In other words, in China the earliest tales of royal succession show, not a desperate quest for a blood heir, but sons disinherited in favor of virtue. They celebrate kingly power while rejecting too heavy an exercise of it. Authority is all very well, but no man should assume that he’ll automatically be gifted with it because of his birth. Wisdom, not birth, qualifies a man to rule. The people of Kish may have mourned because their king Etana was childless. The towns of the Yellow river valley had no such longing.15
Part Two
FIRSTS
Chapter Seven
The First Written Records
Between 3800 and 2400 BC Sumerians and Egyptians begin to use seals and signs
WRITTEN HISTORY BEGAN sometime around 3000 BC. At the beginning of that millennium, there were only two things important enough to communicate across space and time: the deeds of great men, and the ownership of cows, grain, and sheep. In the cities of Sumer, a great epic literature started to form, and a bureaucracy coalesced to take care of the bean counting.
People being what they are, the bureaucracy came first. The genesis of writing lay, not in the celebration of the human spirit, but in the need to say with certainty: This is mine, not yours. But as they evolved their artificial code for keeping track of possessions, the accountants gave a gift to the storytellers: a way to make their heroes immortal. From its earliest days, literature was tied to commerce.
SINCE THE DAYS of cave paintings, people have made marks to keep count of objects. We can call these marks the seeds of writing, since a mark means not Here is a mark, but something else. But the marks do not reach beyond space and time. They are voiceless unless the maker of the marks is standing there, explaining: This line is a cow; this one, an antelope; these are my children.
In Sumer, the use of marks took a step forwards. Very early, a Sumerian who owned valuable resources (grain, or milk, or perhaps oil) would tie closed his bag of grain, smooth a ball of clay over the knot, and then press his seal on it. The seal, square or cylindrical, was carved with a particular design. When the ball of clay dried, the mark of the owner (This is mine!) was locked into the clay. The mark represented the owner’s presence. It watched over the grain while he was absent.
These seals, like the marks made by the cave-painter, depended on shared knowledge. Everyone who saw the seal had to know whose presence the mark represented, before it could convey the message This belongs to Ilshu. But unlike the cave-painter’s mark, a seal was distinctive. A mark could mean woman or sheep, man or cow. A seal—once you knew the meaning of it—could represent only one Sumerian: Ilshu. Ilshu no longer needed to be present to explain it.
A step had been made towards triumphing over space.
Perhaps simultaneously, another type of sign came into use. Like the cave-painters, the Sumerians used marks and tallies to keep track of the number of cows (or sacks of grain) that they owned. The tallies that counted their belongings were often stored on small clay circles (“counters”). These counters had been used for as long as farmers owned cows: perhaps for centuries. But sometime before 3000 BC, the richest Sumerians (those with many, many counters to keep track of) laid their counters out on a thin sheet of clay, folded the sheet up around them, and placed a seal on the seam. When the clay dried, it formed a kind of envelope.
Unfortunately, the only way to open the envelope was to break the clay, in which case (unlike a padded paper mailer) it was unusable. The more economical way to keep track of how many counters were inside the envelope was to keep a new tally on the outside, showing how many counters were inside.
Now the marks on the outside of the “envelope” represented counters inside, which had on them marks representing cows. In other words, the outside marks were two removes away from the objects represented. The relationship between thing and mark had begun to grow more abstract.1
The next advance was to move beyond the simple mark altogether. As the Sumerian cities grew, ownership became more complex. More kinds of things could be owned and transferred to others. Now, the accountants needed something more than marks. They needed pictograms—representations of the things counted—as well as tallies.
The pictograms used became increasingly simplified. For one thing, they were generally drawn on clay, which doesn’t lend itself to careful detail. And it was time-consuming to draw a realistic cow, every time a cow was needed, when everyone looking at the tablet knew perfectly well that a square with a rudimentary head and tail meant cow; just as a child’s stick figure is obviously Mommy, even though unrecognizable (and barely human), because Mommy is, after all, standing right there.
This was still a marking system. It doesn’t quite deserve the name writing just yet. On the other hand, it was a marking system that had grown more and more complex.
Then the seal reappeared, this time conveying a whole new message. Ilshu, who once used his seal only to mark his grain and oil, could now set it at the bottom of a tablet which recorded, in pictographs, the sale of cows from the neighbor on the left to his neighbor on his right. Not trusting each other entirely, the two asked him to be present at the sale; he put his seal on the tablet as a witness to the transaction. At the bottom of the tablet, Ilshu’s design no longer says Ilshu was here, or even This is Ilshu’s. It says Ilshu, who was here, watched this transaction and can explain it, if you have any questions.
That is no longer simply a mark. It is a speech to the reader.
Until this point, Sumerian “writing” depended on the good memories of everyone involved; it was more like a string tied around the finger than a developed system of symbols. But cities traded, the economy grew, and now those clay tablets needed to bear more information than the number and kind of goods traded. Farmers and merchants needed to record when fields were planted, and with what kind of grain; which servants had been sent on what errands; how many cows had been sent to the Temple of Enlil, in exchange for divine favor, in case the priests miscounted; how much tribute had been sent to the king, in case he miscounted and demanded more. To convey this level of information, the Sumerians needed signs that would stand for words, not just for things. They needed a pictogram for cow, but also signs for sent or bought; a pictogram for wheat, but also signs for planted or destroyed.
