> According to Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Professor of Art and Middle Eastern
> Studies at the University of Texas at Austin,
>
> "The most important evidence uncovered is that counting was not,
> as formerly assumed, subservient to writing; on the contrary,
> writing emerged from counting." [1]
I'm not a scholar, but I found Denise Schmandt-Bessarat's (DSB) article in
Scientific American, and then her book "Before Writing", to be quite persuasive
to me.
The process seems to be as follows. (I apologize for any slight inaccuracies in
my popularization):
(1) certain goods were kept on hold for their owners in a central location,
treasury, or temple -- or else, perhaps they were tribute due to the
ruler/king/chief/priest.
(2) in order to keep track of who owed what to whom, before writing, little
tokens were invented -- and apparently they were made out of fired clay. DSB
claims they are the first fired-clay items found anywhere. These little tokens
used to be found everywhere in digs in the Fertile Crescent, but nobody knew
what they were. One style of token would represent a basket of grain, or some
oil, or some beans, or some sheep, or whatever. [But I wonder how they stored
oil if they had no fired clay? Does sun-dried clay work ok?] One sheep = one
particular type of token. Three sheep, then three tokens.
(3) One problem was, how do you keep from losing the little tokens. Various
methods were tried. They used to put them on strings, then take some clay and
bind the end of the strings, then put a "seal" on that wet clay.
(4) Later, they developed clay "envelopes" -- so, if you owed 4 barrels of
wheat, 1 barrel of barley, and 5 oxen, you would put 4 tokens for each barrel
of wheat, 1 barley-barrel token, and 5 oxen tokens into a clay "envelope", and
then let it harden in the sun.
(5) The problem with this was, of course, that clay is not exactly transparent,
and you couldn't check to see what was in the "envelope" unless you broke it
open, defeating the purpose of the "envelope".
(6) DSB then claims that some bright soul got the idea of pressing each token
into the outside of the clay envelope before you put it in, and before it was
sealed. That way, you could tell that you had 4 wheat-barrel tokens inside, 1
barley-barrel token, and so on, just by looking at the characteristic shapes
pressed into the outside of the package.
(7) DSB then claims that they got the further bright idea of using a number
symbol. So instead of pressing 4 barley-barrel tokens into the clay, they would
instead press ONE barley-barrel token, then a special (new) symbol that meant
"4". Then ONE oxen token, and a symbol for "5" (or vice versa).
(8) Eventually some REAL genius figured out that if you had all that
information on the outside of the envelope, then you didn't really have to have
the tokens inside after all. Thus was born the idea of simply WRITING stuff
down by pressing marks into clay onto palm-sized clay tablets which were later
dried out in the sun, rather than using hollow clay envelopes.
(9) She claims that the evidence for 5, 6, 7, and 8 comes from a (very few)
clay envelopes that were found that had certain tokens still inside that were
known to stand for sheep or goats or whatever, and writing on the outside that
was known to stand for the same thing -- and the quantities matched.
It is really quite intriguing.
I am not sure that this has been given the attention it deserves. I personally
thought it was incredibly seminal and original research, which has not been
attacked (AFAIK), but I donno -- it seems like nobody else paid all that much
attention to it.
It is certainly nice to have some real idea (rather than Kipling's Just-So
stories) about where writing came from. And interesting that math (or at least
counting) appears to have preceded writing!
Guy F. Brandenburg