Ideas

by Peter Watson

  In general, towns are defined by archaeologists as occupying 30 hectares or less, whereas cities are 31 hectares and more. In the case of Uruk, by the time its wall was built, it occupied about 5.5 square kilometres, roughly 2.5 kilometres by 3.0 kilometres at its most extended points but in a rough diamond shape. With a population density of around 100–200 inhabitants per 1,000 square metres, this would give a total head-count of 27,500–55,000. The built-up area of Ur occupied 100 acres (roughly 41 hectares) with perhaps 24,000 inhabitants. Its surrounding territory of 4 square miles ‘may have been occupied by half a million people…Girsu, a site adjacent to and apparently part of Lagash, is said to have had 36,000 males which means a population of 80,000–100,000.’12 All this compares favourably with Athens, c. 500 BC, which covered an area of 2.5 square kilometres, or Jerusalem at the time of Christ which was but 1 square kilometre. Rome at the time of Hadrian was only twice as large as Uruk had been three thousand years earlier.13 A measure of the rapidity of the change at this time can be had from the survey reported by Hans Nissen which shows that at the end of the fourth millennium rural settlements outnumbered urban ones by the ratio of 4:1. Six hundred years later–i.e., the middle of the third millennium–that ratio had reversed completely and was now 9:1 in favour of the larger urban sites.14 By this time Uruk was the centre of a ‘hinterland’, an essentially rural area under its influence, which extended roughly 12–15 kilometres around it. Next to this was an area some 2–3 kilometres wide which showed no influence, and then began the hinterland of the next city, in this case Umma.15 There were at least twenty cities of this kind in Mesopotamia.

  The achievements of these cities and city-states were astonishing and endured for some twenty-six centuries, with a remarkable number of innovations being introduced which created much of the world as we know it and live it. It was in Babylonia that music, medicine and mathematics were developed, where the first libraries were created, the first maps drawn, where chemistry, botany and zoology were conceived. At least, we assume that is so. Babylon is the home of so many ‘firsts’ because it is also the place where writing was invented and therefore we know about Babylon in a way that we do not know history before then.

  Excavations have shown that these early urban areas were usually divided into three. There was an inner city with its own walls, inside which were found the temples of the city’s gods, plus the palace of the ruler/administrator/religious leader and a number of private houses. The suburbs consisted of much smaller houses, communal gardens and cattle pens, providing day-to-day produce and support for the citizens. Finally, there was a commercial centre. Though called the ‘harbour’, this area was where overland commerce was handled and where foreign as well as native merchants lived. The very names of cities are believed in many cases to have referred to their visual appearance.16

  In these first cities, much life revolved around the temple. People associated with the cult were the most prominent members of society.17 At Eridu and Uruk the existence of temple platforms shows that there was already sufficient communal organisation to construct such buildings–after the megaliths these are the next great examples of monumental architecture.18 As time went by, these platforms were raised ever higher, eventually becoming stepped or terraced towers crowned by shrines. These are known as ziggurats, a word based on the Assyrian, and probably on an earlier Akkadian term, zigguaratu, meaning summit or mountain top.19 This increasingly elaborate structure had to be maintained, which required a highly organised cult.

  The temples were so important–and so large–that they played a central role in the economic life of the early cities. Records from the temple of Baba (or Bau), a goddess of Lagash, show that shortly before 2400 BC the temple estates were more than a square mile in extent. The land was used for every kind of agricultural use and supported as many as 1,200 people in the service of the temple. There were specialist bakers, brewers, wool workers, spinners and weavers, as well as slaves and an administrative staff.20 The tenant farmers were not slaves exactly; instead, their relation to the temple seems to have been an early form of feudalism.21 In addition to the new specialisations already mentioned, we may include the barber, the jeweller or metal-worker, the costumier and cloth merchant, the laundryman, the brick makers, the ornamental gardener, the ferryman, the ‘sellers of songs’ and the artist. From our point of view the most important specialist was the scribe.

  The origin of writing is a contentious issue at the moment, for there are three possibilities. For many years it was assumed that the cuneiform script of Mesopotamia was the earliest true writing, but it was associated with a problem. Cuneiform consists of more or less abstract signs, whereas many people thought that writing proper would show a stronger link with paintings, or pictographs–symbols that were part pictures of objects and part symbols. This is where the work of archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat comes in.

  In the late 1960s she noticed that thousands of ‘rather mundane clay objects’ had been found throughout the ancient Near East and regarded as insignificant by most archaeologists. Schmandt-Besserat thought otherwise, that they might have formed an ancient system that had been overlooked. She therefore visited various collections of these ‘tokens’, as she called them, in the Near East, North Africa, Europe and America.22 In the course of her study, she found that the tokens were sometimes geometrical in form–spheres, tetrahedrons, cylinders–while others were in the shape of animals, tools or vessels. She came to realise that they were the first clay objects to have been hardened by fire. Whatever they were, a lot of effort had gone into their manufacture. Whatever they were, they were not mundane. Eventually, she came across an account of a hollow tablet found at Nuzi, a site in northern Iraq and dated to the second millennium BC. The cuneiform inscription said: ‘Counters representing small cattle: 21 ewes that lamb, 6 female lambs, 8 full-grown male sheep…’ and so on. When the tablet had been opened, inside were found forty-nine counters, exactly the number of cattle in the written list.23 For Schmandt-Besserat, this was ‘like a Rosetta stone’. For the next fifteen years she examined more than 10,000 tokens, and came to the conclusion that they comprised a primitive accounting system and one which led to the creation of writing. Words, in a sense, began with numbers. This is, after all, what writing is, a form of communication which allows the two communicating parties to be spatially and temporally separated.

