Fwd: Who Started to Write?

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w008...

Apr 6 1999, 12:00 pm

Who Started to Write?

soc.culture.iranian

 

 

I don't care what these experts say. They have paychecks to draw and

tend to complicate things so they can create work and paychecks. To me

it is obvious that writing started first as a databasing device. As

soon

as man's command of property and possessions exceeded his memory's

capability, of course he started to take " written " notes of them. Then

as such databasings turned into small and later larger businesses,

writing such notes became something you had to standardize between you

and a number of other firms that had deals and trade with you, and you

had to teach the standardized form to others. Later its purpose was

also

spread from databasing of the possessions to doing anything at all

that

was demanded of businesses and government of those days. I have no

doubt

this was the course of development of this technique and it would come

sooner or later anywhere in the world after introduction of

agriculture.

There's nothing ancient about it either. Just go to a village no

matter

if you are in USA or Iran, and you still find present-day human for

whom

writing is as strange and impossible a thing as for a Sumerian who

didn't know it 4000 years back. It is also not just writing that has

this feature. Many things our brains are capable of doing and we don't

even know. If those who know try words to convince you that you can,

it

won't work. For instance driving a bicycle is one, or writing and

reading a note Or knowing that Baha'is are backward.

 

On Tue, 06 Apr 1999 10:42:51 GMT, iran_cour... in the

 

message <7ecofa$kh... wrote:

>When No One Read, Who Started to Write?

>By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

 

>04/06/99 The New York Times

 

>PHILADELPHIA -- The Sumerians had a story to explain their invention of

>writing more than 5,000 years ago. It seems a messenger of the king of Uruk

>arrived at the court of a distant ruler so exhausted from the journey that he

>was unable to deliver the oral message. So the king, being clever, came up

>with a solution. He patted some clay and set down the words of his next

>messages on a tablet.

 

>A Sumerian epic celebrates the achievement:

 

>Before that time writing on clay had not yet existed,

 

>But now, as the sun rose, so it was!

 

>The king of Kullaba [uruk] had set words on a tablet, so it was!

 

>A charming just-so, or so-it-was, story, its retelling at a recent symposium

>on the origins or writing, held here at the University of Pennsylvania, both

>amused and frustrated scholars. It reminded them that they could expect

>little help -- only a myth -- from the Sumerians themselves, presumably the

>first writing people, in understanding how and why the invention responsible

>for the great divide in human culture between prehistory and history had come

>about.

 

>The archeologists, historians and other scholars at the meeting smiled at the

>absurdity of a king's writing a letter that its recipient could not read. They

>also doubted that the earliest writing was a direct rendering of speech.

>Writing more than likely began as a separate and distinct symbolic system of

>communication, like painting, sculpture and oral storytelling, and only later

>merged with spoken language.

 

>Yet in the story, the Sumerians, who lived in Mesopotamia, the lower valley of

>the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, seemed to

>understand writing's transforming function. As Dr.HollyPittman, director of

>the university's Center for Ancient Studies and organizer of the symposium,

>observed, writing ''arose out of the need to store information and transmit

>information outside of human memory and over time and over space.''

 

>In exchanging interpretations and new information, the scholars acknowledged

>that they still had no fully satisfying answers to the most important

>questions of exactly how and why writing was developed. Many of them favored

>a broad explanation of writing's origins in the visual arts, pictograms of

>things being transformed into increasingly abstract symbols for things, names

>and eventually words in speech. Their views clashed with a widely held theory

>among archeologists that writing grew out of the pieces of clay in assorted

>sizes and shapes that Sumerian accountants had used as tokens to keep track

>of livestock and stores of grain.

 

>The scholars at the meeting also conceded that they had no definitive answer

>to the question of whether writing was invented only once and spread

>elsewhere or arose independently several times in several places, like Egypt,

>the Indus Valley, China and among the Olmecs and Maya of Mexico and Central

>America. But they criticized recent findings suggesting that writing might

>have developed earlier in Egypt than in Mesopotamia.

 

>In December, Dr. Gunter Dreyer, director of the German Archeological Institute

>in Egypt, announced new radiocarbon dates for tombs at Abydos, on the Nile

>about 250 miles south of Cairo. The dates indicated that some hieroglyphic

>inscriptions on pots, bone and ivory in the tombs were made at least as early

>as 3200 B.C., possibly 3400. It was now an ''open question,'' Dr. Dreyer said,

>whether writing appeared first in Egypt or Mesopotamia.

