Ancient Civilizations

The Invention of Writing

In these two lectures, we will look at the emergence of ancient civilizations and the beginning
of writing.

Definitions
Before we get into the details, let us get familiar with some terms we will be using throughout
this course:

a. CE and BCE: CE stands for “Common Era” and BCE for “Before the Common Era.” We
will be using these notations instead of the “BC”(Before Christ) and “AD” (Anno
Domini).

Remember in BCE, larger numbers means earlier than present, while larger the number
of the year in CE means later than the present. For example 500 BCE is earlier than 300
BCE, while 500 CE is later in time than 300 CE.(see the ppt )

b. Prehistory v. History
 Ancient history of very early era is further divided into:
Pre-history: the enormously long time period before writing is invented. In other words,
prehistoric cultures have no written records. We know these pre-literate cultures only
through the archeological remains including things like cave paintings, remains of their
settlements, pottery, tools etc.
 History proper: begins when literacy begins, when we have written documents.

CIVILIZATIONS:

Civilizations emerge only after Neolithic or agricultural societies coalesce into urban areas, or cities. In
other words, civilizations are products of urban revolutions. Not all agricultural societies become
civilizations, but no civilization can become one without first passing through the stage of agriculture
and then undergoing urbanization.

Such urban
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We have archeological evidence to show that the Urban Revolution happened in six different sites
The word
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the world means
at different the emergence of cities. ‘Civilization’ has more abstract and grander connotations,
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but refers to a specific cultural stage generally associated with cities and writing. In a few instances, archaeologists
1. described
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This is the case with 8th millennium BCE Jericho in the Jordan valley and the 7th millennium BCE settlement at Çatal
Hüyük in Turkey. It has also been pointed out that the Mayan civilization of Mesoamerica and the Mycenaean
civilization of Greece did not have true cities, while the Inca civilization of Peru did not have a system of true
writing. However, apart from a few such exceptions, cities and writing tend to go together, and ‘urbanization’ and
 2. Egypt after 3400 BCE in the Nile River valley
3. Indus valley after 2500 BCE
4. China, along the Yellow River 1800 BCE
5. Mayan civilization in Central America (today’s Mexico) in 500 BCE
6. Inca civilization in Southern America (today’s Peru around 500 bce

The last two civilizations were in what is called the New World – the American continent – which was
not known to the people living in Asia, Europe and Africa until it was found by Christopher Columbus in
1492. Because of the physical isolation, these two civilizations were not in active conversation with the
other four ancient civilizations: their ideas and achievements therefore did not contribute to
development of science as we know it.

These first civilizations are called pristine or primary civilizations because they arose independently and
not as a result of diffusion from somewhere else.

Let us look more closely at the urban revolution, using Mesopotamia and Indus Valley as our focal
points. Here are some points to think about:

 What was going on before the rise of civilizations or the Urban revolution?

For most of pre-history, the human species lived as hunter-gatherers. The Stone Age (or
Paleolithic) societies subsisted on hunting animals for meat and gathering fruit, nuts, grains and
roots. These societies were made up of roving (wandering) bands of men, women and children,
with no permanent settlements: they went wherever they could find food. The hunting-
gathering bands had a very low population density: fewer than one person per square mile.

It was around 10,000 years before the common era that these hunter-gatherers learnt to
domesticate plants and animals. (Farming or agriculture is only about 12,000 years old, a mere
blink in the history of Homo Sapiens, the species that began to walk the earth some 200,000
years ago!).

So hunter-gatherers settled down: they started living in houses, taking care of their crops (wheat
and barley was the first to be domesticated) and herding their animals. These settlements
(villages) were small: on an average 50 or so mud-brick huts with some 400-500 in each village.
They used stone tools as the use of metals had still not been discovered: they used sharpened
stone blades, tied to wooden handles, to dig the land.

There were ecological-technological limits that kept early villages small both in size and in
population. To begin with, early agriculture depended on slash-and-burn to maintain the soil’s
fertility: half the farm would be burned and allowed to fallow to restore its fertility. That
reduced the land available for growing crops. Secondly, early agriculture was rain-dependent.

The low productivity had two consequences:

 One, EVERYONE had to farm. There was not enough surplus that could support non-farm
activities like making tools, crafts, art etc. There WERE, of course, tool-makers (who knew how
to cut the stones to sharpen them etc), potters, medicine-men/women, priests etc. but these
specializations were part-time. The primary occupation of all the specialists was farming

Secondly, villages did not grow by adding more people, but by clearing more land and starting
new villages. When a settlement would reach its carrying capacity, new villages will spring up.
As a result, the population density of human settlements remained low.