As the need for signs multiplied, the written code could take one of two directions. Signs could multiply, each standing for yet another individual word. Or pictograms could evolve into a phonetic system, so that signs could represent sounds, parts of words rather than words themselves; in this way, any number of words could be built from a limited number of signs. After all, whenever a Sumerian saw the pictogram for cow and formed his lips into the Sumerian word for cow, sounds were involved. It was not such a stretch for the pictogram for cow to become, eventually, a sign representing the first sound in the word cow. It could then be used as the beginning sign in a whole series of words that all began with the cow sound.
Over the course of at least six hundred years, Sumerian pictograms took this second road and evolved into phonetic symbols.16 These symbols, made in wet clay by a stylus with a wedge-shaped edge, had a distinctive shape, wider at the top than at the bottom of the incision. What the Sumerians called their writing, we will never know. It is almost impossible to recognize a world-changing technology in its very earliest stages, and the Sumerians did not remark on their own innovation. But in 1700 an Old Persian scholar named Thomas Hyde gave the writing the name cuneiform, which we still use. The name, derived from the Latin for “wedge-shaped,” does nothing to recognize the importance of the script. Hyde thought that the pretty signs on clay were some sort of decorative border.
7.1. Cuneiform Tablet. This cuneiform tablet, from around 2600 BC, records the sale of a house and field. Louvre, Paris. Photo credit Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY
IN EGYPT, pictograms came into use slightly later than they did in Sumer. They were already common by the time Egypt became an empire. On the Narmer Palette, just to the right of King Narmer’s head lies th
e pictogram for catfish; it is Narmer’s name, written on his portrait.
Egyptian pictograms, which we now call hieroglyphs, don’t seem to have evolved from a counting system. Most likely, the Egyptians learned the technique of pictograms from their neighbors to the northeast. But unlike Sumerian cuneiform signs, which lost their resemblance to the original pictograms, Egyptian hieroglyphs retained their recognizable form for a very long time. Even after the hieroglyphs became phonetic signs, standing for sounds and not objects, they were recognizable as things: a man with hands raised, a shepherd’s crook, a crown, a hawk. Hieroglyphic script was a mixed bag. Some of the signs remained pictograms, while others were phonetic symbols; sometimes a hawk sign stood for a sound, but sometimes it was just a hawk. So the Egyptians evolved something called a determinant, a sign placed next to a hieroglyph to show whether it served as a phonetic symbol or as a pictogram.
But neither hieroglyphic script nor cuneiform evolved into a fully phonetic form: into an alphabet.
Sumerian never had the chance. It was replaced by Akkadian, the language of Sumer’s conquerors, before its development was complete. Hieroglyphs, on the other hand, existed for thousands of years without losing their character as pictures. Probably this can be chalked up to the Egyptian attitude towards writing. For the Egyptians, writing brought immortality. It was a magic form in which the lines themselves carried life and power. Some hieroglyphs were too powerful to be carved in a magic place; they could only be written in a less powerful area, lest they bring unwanted forces into existence. The name of a king, carved in hieroglyph on a monument or statue, gave him a presence that went on past his death. To deface the carved name of a king was to kill him eternally.
The Sumerians, more practical, had no such purpose in their writing. Like the Egyptians, the Sumerians had a patron deity of scribes: the goddess Nisaba, who was also (so far as we can tell) the goddess of grain. But the Egyptians believed that writing had been invented by a god: by Thoth, the divine scribe, who created himself with the power of his own word. Thoth was the god of writing, but also the god of wisdom and magic. He measured the earth, counted the stars, and recorded the deeds of every man brought to the Hall of the Dead for judgment. He did not mess around counting bags of grain.
This attitude towards writing preserved the pictorial form of hieroglyphs, since the pictures themselves were thought to have such power. In fact, far from being phonetic, hieroglyphs were designed to be indecipherable unless you possessed the key to their meaning. The Egyptian priests, who were guardians of this information, patrolled the borders of their knowledge in order to keep this tool in their own hands. Ever since, the mastery of writing and reading has been an act of power.
As a matter of fact, hieroglyphs were so far from intuitive that the ability to read them began to fade even as Egypt still existed as a nation. We find Greek-speaking Egyptians, as late as AD 500, writing long explanations of the relationship between sign and meaning; Horapollo, for example, in his Hieroglyphika, explains the various meanings of the hieroglyph written as a vulture by desperately (and incorrectly) trying to figure out the relationship between sign and meaning. “When they mean a mother, a sight, or boundaries, or fore-knowledge,” Horapollo writes,
they draw a vulture. A mother, since there is no male in this species of animal…. the vulture stands for sight since of all other animals the vulturehas the keenest vision…. It means boundaries, because when a war is about to break out, it limits the place in which the battle will occur, hovering over it for seven days. [And] foreknowledge, because…it looks forward to the amount of corpses which the slaughter will provide it for food.2
Once the knowledge of hieroglyphs had disappeared entirely, the writing of the Egyptians remained obscure until a band of Napoleon’s soldiers, digging out the foundations of a fort Napoleon hoped to build in the Nile Delta, uncovered a seven-hundred-pound slab of basalt with the same inscription written in hieroglyphs, in a later Egyptian script, and also in Greek; this rock, which became known as the Rosetta Stone, gave linguistics the key they needed to begin to break the code. Thus the military establishment, which had already provided material for centuries of literary endeavor, helped recover the means of reading the earliest poems and epics. (Great literature has never been independent of war, any more than it can shake itself free from commerce.)
