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By Root 2723 0

the full import of the revolution brought by writing if you think of it just as preserving information into the future. There are two areas where it makes an absolutely decisive difference to 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 argument unless you have some way of writing it down and scanning it. So it’s 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, it is immensely creative. But there’s a second thing about writing which is just as important: when you write down you don’t just record what already exists, you create new entities – money, corporations, governments, complex forms of society. Writing is essential for all of them.

Writing seems to have emerged independently in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Central America – all of them expanding population centres – but there’s fierce debate and much rivalry about who wrote first. At the moment, the Mesopotamians seem to be in the lead, but that may simply be because their evidence – being in clay – has survived.

As we have seen, rulers trying to control their subjects in the new populous cities of Egypt and Mesopotamia initially used military force to coerce them. But in writing, they found an even more powerful weapon of social control. Even a reed pen turned out to be mightier than the sword.

PART FOUR

The Beginnings of Science and Literature

2000–700 BC

The emergence of cities and states in different parts of the world had many consequences, among them the appearance of the world’s first written literature and the development of scientific and mathematical knowledge. These early cities and states did not exist in isolation, but were connected through extensive trade networks by road and sea. The majority of the world’s population nevertheless still lived in scattered communities, but these people created many sophisticated objects, notably of materials such as bronze and gold which have often survived. Many of these objects were clearly made as demonstrations of power, designed to impress subjects, visitors and possibly posterity.

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Flood Tablet

Clay writing tablet from Nineveh (near Mosul), northern Iraq

700–600 BC

The biblical story of Noah, his ark and the Great Flood has become so much part of our language that any child in Britain can tell you that the animals went in two by two. But the story of a Great Flood is one that goes back far beyond the Bible to many other societies. Which leads to a big question: we know about the Flood now because somebody long ago wrote the story down – but when did the very idea of writing down a story begin?

Locals from Bloomsbury often drop in to the British Museum. Just over 140 years ago, one of those locals, a regular lunchtime visitor, was a man called George Smith. He was an apprentice to a printing firm not far from the Museum, and he had become fascinated by the collection of ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets. He became so engrossed by these that he taught himself to read the wedge-shaped, cuneiform script in which they were written, and in due course he became one of the leading cuneiform scholars of his day. In 1872 Smith studied a particular tablet from Nineveh (in modern Iraq), and that’s what I want to look at now.

The library where we keep the clay tablets from Mesopotamia – there are about 130,000 of them – is a room filled with shelves from floor to ceiling, with a narrow wooden tray on each shelf with up to a dozen clay tablets in it – most of them fragments. The piece that in 1872 particularly interested George Smith is about 15 centimetres (just under 6 inches) high and made of dark brown clay, and it’s covered with densely written text organized into two close columns. From a distance, it looks a bit like the small-ads column of an old-fashioned newspaper. It would originally have been rectangular, but sections have broken off in