a 4 A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 100 OBJECTS Neil MacGregor THE 5os BRITISH = 20 @ MUSEUM © sm VIKINGVIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc, $75 Hudson Street, New York New York 354,08. guin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Fea re Onis, Canada Mg? AY (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada inc.) 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Your weppoct oftheEarly Writing Tablet Clay tablet, found in southern Iraq 3100-3000 BC TT ssine a world without writing - without any writing at all. There would of course be no forms to fill in, no tax returns, but also no lit- erature, no advanced science, no history. It is effectively beyond imag- ining, because modern life, and modern government, is based almost entirely on writing, Of all mankind’s great advances, the development of writing is surely the giant: it could be argued that it has had more impact on the evolution of human society than any other single inven- tion. But when and where did it begin — and how? A piece of clay, made Just over 5,000 years ago in a Mesopotamian city, is one of the earliest examples of writing that we know; the people who gave us the Stand- ard of Ur have also left us one of the earliest examples of writing. Tris emphatically not great literature; it is about beer and the birth of bureaucracy, It comes from what is now southern Iraq, and it’s ona lit- tle clay tablet, about 9 centimetres by 7 (4 inches by 3) — almost exactly the same shape and size as the mouse that controls your computer, Clay may not seem to us the ideal medium for writing, but the clay from the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris proved to be invaluable for all kinds of Purposes, from building cities to making pots, and po as with our tablet, for giving a quick and easy surface on which tO write. From the historian’s point of view, clay has one huge advan- tage: it lasts. Unlike the bamboo used by the Chinese to write on, ee rots quickly, and unlike paper, which is so easily destroyed, sun. ind will survive in dry ground for thousands of years— and asa te still learning from those clay tablets. In the British Museum ok after about 130,000 writing tablets from Mesopotamia, and ars from all over the world come to study the collection. 91THE FIRST CITIES AND STATES While experts are still working hard on the early history of Meso- Potamian script some points are already very apparent, and many of them are visible in this oblong of baked clay. You can see clearly how a teed stylus has pressed the marks into the soft clay, which has then been baked hard so that it is now a handsome orange. If you tap it, you can hear that this tablet is very tough indeed — that’s why it has sur vived. But even baked clay doesn’t last for ever, especially if it has been exposed to damp. One of our challenges in the British Museum is that we often have to re-bake the tablets in a special kiln in order to con- solidate the surface and Preserve the information inscribed on the clay. Our little beer-rationing tablet is divided into three rows of four boxes each, and in each box the signs — typically for this date — are read from top to bottom, moving right to left, before you move on to the next box. The signs are Pictographs, drawings of items which stand just for that item or something Closely related to it. So the symbol for beer is an upright jar with a pointed base —a picture of the vessel that was actually used to store the beer rations. The word for ‘ration’ itself is conveyed graphically by a human head, juxtaposed with a bowl, from which it appears to be Arinkings the signs in each of the boxes are accompanied by citcular and semicircular marks which represent the number of rations recorded. __ Youcould say that this script isn’t really writing in the strict sense, that it’s more a kind of mnemonic, a repertoire of signs that can be used to carry quite complex messages. The crucial breakthrough to real writing came when it was first understood that a graphic symbol, like the one for beer on the tablet, could be used to mean not just the thing it showed, but what the word for the thing sounded like, At this point writing became Phonetic, and then all kinds of new communication became possible. 2 Got eaales cities and states grew up in the world’s ee und 5,000 years ago, one of the challenges for lea < te a to govern these new Societies. How do you impose your me Just on a couple of hundred villagers, but on tens of thousands © carly all these new rulers discovered that, as well as We tend to history, what oral - learnt think of writing as being about poetry or fiction oF res might call literature, But early literature was in fact y heart and then recited or sung. People wrote down 9215 : EARLY WRITING TABLET what they could not learn by heart, what they couldn’t turn into verse. So pretty well everywhere early writing seems to have been about record-keeping, bean-counting or, as in the case of this little tablet, beer- counting. Beer was the staple drink in Mesopotamia and was issued as rations to workers. Money, laws, trade, employment: this is the stuff of early writing, and it’s writing like that on this tablet that ultimately changes the nature of state control and state power. Only later does writing move from rations to emotions; the accountants got there long before the poets. It’s all thoroughly bureaucratic stuff. 1 asked Sir Gus O’Donnell, the head of the British civil service, for his view: The tablet is a first sign of writing; but it also tells you about the growth of the early beginnings of the state. You’ve got a civil service here, start- ing to come into place in order to record what's going on. Here, very clearly, is the state paying some workers for some work that’s been done. They need to keep a track of the public finances, they need to : it needs to be fair. know how much has been pai By 3000 Bc the people who had to run the various city-states of Meso- potamia were discovering how to use written records for all kinds of day-to-day administration, keeping large temples running or tracking the movement and storage of goods. Most of the early clay tablets in the British Museum collection, like this one, come from the city of Uruk, roughly halfway between modern Baghdad and Basra. Uruk was just one of the large, rich city-states of Mesopotamia that had grown too big and too complex for anyone to be able to run them just by word of mouth. Gus O’Donnell elaborates: This is a society where the economy is in its first stages — there is no money, and no currency. How do they get around that? The symbols tell us that they've used beer. No liquidity crisis here; they are coming up with a different way of gerting around the problem of the absence of a currency and, at the same time, sorting out how to have a functioning, state. As this society develops, you can see that this will ; and more important. And the ability to keep track, to write things down, which is a crucial element of the modern state ~ 0 know how much ¥ it - is money you're spending, and to know what you're getting for first ever equivalent of the become more starting to emerge. This tablet for me is the cabinet secretary's notebook - it’s that important 93THE FIRST CITIES AND STATES When writing in the full sense was developing, with phonetic me replacing pictograms, life as a scribe must have been very exciting. The Creation of new sound signs was probably quite a fast-moving Proc- ess, and as they developed, the signs would have had to be listed - by earliest dictionaries if you like — beginning an intellectual process o! categorizing words, things and the relationships between them has never stopped since. Our little beer-ration tablet leads, directly an swiftly, to the Possibility of thinking quite differently about ourselves and about the world that surrounds us. John Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, describes what happens to the human mind when writing becomes part of culture: : : an civil- ‘Writing is essential for the creation of what we think of as human ization. It has a creative ca; I think by writi pacity that may not even have been intended. you don’t understand the full import of the revolution brought ng ifyou think oft just as preserving information into the future. There are two areas where it makes an absolutely decisive difference t0 the whole history of the human species, One is complex thought. There's a limit to what you can do with the spoken word. You cannot really do higher mathematics or even more complex forms of philosophical argu- Fee naumless You have some way of writing it down and scanning it. $0 its not adequate to think of writing just as a way of recording, for the future, facts about the past and the Present. On the contrary iti immensely creative, But there’s a second thing about writing which is just as impo, rai , at int: when you write down you don’t just record wh: already exist: ia i wvern- 'S) YOu create new entities — money, corporations, go ments, » complex forms of. Society. Writing is essential for all of them. Writing see! China and ~ being in clay — has survived. a We have seen, rulers trying to control their subjects in the new pop- ulous cities of F, t and Mesopotamia initially used military force to