How Writing Came About

Abstract

Reviewed by: How Writing Came About * Edward Wachtel (bio) How Writing Came About. By Denise Schmandt-Besserat. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Pp. xii+193; figures, notes, index. $19.95. It is a joy to watch a good mind at work. It is a special pleasure when the work is significant and difficult, when the question addressed has a fundamental importance for understanding ourselves and our history, and when the answers must be wrested from evidence that is lost, or partial, or never existed. Such is the experience of reading Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s How Writing Came About. The book is an abridged version of her two-volume work Before Writing, and is intended for a general audience. The question Schmandt-Besserat asks is, How did writing begin in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium b.c.? Her problem is to find evidence for the invention of a technology that marks the beginning of history and that itself is the principal technology of evidence creation and storage. More than twenty years ago, Schmandt-Besserat found her first evidence in the clay tokens and envelopes unearthed from more than one hundred archaeological sites in the Near East. The tokens are marble-sized objects manufactured in a variety of geometric shapes. Groups of tokens have been discovered sealed inside clay envelopes. Building on the work of others, Schmandt-Besserat realized that the tokens and the envelopes represented a concrete system of accounting, utilized from about 8000 b.c. to 3000 b.c. The accounting system was straightforward. Each token stood for an item or a conventional quantity. For example, one spherical token represented a measure of grain, while an ovoid represented a jar of oil, and a cylinder might stand for a goat. Groups of tokens, in clay envelopes or strung together, served to keep track of stored or traded merchandise or herds of animals. The system was concrete, that is, each token represented one sheep or one jar, not the abstract number “1.” Schmandt-Besserat builds a substantial case for an evolution from token use to writing on tablets. First, tokens were used to impress their own shapes [End Page 128] into the clay surface of the envelopes to indicate, in a one-to-one correspondence, the number and type of tokens contained inside the envelope. Next, people used tokens to impress their shapes directly onto tablets. At this stage, the impression replaced the token as the direct sign for the merchandise or livestock. Finally, late in the fourth millennium b.c., a stylus was used to incise the image of the token on a tablet, making tokens obsolete even as tools to stamp their own impressions. We have arrived at an important point in her story: The concrete elements of cuneiform writing—stylus and tablet—were in place. So was one of the abstractions necessary for a protowriting system—an inscribed sign or pictograph was understood to represent an object. Schmandt-Besserat traces the development of abstract counting (the use of signs to represent the concepts of “oneness,” “twoness,” “threeness,” etc., separate from the actual things being counted). Consequently, a sign that originally stood for “one jar of oil” was replaced by two signs, one for the quantity, one for the jar of oil. Further abstraction led to the use of three signs, one for the quantity, one for the jar, and a third for the oil. The author argues that the progressive abstraction represented by the development of numeracy leads rather easily to true writing, but it is here that her analysis begins to weaken. This type of abstraction is only one of the conceptual inventions necessary for a true writing system. She recognizes, along with I. J. Gelb, that a true writing system requires signs that represent speech sounds rather than the material things of the visual world. A pictograph system (i.e., a system in which signs stand for visual images) cannot assert, negate, propose, or establish temporality or tense. Only language, with its conventional grammar, syntax, and meanings, can express the range of human experience. Only a script that encodes aural language can express this range in visual form and thus be considered a true writing...