 WHAT LED TO THE URBAN REVOLUTION: Two factors allowed the transition to cities, one
ecological and the other technological

a. Ecological factor: All four primary civilizations arose in the river valleys – making irrigation
possible. The rivers provided silt-laden soil and a constant supply of water – but also
increased the risk of flooding which required building of dams and canals, which in turn
brought about the rise of centralized authority.

Mesopotamian civilization in the flood plains of Euphrates and Tigris in the present day Iraq.
(The word “Mesopotamia” means “the land between the rivers.”). By 4000 BCE, this area
was inhabited by small villages. Gradually, the marshes in the river delta were cleared
people began farming there. The ruins show the existence of canals for flood control and
irrigation.

The Indus Valley or Harappan civilization is A fundamental contrast between the

Mesopotamian and Harappan situation is located in a funnel shaped area with the
Thar desert to the east and the Baluchistan hills to the west —) along the rivers
flowing south to the sea. Even though it is called Indus Valley civilization, only
Mohanjodaro is on Indus, Harappa is the flood plains of Ravi. Of the 1,399
Harappan sites presently known (917 in India, 481 in Pakistan, 1 in Afghanistan), only
44 sites are actually on or near the River Indus. However, around 1,000 lie along the
course(s) of the Ghaggar-Hakra/ Sarasvati

b. Bronze metallurgy: beginning around 5000 bce at the same time when the river
valleys were getting populated, ancient people figured out how mine and use
copper. Copper is abundantly available around the world at a relatively shallow
level. Copper, compared to iron, melts at a relatively low temperature of 1100
centigrade. The ancient people learned to mine copper and allow it with tin to make
bronze which was stronger and easier to handle than pure copper. This led to new
kind of tool making, oranments and works of art. All the primary civilizations are
bronze age civilizations.
 FOOD SURPLUS allowed population density to grow
 Instead of villages getting split into new villages, the cultivated areas could grow in size
and support a greater population density.

Great walled cities such as Uruk, Ur, Sumer, with populations between 50,000 to
200,000 arose around 3,500 BCE in Meospotamia.

The Indus valley area was much larger than Mesopotamia and Egypt: Indus Civilization
extended roughly 1,100 kilometres north to south and east to west, covering an area of
around 1,210,000 square kilometres. This is nearly twenty times the area of Egypt, and
over a dozen times the settled area of Egypt and Mesopotamia combined.

The cities of the Indus valley were characterized by urban planning, well-laid out streets
in a grid, water management with drains and sewage system, graneries etc. (see ppts).

 GRWOTH OF THE STATE AND FULL-TIME SPECIALISTS:

In these ancient cities, there was enough food surplus to allow for full-time specialists:
EVERYONE DID NOT HAVE TO FARM. Fulltime specialists – metal-worker, potters,
weavers, merchants, priests, officials emerged.

The surplus was collected and distributed through taxes or compulsory giving of a
portion of what was produced.

How was this tax extracted? Here religion played a part: the tax was in the name of god
or in the name of the king who himself was considered God. The surplus was stored in
graneries and stores attached to prominent public buildings which served both as
temples and as the seat of the government. (the Ziggurats in Mesopotamia and the
Citadels in Indus valley (see ppt).
 WRITING AND NUMBERS EMERGED FROM THESE STATE-TEMPLE BUREAUCRACIES;

To administer such big units of human population, there was a need to keep a record of
the taxes, the expenditure, the area of the farms that can be taxed etc. so in a way, the
growth in density and size of human population in ancient cities FORCED the invention
of writing.

From oral cultures to writing:

Development of writing was a giant step forward for the entire human race. Writing was a
perquisite for any kind of systematic science to start.

What is writing?: reduction of speech (spoken sounds/words) to graphic forms.

What difference does writing make to growth of knowledge:

 1. Writing breaks the flow of spoken language and sets ideas down in words. This makes it
possible to see the logical structure of the argument.
2. Writing makes it is easier to see contradictions partly because one can formalize
statements and compare them side by side. Writing makes it possible to stand back and
examine a text in a more abstract and rational manner. Criticism is essential for growth
of knowledge.
3. Writing frees minds from the need to memorize vast amounts of facts and figures.
4. Writing allows greater abstractedness and de-contextualization.

Evolution of writing:
Growth of writing, mathematics and science is intimately connected to the development of city-
based/urban civilizations with a complex division of labor. A class of workers (priests, clerks,
teachers and etc. ) emerges whose job it is to deal with symbols…

The first urban civilization arose in the Mespotamia around 4000 BCE. This was followed by
Egypt around the river Nile and later by Mohanjodaro and Harappa along the Indus

Mesopotamian Civilization
Sumerian cuneiform writing on clay tablets is the earliest form of writing that we know of and can read.

