The Information - James Gleick [20]
The result: cryptic messages from an alien culture. They took generations to decipher. “Writing, like a theater curtain going up on these dazzling civilizations, lets us stare directly but imperfectly at them,”♦ writes the psychologist Julian Jaynes. Some Europeans took umbrage at first. “To the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, and Egyptians,” wrote the seventeenth-century divine Thomas Sprat, “we owe the Invention” but also the “Corruption of knowledge,”♦ when they concealed it with their strange scripts. “It was the custom of their Wise men, to wrap up their Observations on Nature, and the Manners of Men, in the dark Shadows of Hieroglyphicks” (as though friendlier ancients would have used an alphabet more familiar to Sprat). The earliest examples of cuneiform baffled archeologists and paleolinguists the longest, because the first language to be written, Sumerian, left no other traces in culture or speech. Sumerian turned out to be a linguistic rarity, an isolate, with no known descendants. When scholars did learn to read the Uruk tablets, they found them to be, in their way, humdrum: civic memoranda, contracts and laws, and receipts and bills for barley, livestock, oil, reed mats, and pottery. Nothing like poetry or literature appeared in cuneiform for hundreds of years to come. The tablets were the quotidiana of nascent commerce and bureaucracy. The tablets not only recorded the commerce and the bureaucracy but, in the first place, made them possible.
A CUNEIFORM TABLET
Even then, cuneiform incorporated signs for counting and measurement. Different characters, used in different ways, could denote numbers and weights. A more systematic approach to the writing of numbers did not take shape until the time of Hammurabi, 1750 BCE, when Mesopotamia was unified around the great city of Babylon. Hammurabi himself was probably the first literate king, writing his own cuneiform rather than depending on scribes, and his empire building manifested the connection between writing and social control. “This process of conquest and influence is made possible by letters and tablets and stelae in an abundance that had never been known before,”♦ Jaynes declares. “Writing was a new method of civil direction, indeed the model that begins our own memo-communicating government.”
The writing of numbers had evolved into an elaborate system. Numerals were composed of just two basic parts, a vertical wedge for 1 () and an angle wedge for 10 (). These were combined to form the standard characters, so that represented 3 and represented 16, and so on. But the Babylonian system was not decimal, base 10; it was sexagesimal, base 60. Each of the numerals from 1 to 60 had its own character. To form large numbers, the Babylonians used numerals in places: was 70 (one 60 plus ten 1s); was 616 (ten 60s plus sixteen 1s), and so on.♦ None of this was clear when the tablets first began to surface. A basic theme with variations, encountered many times, proved to be multiplication tables. In a sexagesimal system these had to cover the numbers from 1 to 19 as well as 20, 30, 40, and 50. Even more difficult to unravel were tables of reciprocals, making possible division and fractional numbers: in the 60-based system, reciprocals were 2:30, 3:20, 4:15, 5:12 … and then, using extra places, 8:7,30, 9:6,40, and so on.♦
A MATHEMATICAL TABLE ON A CUNEIFORM TABLET ANALYZED BY ASGER AABOE
These symbols were hardly words—or they were words of a peculiar, slender, rigid sort. They seemed to arrange themselves into visible patterns in the clay, repetitious, almost artistic, not like any prose or poetry archeologists had encountered. They were like maps of a mysterious city. This was the key to deciphering