  The first tokens dated to 8000–4300 BC and were fairly plain and not very varied. They were found in such sites as Tepe Asiab in Iran (c. 7900–7700 BC), where the people still lived mainly by hunting and gathering. Beginning around 4400 BC, more complex tokens appeared, mainly in connection with temple activity. The different types represented different objects: for example, cones appear to have represented grain, an ovoid stood for a jar of oil, while cylinders stood for domestic animals.24 The tokens caught on because they removed the need to remember certain things, and they removed the need for a spoken language, so for that reason could be used between people who spoke different tongues. They came into use because of a change in social and economic structure. As trade increased between villages, the headman would have needed to keep a record of who had produced what.

  The complex tokens appear to have been introduced into Susa, the main city of Elam (southern Iran), and Uruk, and seem to have been a result of the need to account for goods produced in the city’s workshops (most were found in public rather than private buildings). The tokens also provided a new and more accurate way to assess and record taxes. They were kept together in one of two ways. They were either strung together or, more importantly from our point of view, enclosed in clay envelopes. It was on the outside of these envelopes that marks were made, to record what was inside and who was involved. And although this chronology has recently been queried by French scholars, this still seems to be the best explanation for how cuneiform script came about. Of course, the new system quickly made the tokens themselves redundant, with the result that the impressions in the clay had rep
laced the old system by about 3500–3100 BC. The envelopes became tablets and the way was open for the development of full-blown cuneiform.25

  A system of marks, of more or less geometric lines, whorls and squiggles, has been found on a number of tablets, figurines, pottery, and amulets in south-east Europe, in Romania and Bulgaria in what is known as the Vinca culture. Associated with undoubted pictographs–goats, animal heads, ears of corn–these were found in burial and apparently sacrificial contexts, dating from c. 4000 BC. The Gradesnica Plaque, discovered in Vratsa in western Bulgaria in 1969, is even older, dating to 7,000–6,000 years ago.26 The signs associated with this Vinca culture have been analysed according to which type of artefact they appear on–amulets or pottery, for example. The analysis has shown that their distribution is consistent. There is a corpus of 210 signs, forming just five core groups: straight lines, crosses, chevrons, dots and curves. But these nowhere form texts. Instead, they seem to be symbolic designs, no doubt with religious rather than economic meanings. They comprise a form of proto-writing.

  Some scholars believe that the users of these ‘Old European’ scripts (to use Marija Gimbutas’ phrase) were forced out of their native lands by invading Indo-Europeans. Harald Haarman, of the University of Helsinki, is one of those who believes that the Old Europeans may have been driven to places like Crete. There, at Knossos and elsewhere, in the early twentieth century, Sir Arthur Evans and his colleagues uncovered a major civilisation–the Minoan, with Bull and Snake worship among its common features. But the Minoans also produced two scripts, known to us as Linear A and Linear B. The use of the term ‘Linear’ was originally Gimbutas’ idea, to stress the mainly linear (as opposed to pictographic) qualities of the Vinca signs. But while Linear B was famously deciphered by the English amateur, Michael Ventris, in the 1950s, and shown to be a form of Greek, Linear A has never been deciphered. Haarman suggests that this is because Linear A is not an Indo-European language at all but an ‘Old European’ one. Haarman says he has found fifty signs in Linear A that are identical with Old European (see Figure 3, opposite).

  The most recent candidate for the birth of writing takes us to India. There, traditionally, the earliest major civilisation was known as the Indus civilisation, the capitals of which were Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, dating back to 2300–1750 BC. In May 1999 it was announced that a tablet, 5,500 years old, and bearing an inscription, had been discovered at Harappa. A month later, another announcement claimed that the script had been deciphered. This script consisted of a double M, a Y, a lozenge with a dot at its centre, a second lozenge, somewhat deformed, and a V. According to Drs Jha and Rajaram, this means ‘It irrigates the sacred land.’ The language is allegedly ‘pre-Harappan’, much more primitive than other Indus seals. Four other examples have been found in the region. The Indian scholars believe that this script, like other primitive scripts elsewhere, does not use vowels, though in this case the use of double consonants, as in the double M, is meant to indicate vowels. In other words, it shows early writing in the course of evolution. Scholars associated with the discovery believe this is enough to move the ‘cradle of civilisation’ from Mesopotamia to the Indus region.27 These are the latest researches, and in time they may well change the way we think about origins. For the present, however, the Vinca markings do not comprise full-blown scripts, while the tablets discovered in and around the Indus region are only a handful of examples. While undoubtedly intriguing, even promising, we must await further discoveries before abandoning Mesopotamia–and cuneiform–as the earliest example of true writing.

