone numbers. Ancient man, and men in some societies today still possess these abilities, could keep track of incredible amounts of data simply by storing it in that moist computer we call the brain. To demonstrate, I need only point out that tales like the Iliad and the Odyssey (later featured here on this blog) were told by illiterates who memorized them (2). If ancient man was capable of such a feat, the complexity and amount of their economic dealings must have been considerable for writing to have been necessary.

Or, was it not an issue of data involved but rather a trust issue? Did it become too difficult to be sure that each man’s memory was correct when it came to remembering how many wagon wheels were promised in exchange last fall for this summer’s wheat crop? Was writing invented in order to keep everyone honest? It doesn’t matter much for our purposes here. But it may be of interest later on, when we come to more modern writings and we see that people begin to suspect that the written word has lost it’s certainty, and the signifier no longer has the same signified.

Regardless, the first writings we know of involve business. Writing was not invented to tell heroic stories or to express love in a poem. Ancient stories and poems, those known and unknown to us, probably existed long before writing, and existed alongside writing for some period of time before two things happened - sufficient written vocabulary came into existence and it was deemed useful, for whatever reason, to actually write the stories down.

Archaeologists have discovered tokens that were presumably used previous to the existence of writing(3). A wooden or stone token may signified a sheep, or ten sheep, or a hundred sheep. At some point, it became useful to make marks that looked like the tokens on tablets of stone or clay. Thus writing was most likely born (4). At some later time, there were enough words in the written vocabulary (presumably more than numbers and animal or crop names) to enable a man to actually record, in writing, a tale that was already known to people through oral traditions.

This transition, from business to literature, happened first in Southwest Asia (5), the place we know today as Mesopotamia, where the earliest cities, those of Sumer, were built. Amid the wreckage and ruins of this ancient civilization, we have uncovered tablets that tell of the heroes and deities whose tales entertained our ancestors.

The oldest story is called the Enuma Elish. These words are simply the first two words in the story, meaning "when on high..." in English. The next essay will concern this account of the beginning of the world and the gods who witnessed it.