Writing emerged in the context of temple bureaucracy in the cities of southern Iraq: a tiny
number of accountants used word signs (pictograms) and number signs to account for property
– how many animals, how much land, how many sacks of grain etc. They wrote on clay tablets,
about the size of a credit card but about one cm thick. They used a reed stylus to make the
mark on wet clay – used a pointed stylus for objects and a rounded stylus for numbers. These
clay tablets were dried in the sun, and could be recycled later when no longer needed. Some of
the tablets got baked in accidental fires: while fire destroys all other written texts, fires helped
preserve the cuneiform tablets.

Cuneiform script underwent gradual evolution from just pictographic record-keeping to

a real language in which gods could be praised, stories could be told, and passage of stars could
be recorded and mathematical problems could be solved. This evolution is evident from tablets
unearthed from three archeological sites:

a. Remains of a school house, “House F” excavated in 1950 from a small house near Najaf
in modern Iraq. This “House F” was most probably a school for scribes – students
learning to write in cuneiform. Most of the tablets are school exercises in which
students simply copy. A small number of tablets record stories about gods and heroes
and even have funny stories about the students of the school. These tablets go back to
around 1740 BCE, the reign of the King Hammurabi (1792-1750 BCE)
 b. The library of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria (from 668 bce to around 630 bce), on the
banks of Tigris river in modern day Mosul, Iraq. British Museum archaeologists
discovered more than 30,000 cuneiform tablets and fragments from this site. Alongside
historical inscriptions, letters, administrative and legal texts, were found thousands of
divinatory, magical, medical, literary and lexical texts.

One of the most famous finds from this library is the Flood tablet (see PowerPoint). It is a
fragment from the Epic of Gilgamesh – the first epic poem in world literature. It tells the
story of the hero Gilgamesh, who sets off on a quest for the secret of eternal life. He
confronts demons and monsters, he survives all kinds of perils and eventually he has to
confront the deepest challenge of all: his own nature and his mortality. The flood tablet is a
part of the Gilgamesh epic. The tablet was deciphered in 1872 by George Smith, an
apprentice to a printer, who got interested in Sumerian tablets at the British museum. He
discovered that the tablet told the story of the Great Flood and Noah’s ark. The tablet dated
back to 700 bce, roughly 400 years before the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible was
written.

The temple to sky-god Anu: scholarly tablets from the chief-priest of the sky god Anu in the
city of Uruk in 190 bce: here we encounter mathematical astronomy containing complex
instructions for calculation of dates and positions of key events in the journey of mars,
Jupiter and moon and tabulation of data….

Writing in Egypt:
“Books” –or rather, scrolls -- in Egypt, classical Greece and Rome were made of papyrus.

Egypt was the only country where papyrus was made and shipped to all places around the
Mediterranean.

Papyrus is made from a plant called papyrus which grows in the swamps of the Nile delta. The
plant can grow as tall as 15 feet. The pith of the plant is cut into thin slices, soaked and pressed
together to form sheets which are later smoothed by stones. These sheets were used for
writing using a reed pen and permanent ink made out of minerals.

Writi ng in the Indus Valley Civilizati on

Indus valley civilization lasted from approximately 2300 to 1500 BCE

 Largely agricultural economy, but also trade in gold, copper, timber, ivory and cotton
with Mesopotamia – Indus seals have been found as far in as Central Asia and what is
now called Middle East.
 impressive urban centers at Mohanjo-Daro (in Sindh, Pakistan), Harappa (200 miles to
east), Lothal (Gujarat) and 800 miles along the Arabian coast of India.
  Literate culture, with a script which has not yet been deciphered -- seals.
The cow/unicorn seal: discovered in Harappa (150 miles south of Lahore) in the 1850s .
Made of soap stone, the size of a postage stamp.

Script: the tablets have some kind of writing but it has not yet been deciphered. Scholars now
believe that the IV script is not a complete language but rather symbols to identify a product or
to indicate a place of origin of a person or a product. These tablets were more like tags or
identity cards.

How are ancient languages deciphered? Through chance findings of multi-lingual

inscriptions in which the same text is written in more than one scripts.

