The Exhausted Messenger
You just cannot get the staff these days!
That must have been the predominant thought in the mind of the king of Uruk when his messenger finally returned to him. Sent on an urgent mission to a distant court, the messenger had run the whole way and been too exhausted to remember the details which were so important to his message. Shamefacedly, the messenger had returned to Uruk to report his failure and ask that the message be repeated to him.
Now, of course, the matter was even more urgent and the need for haste even greater, yet the king of Uruk could see a stream of exhausted messengers arriving at the distant court and failing to deliver their messages - or what was worse, give the wrong messages. Something would have to be done.
According to Sumerian legend, the king of Uruk gave the matter some thought and then called for a ball of wet clay. With his hands he patted into a flat shape and then, using a piece of wood, he impressed marks into the clay, then ordered that the clay be baked. Armed with these visual clues, the messenger returned to the distant court and this time delivered his message successfully.
This, according to one of the speakers at a recent symposium on the origins of writing held at the University of Pennsylvania, in America, was how the Sumerians accounted for the origin of their greatest invention: writing. The Sumerian epic telling this tale declares:
Before that time writing on clay had not yet existed,
But now, as the sun rose, so it was.
The king of Uruk set words on a tablet,
so it was!
Certainly there is good evidence that writing began very early indeed in Uruk. Many clay tablets have been found there on which is inscribed a series of symbols which are believed to be the precursors of cuneiform. Like Egyptian hieroglyphs, these symbols are stylised pictures of the things they represent and had the Sumerians known the secret of papyrus, that is probably how their writing would have remained.
Clay, however, is an intractable medium. Drag a pin through some plasticine and the track of the pin is bordered by rough lumps and bumps. It wasn't long before some unknown genius realised that a much neater appearance could be achieved by pressing the stylus into the clay rather than dragging the stylus through it. By holding the stylus at different angles, you could manage to draw an even more stylised picture of the thing you wanted to represent.
We cannot be sure just how long it took for the Sumerians to make the leap from drawing pictures of things to using abstract symbols for abstract ideas and then to using the symbols for parts of words and thus causing the writing to communicate spoken language. Some claim that it took as long as five hundred years; personally I think the Sumerians were clever enough to have made the leap much faster.
Dr Denise Schmandt-Besserat, an archaeologist at the University of Texas, has her own theory on the development of cuneiform. According to her, the early Sumerian accountants used models of things in their counting. These tokens, which might represent a jar of oil or a sack of grain, were wrapped up in wet clay, on the outside of which a drawing of the tokens together with a system of numbers was made. Finally the tokens were thrown away and only the symbols remained - the first writing.
Although ingenious, most linguists question this theory. There is more to life than counting and it is likely that artists also had a part to play in using pictures to communicate meaning. Like the legendary king of Uruk, abstract ideas needed to be transmitted via untrustworthy messengers, myths and legends needed to be recorded for a heedless posterity. It is unlikely that one single need drove the development of writing.
It is even more unlikely that one single place developed writing all on its own, for news of such a useful invention would spread rapidly throughout the ancient world. The Elamites developed their own script (though they later adopted cuneiform) and the inhabitants of the Indus Valley, with which the Sumerians had close trading links, developed a script which has not yet been deciphered and which archaeologists believed post-dated the earliest Sumerian writing.
Recent excavations in Harappa, however, seem to indicate that the Indus script did not depend on the Sumerian model, though it may have been inspired by word-of-mouth news of what was happening in Sumeria. (Or, of course, it may have been the other way round!) Symbols scratched on broken potsherds are "similar in some respects to those later used in the Indus script", declares Dr Richard Meadow of Harvard University, though Dr Gregory Possehl, a Pennsylvania specialist in the Indus Valley civilisation, warns that it is easy to confuse graffiti or even random marks with early writing.
Certainly new evidence is being uncovered of links between countries and cultures hitherto thought to be remote from each other. Dr Victor Mair, professor of Chinese language at Pennsylvania University, claims to have found similarities between the Phoenician alphabet and Chinese symbols. The discovery in China's western desert of mummified bodies wearing garments woven by Western techniques and having Caucasoid facial features seems to point in the same direction. Indeed, it is now accepted that horse-drawn chariots and bronze smelting reached China from the West.
Despite claims by Dr Günter Dreyer, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Egypt, that radiocarbon dates for tombs at Abydos now indicates that the primitive hieroglyphics found on objects in these tombs date to 3,400 BC, Dr John Baines, an Oxford University Egyptologist remains sceptical. "I'm suspicious of the dates," he declared at the symposium. "I think he (Dr Dreyer) is being very bold in his readings of these things."
We know that there were links between Egypt and Mesopotamia from the very earliest times and it is highly likely that news of the king of Uruk's invention reached Egypt and led to the development of its own form of picture writing.
The symposium does not appear to have dealt with the origin of Hittite hieroglyphics, but it is highly likely that they too had their origin independently but stimulated by the example of other peoples. One of the peculiarities of the Hittite hieroglyphics is that they were routinely written "boustrophedon" - as the ox ploughs - with alternate lines running left to right and right to left.
Today, of course, we take writing for granted and think nothing of picking up a biro and scribbling a note on a piece of paper or dashing off a message on the internet. Everytime you write a note to the milkman or jot down a reminder on a memo pad, spare a thought for the king of Uruk, five thousand years ago, as he sat on his throne with a lump of wet clay in his hands and for the very first time put pen to paper.
If it hadn't been for an exhausted messenger . . . you wouldn't be reading the Diggings website!