HIEROGLYPHS could preserve their magical and mysterious nature only because the Egyptians invented a new and easier script for day-to-day use. Hieratic script was a simplified version of hieroglyphic writing, with the careful pictorial signs reduced to a few quickly dashed lines (in W. V. Davies’s phrase, the “cursive version” of hieroglyphic script). Hieratic script became the preferred handwriting for business matters, bureaucrats, and administrators. Its existence depended on another Egyptian invention: paper. No matter how simple the lines were, they could not be written quickly on clay.
Clay had been the traditional writing material of both the Sumerians and the Egyptians for centuries. It was plentiful and reusable. The writing on a smooth-surfaced clay tablet that had been dried in the sun would last for years; but simply dampen the surface of the tablet, and the writing could be smoothed and altered, to correct or change a record. Records which had to be protected from tampering could be baked instead, fixing the marks into a permanent, unalterable archive.
But clay tablets were heavy, awkward to store, and difficult to carry from place to place, severely limiting the amount of writing in any message. (Think of it as the opposite phenomenon to the prolixity encouraged by word processors.) Sometime around 3000 BC, an Egyptian scribe realized that the papyrus used as a building material in Egyptian houses (reeds softened, laid out in a crossed pattern, mashed into pulp, and then laid out to dry in thin sheets) could also serve as a writing surface. With a brush and ink, hieratic script could be laid down very rapidly on papyrus.
Up in Sumer, where the raw material for such a substance didn’t exist, clay tablets continued in use for centuries. Fifteen hundred years later, when Moses led the Semitic descendants of the wanderer Abraham up out of Egypt into the dry wastes of the Near East, God carved their instructions on tablets of stone, not on paper. The Israelites had to build a special box for the stone tablets, which were hard to transport.
Paper, on the other hand, was much simpler to carry. Messages could be rolled up, stuffed under one’s coat or in one’s pocket. The widely separated bureaucrats of the Nile River valley needed some such simple method of communication between north and south; a messenger travelling up the Nile with forty pounds of clay tablets was at an obvious disadvantage.
The Egyptians embraced the new, efficient technology. Hieroglyphs continued to be carved on the stone walls of tombs and on monuments and statues. But letters and petitions and instructions and threats were written on papyrus—which dissolved when it got wet, and cracked when it grew old, and disintegrated into heaps of dust not long after.
Although we can trace the family difficulties of the Sumerian king Zimri-Lim on the unwieldy clay tablets that travelled back and forth between the sunbaked cities of Mesopotamia, we know very little about the daily life of pharaohs and their officials after the invention of papyrus. Their sorrows and urgent messages are lost; the careful histories of their scribes have disappeared without a trace, like electronic messages wiped clean. Thus, five thousand years ago, we have not only the first writing, but also the first technological advance to come back and bite mankind.
SUMERIAN CUNEIFORM died and was buried. But the lines of hieroglyphs have survived until the present day. A later form of writing, which we call Protosinaitic because it shows up in various places around the Sinai peninsula, borrowed almost half of its signs from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Protosinaitic, in turn, appears to have lent a few of its letters to the Phoenicians, who used it in their alphabet. The Greeks then borrowed the Phoenician alphabet, turned it sideways, and passed it on to the Romans, and thence to us; so that the magical signs of the Egyptians have, in fact
, come as close to immortality as any mortal invention that we know.
7.2. Alphabet Chart. The transformation of three letters from Egyptian to Latin. Credit Richie Gunn
Chapter Eight
The First War Chronicles
In Sumer, around 2700 BC, Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, conquers his neighbors
WHEN THE SUMERIANS began to use cuneiform, they moved from once upon a time into the knowable past. They began to set down accounts of battles won, trades negotiated, and temples built. The king list can now be elaborated by official tablets and inscriptions.
Epic tales, which often preserve the body of earthly accomplishments beneath the fancy dress of demonic opponents and supernatural powers, remain useful. But now we can anchor them in accounts which are intended to be more or less factual. Which is not to say that inscriptions display a new and startling objectivity; they were written by scribes who were paid by the kings whose achievements they recorded, which naturally tends to tilt them in the king’s favor. (According to Assyrian inscriptions, very few Assyrian kings ever lost a battle.) But by comparing the inscriptions made by two apparently victorious kings at war with each other, we can usually deduce which king actually won.
In Sumer, where civilization arose in order to keep the have-nots separate from the haves, battles between cities erupted sporadically from at least 4000 BC. From temple inscriptions, the king list, and a collection of tales, we can put together a story of one of the earliest series of battles: the first chronicles of a war.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 6