Cuneiform was deciphered through the Behistun inscription. The Behistun Inscription (also
Bisotun, Bistun or Bisutun; Persian: ‫بیستون‬, Old Persian: Bagastana, meaning "the place of
god") is a multilingual inscription and large rock relief on a cliff at Mount Behistun in the
Kermanshah Province of Iran, near the city of Kermanshah in western Iran, established by
Darius the Great (r. 522–486 BC). It was crucial to the decipherment of cuneiform script as
the inscription includes three versions of the same text, written in three different cuneiform
script languages: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian (a variety of Akkadian). The inscription
is to cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone is to Egyptian hieroglyphs: the document most
crucial in the decipherment of a previously lost script. (Wikipedia)

Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered when Napoleon’s soldiers discovered the Rosetta
Stone in Egypt in 1799. The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele discovered in 1799 which is
inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC during the
Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The top and middle texts are in
Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and demotic scripts, while the bottom is in Ancient
Greek. The decree has only minor differences among the three versions, so the Rosetta
Stone became key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, thereby opening a window into
ancient Egyptian history.

The beginnings of writing in India:

Indus Valley has left some kind of writing on their seals, but no one has been able to decipher it
yet.

So when does actual writing make an appearance in the Indus Valley and the later Vedic
civilization?

First records of writing come from the Mauryan king, Ashoka in 260 bce written in Brahmi – first
pan-Indian language, from northern Afghanistan to Karnataka Sanskrit: even though Sanskrit is
much older than Brahmi, there are no written records dating back to the time of the Rg Veda
(the first of the four Vedas). The reason is that Sanskrit was considered a sacred language, the
language of Gods, which was not to be written. Sanskrit texts were passed on through
generations through memory.

Sanskrit: even though Sanskrit is much older than Brahmi, there are no written records dating
back to the time of the Rg Veda (the first of the four Vedas). The reason is that Sanskrit was
considered a sacred language, the language of Gods, which was not to be written. Sanskrit texts
were passed on through generations through memory.

For those who want know more, read the text in the box from Upinder Singh’s well-known textbook,
A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India). Box on the next page
 ANCIENT AND EARLY MEDIEVAL SCRIPTS

Inscriptions and coins come under the general umbrella of archaeology and archaeological sources, but
they are subjects of specialized study in their own right. The study of inscriptions is known as epigraphy. An
inscription is any writing that is engraved on something—stone, wood, metal, ivory plaques, bronze
statues, bricks, clay, shells, pottery, etc. Epigraphy includes deciphering the text of inscriptions and
analysing the information they contain. It also includes palaeography, the study of ancient writing. As
mentioned earlier, the oldest inscriptions in the Indian subcontinent are in the yet undeciphered Harappan
script. The oldest deciphered inscriptions belong to the late 4th century BCE, and are in Brahmi and
Kharoshthi (sometimes spelt Kharoshti). These include those of the Maurya emperor Ashoka, which are in
a number of different languages and scripts, but mostly in the Prakrit language and Brahmi script. As there
are no obvious links between the Harappan script and Brahmi or Kharoshthi, what happened to writing in
between remains a mystery. There is no direct mention of writing in Vedic literature, but references to
poetic metres, grammatical and phonetic terms, very large numbers, and complex arithmetical calculations
in later Vedic texts are taken by some historians to indicate the possibility that writing may have been
known at the time. The first definite literary references to writing and written documents occur in the
Buddhist Pali texts, especially the Jatakas and the Vinaya Pitaka. Panini’s Ashtadhyayi refers to the word
lipi (script). The Brahmi of Ashoka’s inscriptions seems a fairly developed script, and it must have had a
prior history of at least a few centuries. Recently, important direct evidence that Brahmi existed in pre-
Maurya times has come from Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, where excavations unearthed potsherds with
short inscriptions (probably names of people) that can be dated to at least the early 4th century BCE. There
are three main types of scripts. In a logographic script, written symbols stand for a word, in a syllabic script
for a syllable, and in an alphabetic script for a single phonetic sound. In the strict sense of the term, in an
alphabet, the vowels should have a separate and fully independent status equal to that of consonants.
Both the Brahmi and Kharoshthi scripts stand midway between alphabetic and syllabic scripts, and can be
described as semi-syllabic or semi-alphabetic.

Box 2, continued on the next page

 Kharoshthi’s core area lay in the north-west—in and around the Indus, Swat, and Kabul river valleys, the
land known as Gandhara in ancient times. Ashoka’s Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra inscriptions are in this
script. Kharoshthi was later used in north India under the Indo-Greek, IndoParthian, and Kushana kings, and
was also used in certain records outside the Gandhara area, including in parts of central Asia. Written from
right to left, Kharoshthi seems to have been derived from the north Semitic Aramaic script.