 

>At the symposium, Dr. John Baines, an Oxford University Egyptologist who had

>just visited Dr. Dreyer, expressed skepticism in polite terms. ''I'm

>suspicious of the dates,'' he said in an interview. ''I think he's being very

>bold in his readings of these things.''

 

>The preponderance of archeological evidence has shown that the urbanizing

>Sumerians were the first to develop writing, in 3200 or 3300 B.C. These are

>the dates for many clay tablets with a proto-cuneiform script found at the

>site of the ancient city of Uruk. The tablets bore pictorial symbols for the

>names of people, places and things for governing and commerce. The Sumerian

>script gradually evolved from the pictorial to the abstract, but it was

>probably at least five centuries before the writing came to represent

>recorded spoken language.

 

>Egyptian hieroglyphics are so different from Sumerian cuneiform, Dr. Baines

>said, that they were probably invented independently not long after Sumerian

>writing. If anything, the Egyptians may have gotten the idea of writing from

>the Sumerians, with whom they had contacts in Syria, but nothing more.

 

>In any event, the writing idea became more widespread at the beginning of the

>third millennium B.C. The Elamites of southern Iran developed a proto-writing

>system then, perhaps influenced by the proto-cuneiform of their Sumerian

>neighbors, and before the millennium was out, writing appeared in the Indus

>River Valley of what is now Pakistan and westernIndia, then in Syria and

>Crete and parts of Turkey. Writing in China dates back to the Shang period

>toward the end of the second millennium B.C., and it dates to the first

>millennium B.C. in Mesoamerica.

 

>Archeologists have thought that the undeciphered Indus script, which seemed

>to appear first around 2500 B.C., may have been inspired in part from trade

>contacts with Mesopotamia. But new excavations in the ruins of the ancient

>city of Harappa suggest an earlier and presumably independent origin of Indus

>writing.

 

>In a report from the field, distributed on the Internet, Dr. Jonathan Mark

>Kenoyer of the University of Wisconsin and Dr. Richard H. Meadow of Harvard

>University showed pictures of marks incised on potshards that they

>interpreted as evidence for the use of writing signs by Indus people as early

>as 3300 B.C. If these are indeed proto-writing examples, the discovery

>indicates an independent origin of Indus writing contemporary with the

>Sumerian and Egyptian inventions.

 

>Dr. Meadow, using E-mail, the electronic age's version of the king of Uruk's

>clay tablet, confirmed that the inscribed marks were ''similar in some

>respects to those later used in the Indus script.'' The current excavations,

>he added, were uncovering ''very significant findings at Harappa with respect

>to the Indus script.''

 

>At the symposium, though, Dr. Gregory L. Possehl, a Pennsylvania archeologist

>who specializes in the Indus civilization and had examined the pictures,

>cautioned against jumping to such conclusions. One had to be careful, he said,

>not to confuse potter's marks, graffiti and fingernail marks with symbols of

>nascent writing.

 

>Of the earliest writing systems, scholars said, only the Sumerian, Chinese and

>Mesoamerican ones seemed clearly to be independent inventions. Reviewing the

>relationship between early Chinese bronze art, ''oracle bones'' and writing,

>Dr. Louisa Huber, a researcher at Harvard's Fairbanks Center for East Asian

>Research, concluded, ''Chinese writing looks to be pristine.''

 

>But few pronouncements about early writing go undisputed. Dr. Victor Mair, a

>professor of Chinese language at Penn, offered evidence indicating, he said,

>that ''the Chinese writing system may well have received vital inputs from

>West Asian and European systems of writing and proto-writing.''

 

>Dr. Mair cited an intriguing correspondence between the Chinese script and 22

>Phoenician letters and also Western-like symbols on pottery and the bodies of

>mummies found in the western desert of China. The recent discoveries of the

>mummies, wearing garments of Western weaves and having Caucasoid facial

>features, have prompted theories of foreign influences on Chinese culture in

>the first and second millennia B.C. It had already been established that the

>chariot and bronze metallurgy reached China from the West.

 

>Though no one seemed ready to endorse his thesis, Dr. Mair said, ''We simply

>do not know for certain whether the Chinese script was or was not

>independently created.''

 

>Dr. Peter Damerow, a specialist in Sumerian cuneiform at the Max Planck

>Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, said, ''Whatever the mutual

>influences of writing systems of different cultures may be, their

 

....

 

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