Names and numbers

A story which was motivated by an interest in how names, nouns and numbers came to be – and then came to evolve into what we know as writing. An interest which came to centre on what is now Iraq. There were other places where writing evolved a long time ago – Egypt, China and northern India – but probably rather later and, more importantly for me, there is a lot more readily available information about Iraq. A lot of it seemingly the work of German scholars past and present. Not to mention Agatha Christie’s second husband.

I shall come back to where I got to writing from in due course.

A story which starts with a large population of humans with language, but without writing or anything much in the way of near-writing. This last being the sort of thing to be found at reference 1 and an example is snapped above. But we do have kingdoms of various sizes, pretty much the nation states, pushing and shoving, squabbling among themselves, that we have now.

We also have central facilities like armies, temples and granaries. The economic foundation of these states is agriculture, specifically grains such as maize, rice, barley and wheat. Which means that most of the population is necessarily spread quite thinly over a large area. 

I associate today to once reading that temples, generally speaking and in these sorts of places, managed to absorb about a third of the available resources. Important for keeping the workers quiet and happy, if not particularly well-fed or healthy. Also a separation of powers, something that those studying state institutions today spill much ink over.

Circumstances are such that organisation and communal activity is needed: we are not in a world of sturdily independent farmers living on their land with their families without much need to interact with anyone else. One needed communal activity, for example, to manage the water in the lower reaches of the great rivers of Iraq. Managed well and you got lots of food, but not something that worked on an individual basis. Such states existed in various parts of the world between five and ten thousand years ago. 

We then think about how to model this world for present purposes and we start by distinguishing two sorts of entity, the public node and the private node. Some of these nodes will represent, will be, a single individual. In the case where a node represents more than one individual, one of those individuals will be head of node, otherwise head of household.

As things stand, more or less all such heads will be male – but I don’t think that gender is presently an issue.

Households are mostly quite small. From where I associate to the extended Cossack households of the first volume of ‘And quiet flows the Don’ (reference 4) – but also to the factories full of women textile workers, all more or less slaves, said to be have been run by the Mycenaean kings some time after writing was invented in Iraq.

Nearly all public nodes will have exactly one parent, with just one node at the top of the heap. Emperor, general secretary, dictator, autocrat, king or whatever. That node will have children. Other nodes may have one or more children.

In what follows, we are mainly concerned with public nodes.

Most nodes are associated with places, with locations. Most people do not move around much. And fields do not move at all.

All of which suggests to me a big tree structure, with lots of nodes and levels – the sort of thing snapped above – but, given the primitive machinery available for communication – very few child nodes to the parent node. There have to be few enough children that the parent can manage them without the help of pencil and paper. From where I associate to our army of fifty years ago, which had a similarly dense command structure, albeit for rather different reasons. And from there to an old war film, probably from the US, in which a British private would not obey the orders of a stray US officer: he would only obey ‘his officer’ – who was not on hand to sort whatever it was out.

Roughly speaking, commands trickled down the structure, information trickled up. Produce mainly trickled up, to feed central functions, but there was also provision for trickling down in emergencies. Agriculture might be a good bet in the long run, but there could be difficulties in the short term. Maybe the odd Noah’s flood.

It would be interesting to put some numbers on such a tree for some of the ancient civilisations that we know about. I believe, for example, that in ancient Iraq they ran to around five agricultural layers, that is to say without counting central nodes like granaries and armies.

However, as soon as we start moving food about from one node to another and storing food, there will be theft – theft which has been about for much longer than humans. Think, for example, of the thieving behaviour of nesting rooks: pinching twigs from a nearby nest might well seem a better option than going off to get one’s own. We also need management: the king, for example, needs to know when to move grain from one place to another. Has he got enough grain to last out the winter to come? Will he need to move his army to keep the lid on some region of dearth?

[Cylinder seal of First Dynasty of Ur Queen Puabi, found in her tomb, dated circa 2600 BC, with modern impression]

One way to attack all this is put known amounts of food into sealed containers – which might be pots, jars or rooms. One does the sealing with blobs of wet clay, with opening the container involving the breaking up of the then dry clay. While at the time of sealing one can mark the clay – marks which tell those concerned what is contained, how much there is of it and who the responsible official was. Notice how civil servants got going a long time ago! 

Aside: accountants claim this job too and I believe this factlet is used to liven up their training.

Originally the official would have been identified by rolling his cylinder seal across the wet clay, with these seals being about the size and shape of the cork of a wine bottle and which are more fully described at reference 3. In this context more a role than a name.

And so we had the beginnings of names, nouns and numbers. Probably hundreds if not thousands of years before anything which could properly described as writing, let alone the west-conquering phonetic alphabet. Derived, as it happens from the slightly earlier Phoenician alphabet, which was not phonetic at all as it made do without vowels. The similarity of the two words is presumably a coincidence.

Aside: part of the cylinder seal system was that they were expensive to make, to carve out of stone, making identity theft both difficult and expensive. Another advantage of these seals was that they could accommodate a large amount of variation: they were not bound by a limited repertoire of names – with repertoires of given names, at least in some cultures, being very small. Maybe as small as tens rather than hundreds.

Conclusions

A story which I find convincing. This is probably the place where writing and literacy started out.

I remember that I once went to a lecture at the British Museum where a visiting Iraqi scholar told us something about cuneiform. It was a badly prepared lecture, but I do recall that he told us, in reply to a question, that not all cuneiform was accounting. There was more literary stuff – possibly dreams – as well – albeit from some thousand or so years after my story. We were also generously supplied with wine at the end. This being while I was still in the world of work. 

A story which one might think had some bearing on the contents of consciousness, a long-time interest of mine, but I have yet to work out exactly what that might amount to.

Which reminds me that I once owned the book at reference 6 – but not reading it – about how the northern European renaissance in the 16th century shaped the educated man’s sense of self. Maybe I will now get around to reading it. I might also say that it took the power of Gemini to run the book down.

PS: the image of the cylinder seal further up came from Wikipedia. The original came from the British Museum, who provide the freebie above, but you have to register and pay if you want a good quality image. How much, I have not troubled to find out. The National Gallery, as I recall, is more relaxed about such matters.

While Google Images turns up this much higher resolution image from reference 5. From which I learn that the Wikipedia image is not quite the same as that from the British Museum; some of the details, for example the spears, are missing. Reference 1 talks of there being a lot of minor variations on themes, and I have not done enough to know whether what we have here are slightly different images of the same thing or images of slightly different things. A little knowledge, as they say, can be dangerous.

I should add that reference 5 is an interesting and accessible read, concerning the same city that is the focus of reference 1, albeit a few thousand years later.

References

Reference 1: Archaic bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East - Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow, Robert K. Englund, Paul Larsen (translator) – 1993. 

Reference 2: [not used]. 

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinder_seal.

Reference 4: And Quiet Flows the Don – Mikhail Sholokhov – 1928.

Reference 5: https://chameleonfire1.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/gilgamesh-and-civilization/. 

Reference 6: Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare – Stephen Greenblatt – 1980.