The origins of Brahmi, a script written from left to right, are not as clear. Some scholars have suggested an
indigenous origin, others an Aramaic origin. A problem in accepting the latter theory is that the direction of
writing and the forms of the letters in Brahmi and Kharoshthi are different, so it is unlikely that they were
derived from the same script. Kharoshthi declined and died out in about the 3rd century CE. Brahmi, on the
other hand, became the parent of all the indigenous scripts of South Asia, and also of those used in parts of
central and Southeast Asia. The different stages of the Brahmi script are often labelled on the basis of
dynasties, e.g., Ashokan Brahmi, Kushana Brahmi, and Gupta Brahmi. The epigraphist D. C. Sircar identified
three stages of development in the history of this script in northern India: early Brahmi (3rd–1st centuries
BCE); middle Brahmi (1st century BCE–3rd century CE); and late Brahmi (4th–6th centuries CE). In the late
6th century, Gupta Brahmi evolved into a script known as Siddhamatrika or Kutila, which had sharp angles
at the lower right hand corner of each letter. Regional differences became sharper after this point of time.

The modern north Indian scripts gradually emerged out of Siddhamatrika. Nagari or Devanagari was
standardized by about 1000 CE and an eastern script (known as proto-Bengali or Gaudi) took shape
between the 10th and 14th centuries. From here, it was a short step to the emergence of the Bengali,
Assamese, Oriya, and Maithili scripts in the 14th–15th centuries. This is also the time when the Sharada
script emerged in Kashmir and adjoining areas.

The earliest inscriptions in the Tamil language (with some Prakrit elements) are engraved in rock shelters
and caves, mostly in Tamil Nadu, especially in the area near Madurai. They are in a script known as Tamil–
Brahmi, an adaptation of Brahmi for writing the Tamil language. Iravatham Mahadevan (2003) has identified
two phases in the evolution of the Tamil–Brahmi script—early Tamil-Brahmi (c. 2nd century BCE–1st century
CE) and late Tamil–Brahmi (2nd–4th centuries CE).

On the evolution of tamil script, read the next box on the next page…
 Three southern scripts emerged in the early medieval period—Grantha, Tamil, and Vatteluttu. The first of
these was used for writing Sanskrit, the second and third for writing Tamil. These three scripts may have
emerged out of southern varieties of Brahmi; or they may have emerged from some other earlier southern
scripts. The Tamil script first appeared in the Pallava territory in the 7th

century CE. Something similar to the modern Telugu and Kannada scripts took shape in the 14th–15th
centuries, while the Malayalam script developed out of Grantha at about the same time. Ancient Indian
inscriptions include a few bi-script documents, in which the text is given in the same language written in two
different scripts. Most of the instances come from the north-west and consist of short bi-script Brahmi–
Kharoshthi inscriptions. The longer records include an 8th century Pattadakal pillar inscription of the Chalukya
king Kirttivarman II. The language is Sanskrit; the text is written both in the north Indian Siddhamatrika script
and in the local southern proto-Telugu–Kannada script.

LANGUAGES OF ANCIENT AND EARLY MEDIEVAL INSCRIPTIONS

The earliest Brahmi inscriptions, including those of Ashoka, are in dialects of Prakrit (also known as Middle
Indo-Aryan). Between the 1st and 4th centuries CE, many inscriptions were written in a mixture of Sanskrit
and Prakrit. The first pure Sanskrit inscriptions appeared in the 1st century BCE. The first long Sanskrit
inscription is the Junagadh rock inscription of the western Kshatrapa king Rudradaman. By about the end of
the 3rd century CE, Sanskrit had gradually replaced Prakrit as the language of inscriptions in northern India.

Deciphered and undeciphered scripts

The story of the decipherment of ancient scripts is an exciting one. Ashokan Brahmi was deciphered as a
result of the slow, painstaking efforts of a number of administrator-scholars working in India as employees
of the East India Company. They included Charles Wilkins, Captain A. Troyer, W . H. Mill, J. Stevenson, and
James Prinsep. These scholars first tried to read early medieval Brahmi inscriptions and then worked at
deciphering the older Brahmi letters. The final step in the decipherment of the 3rd century BCE Maurya
Brahmi was made by Prinsep in 1837.

Even though Prinsep managed to read these inscriptions, he had no idea about the identity of the king
Piyadassi mentioned therein. The answer came soon enough, when George Turnour, an officer of the
Ceylon civil service, identified the king as Ashoka on the basis of references in the Pali chronicle, the
Dipavamsa.

Prinsep also played a role in the decipherment of Kharoshthi, along with other scholars such as Christian
Lassen, Charles Masson, Alexander Cunningham, and E. Norris. The decipherment of Kharoshthi was easier
because of the availability of bi-script coins in Greek and Kharoshthi issued by the Indo-Greek kings.