The development of civilization meant more than social and technological innovations. It required the acquisition of complex cognitive processes. In particular, the ability to manipulate data abstractly was key to the development of urban society. This is illustrated by the evolution of artifacts for counting and accounting associated with the rise of the very first civilization in Sumer, Mesopotamia, about 3300-3100 B.C. Here, the development of a system of clay tokens and its final transmutation into writing on clay tablets document the importance for an administration to process large amounts of information in ever greater abstraction (Schmandt-Besserat 1992). Tokens and economic clay tablets made it possible to levy taxes and impose forced labor; in other words, they gave the temple institutional control over manpower and the production of real goods. The accumulation of wealth in the hands of a ruling priesthood bolstered the development of monumental architecture and the arts. More importantly, the temple economy fostered long distance trade and critical industries such as metallurgy (Moorey 1985). In turn, metal tools revolutionized crafts. For example, metal saws could cut wooden planks into circular shapes, allowing such inventions as the wheel (Littauer and Crauwel 1979). Metal weapons transformed warfare, leading to conquests far and near that could be administered with tokens and economic tablets (Algaze 1993). Finally, tokens and writing fostered new cognitive skills and thereby transformed the way people thought (Schmandt-Besserat 1996).
Starting with the beginning of agriculture ca. 8000 B.C., clay tokens of multiple shapes were used for counting and accounting goods. They were the first code or system for storing/communicating information: each token shape represented one unit of merchandise, for example, a cone and a sphere stood, respectively, for a small and a large measure of grain, and an ovoid for a jar of oil (figure 1). The tokens represent a first stage of abstraction. They translated daily-life commodities into miniature, mostly geometric counters, removing the data from its context and the knowledge from the knower. However, the clay counters represented plurality concretely, in one-to-one correspondence. Three jars of oil were shown by three ovoids, as in reality.
Figure 1. Tokens held in an envelope from Susa, present-day Iran, ca. 3300 b.c. The large and small cones stood for large and small measures of grain and each of the lenticular disks represented a flock of animals (10?). The markings impressed on the outside of the envelope correspond to the tokens inside. Both tokens and impressed markings represented units of goods concretely, in one-to-one correspondence. Published in Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1992), Before Writing, vol. 1. Austin: University of Texas Press, p. 126, fig. 73. Courtesy Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités Orientales.
About 3500-3300 B.C., envelopes in the form of hollow clay balls were invented to keep in temple archives the tokens representing unfinished transactions (tax debts?). For convenience, the accountants indicated the tokens hidden inside the envelopes by impressing them on the outside. The two-dimensional markings standing for three-dimensional tokens represented a second step of abstraction. A third level of abstraction was reached ca. 3200 - 3100 B.C., when solid clay balls -- tablets -- did away with the actual tokens, only displaying the impressions. The impressed markings still represented numbers of units of goods concretely, in one-to-one correspondence. Three jars of oil were shown by three impressions of the ovoid token. Each impressed marking therefore continued to fuse together the concept of the item counted (jar of oil) with that of number (one), without the possibility of dissociating them.
The fourth step, the abstraction of numbers, ca. 3100 B.C., coincided with pictography -- signs in the shape of tokens but traced with a stylus, rather than impressed. These incised signs were never repeated in one-to-one correspondence. Numbers of jars of oil were shown by the sign for jar of oil preceded by numerals (figure 2). The symbols to express abstract numbers were not new. They were the former units of grain: the impression of a cone token that formerly was a small measure of grain stood for 1 and that of a sphere representing a large measure of grain was 10. When, finally, the concept of number was abstracted from that of the item counted, numerals and writing could evolve in separate ways. Abstract numerals grew to unprecedented large numbers, paving the way for mathematics and thereby providing a new grasp on reality (Justus 1996). Pictographs assumed a phonetic value in order to satisfy new administrative demands, namely, the personal names of recipients or donors of the stipulated goods. The syllables or words composing an individual's name were rendered in a rebus fashion. That is to say, a new type of pictographs no longer stood for the objects they pictured, but rather for the sound of the word they evoked. This fifth step in abstraction marked the final departure from the previous token system. The phonetic signs featured any possible items, such as the head of a man standing for the sound "lu" or that of a man's mouth that was read "ka." This further abstraction also marked the true takeoff of writing. The resulting syllabary was no longer restricted to economic record keeping but opened ca. 2900 B.C. to other fields of human endeavor. In sum, in Mesopotamia, the earliest civilization corresponded with the transmutation of an archaic token system of accounting into a script written on clay tablets. The metamorphosis meant far more than the reduction from a three- to a two-dimensional recording device. It signified step-by-step acquisition of new cognitive skills for processing data in greater abstraction.
Figure 2. Economic clay tablet showing an account of thirty-three jars of oil, from Godin Tepe, present-day Iran, ca. 3100 BC. The units of oil are no longer repeated in one-to-one correspondence, but the sign for a measure of oil is preceded by numerals. The circular sign stood for 10 and the wedge for 1. Published in Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1992), Before Writing, vol. 1. Austin: University of Texas Press, p. 192, fig. 115. Courtesy T. Cuyler Young, Jr.
Artifacts for counting and writing were also part and parcel of the rise of all subsequent Near Eastern civilizations. However, the cultures following in the wake of Sumer were spared some of the hurdles to abstract data manipulation. Elam, in present-day western Iran, the nearest neighbor to Mesopotamia, is the only exception where the stages from tokens to impressed markings on envelopes and tablets took place synchronically with Mesopotamia -- no doubt because of the Sumerian domination of Elam ca. 3300-3200 B.C. But, when the Proto-Elamites created their own script ca. 3000 B.C., they borrowed simultaneously abstract numerals and phonetic signs (Hoyrup 1994). About 2500 B.C., the Indus Valley civilizations emulated their Sumerian trade partners by devising a script that had no links with the Mesopotamian-like tokens recovered in pre-Harappan sites (Possehl 1996). Crete probably adopted first the idea of tokens and then that of writing. This is suggested by the fact that Minoan clay counters in the shape of miniature vessels seem unrelated to the following hieroglyphic, Linear A or B scripts used in the Aegean between 2200 - 1300 B.C. (Poursat 1994). Farther afield, Egypt, where the use of tokens is not clearly attested, produced ca. 3000 B.C. a full-blown system of writing based on the rebus principle, visibly imitating Sumer (Ray 1986). These examples imply that the multiple cognitive steps from concrete to abstract data manipulation occurred only once in the Near East. The Mesopotamian concrete tokens and abstract tablets loomed large over the process of civilization in the Old World. In fact, abstract accounting is probably a universal prerequisite for civilization. But this has to remain an hypothesis as long as the precursors of writing in China and the New World remain elusive.
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