  Figure 3: Signs common to Old European script and Linear A

  [Source: Richard Rudgley, Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, New York, The Free Press, 1999, page 70]

  Cuneiform script has been known about since the late seventeenth century. Partially successful attempts to decipher it were made in 1802 and again in 1846. But a complete understanding of Babylonian culture was only possible after the discoveries of a ‘footloose young Englishman’, a newly-qualified solicitor, Austin Henry Layard. On his way overland to Ceylon (as Sri Lanka then was), he stopped off in the Middle East and got no further than western Persia (now Iran). ‘After undertaking some unofficial intelligence work for the British Ambassador in Istanbul, he won his backing for a period of excavation in Iraq, where he chose a huge mound called Nimrud, twenty miles south of Mosul.’28 Though he was not a trained archaeologist (hardly anybody was in those days), Layard was blessed with luck. He discovered a series of huge slabs, great limestone bulls up to fourteen feet high, images so striking that his account of his researches became a best-seller. But Layard also found many examples of what appeared to be wedge-shaped inscriptions on stone, and the dating of the site–3500–3000 BC–made this the earliest known form of writing. Sumerian was not finally understood until the twentieth century but once it was, the discoveries came thick and fast.29

  Our new understanding shows that there were in Mesopotamia several forms of ‘proto-writing’ in use before writing proper. Of these, stone cylinder seals were both more permanent and at the same time more flexible versions of the clay ‘envelopes’ examined by Schmandt-Besserat. The seal itself took the form of a hollow cylinder, on which was inscribed a set of engravings. The cylindrical seal would be rolled over wet clay, which therefore reproduced the engraved inscription as a reversed, embossed image.30 The clay seals were used everywhere: they could be moulded over the knot of a rope tied around a bundle; or over the rope fastening of a door. The idea was that the seal should bear a clear mark, identifying its owner.31 Like the clay envelopes studied by Schmandt-Besserat, seals were instruments of economic control, guaranteeing the supervision of proceedings, or confirming that a transaction had taken place. In practice, the Sumerians produced some very imaginative devices with which to identify owners: worshipping at a temple, processions of boats, prisoners before a ruler, the feeding of animals. They were, in effect, pictographical signatures.32 Later, a new type of seal emerged, produced by cutting machines. This clearly suggests that trade was increasing and that the need for identifying marks was likewise growing.

  So much for proto-writing. But cuneiform actually developed out of the archaic Uruk pictographic system, which took over many of the signs used with the earlier tokens, such as the sign for sheep, and wavy lines for water. The birth of writing proper is clearly shown by the use the first scribes made of the so-called ‘bevel-rimmed’ bowls of Uruk. These were cheap, coarse and very porous. They could not have been made to hold water and yet they were so common that, at some sites, they made up three-quarters of the pottery found. The fact that they were so porous–suitable only for containing solid matter–and were all the same size, provides a key to their use. Texts that have been deciphered tell us that the workers of Uruk, at least the workers on the large temple projects, were paid in kind–i.e., with a daily ration of food. Since the bulk of the workers’ rations would have been grain, it stands to reason that these were the ‘standard’ bowls by which the workers were paid.33

  Shown in Figure 4, opposite, is the very ancient sign for ‘eat’. This quite clearly shows a head, with an open mouth, receiving food from one of these ‘bevel-rimmed bowls’. It was, in other words, a picture, or pictograph. Many other words began as pictographs, too (see Figure 5, opposite).

  Figure 4: A bevel-rimmed bowl and the early sign for ‘to eat’ (left); as it begins to be represented in early cuneiform (right)34

  [Source: Hans J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East: 9000–2000 BC, translated by Elizabeth Lutzeier with Kenneth J. Northcott. © 1988 by the University of Chicago]

  This was only the beginning. Just as cylinder seals became simpler and easier to mass-produce–to cope with busy life–so too did writing evolve. Writing on moist clay made it awkward to draw these images clearly and quickly (a problem which the Egyptians never had, with their smooth, dry surfaces, which is why they stuck with hieroglyphics), and so signs, words, became more abstract, fewer, ali
gned much more in the same direction, all developments that enabled the speed of writing to be increased. Figure 6 on page 82 shows how a few words changed in appearance, over a millennium and more, from the earliest days in Uruk, to the height of Ur’s power, that is, between c. 3800–3200 and c. 2800–2100 BC. We still don’t know why the images were turned through ninety degrees, but this would surely have made the images less legible and that in turn may have provoked a more simple way of writing. Circular and curved marks were always more difficult to produce in wet clay and this is why cuneiform emerged as a system of simple strokes and wedges. The repertoire of signs was reduced and homogenised by the first third of the third millennium.

  Figure 5: Early pictographs: (a) a group of reeds; (b) an ear of corn; (c) a fish; (d) a goat; (e) a bird; (f) a human head; (g) a form of pot; (h) a palm tree; (i) a ziggurat35

  [Source: H. W. F. Saggs, Civilisation Before Greece and Rome, London: B. T. Batsford, 1989, page 62]