A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [42]
When the earliest cities and states grew up in the world’s fertile river valleys around 5,000 years ago, one of the challenges for leaders was how to govern these new societies. How do you impose your will not just on a couple of hundred villagers, but on tens of thousands of city dwellers? Nearly all these new rulers discovered that, as well as using military force and official ideology, if you want to control populations on this scale you need to write things down.
We tend to think of writing as being about poetry or fiction or history, what we might call literature. But early literature was in fact oral – learnt by heart and then recited or sung. People wrote down 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. I 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, starting 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 know how much has been paid: it needs to be fair.
By 3000 BC the people who had to run the various city-states of Mesopotamia 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 getting 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 become more and more important. And the ability to keep track, to write things down, which is a crucial element of the modern state – to know how much money you’re spending, and to know what you’re getting for it – is starting to emerge. This tablet for me is the first ever equivalent of the cabinet secretary’s notebook – it’s that important.
When writing in the full sense was developing, with phonetic symbols replacing pictograms, life as a scribe must have been very exciting. The creation of new sound signs was probably quite a fast-moving process, and as they developed, the signs would have had to be listed – the earliest dictionaries if you like – beginning an intellectual process of categorizing words, things and the relationships between them that has never stopped since. Our little beer-ration tablet leads, directly and 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:
Writing is essential for the creation of what we think of as human civilization. It has a creative capacity that may not even have been intended. I think you don’t understand