Writing began simply enough: with
the need to count and keep track of things.[1]
Indeed, the first evidence of any form of writing is scratch marks used for
counting on a bone dating back 150,000 years and the first evidence of the
existence of a concept of a number [the number “one”] is likewise a bone dating to 20,000 years ago.[2][3][4]
As early as 8,000 BCE in Mesopotamia
between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, accounting was being done with clay
tokens in the shapes of different good that were later wrapped up in clay
balls. These clay balls were later marked with shapes representing those of the
tokens inside, indicating the number of each token contained. By the late
fourth millennium BCE, these token had been done away with all together in
favor of only the drawn shapes and the clay was flattened into tablets. The
shapes were imprinted into the clay with sharpened reeds, lending this writing
system its name: “Cuneiform”, meaning
“wedge-shaped”.[5]
Between 4,000 and 3,500 BCE, a
strikingly similar iconographic writing system, called “hieroglyphics” [Greek, meaning “sacred
engravings”] developed, as far as anyone knows independently, along the
Nile River in Africa. Like with cuneiform, some of the earliest hieroglyphic
tablets from Ancient Egypt, dating back to 3300-3200 BCE are written records of
wages, assets, taxes and tributes.[6]
It was in Egypt in the fourth millennium BCE that the manufacture of the first
form of paper, papyrus, [made from a woody swamp-dwelling aquatic flowering
Cyprus grass of the same name indigenous to Africa] first began.[7][8]
Strikingly
similar pictographic carvings have been discovered in China dating back to the
seventh millennium BCE and carvings have been discovered dating between 6000
and 5000 BCE resembling the pictographic representations in cuneiform of gods,
the sun and the moon.[9]
In
the third millennium BCE, these symbols grew into progressively more abstract
representations as the number of symbols expanded, with pictograms to indicate
names of gods, countries, cities, vessels, birds and trees. As such, the same
sign could have a variety of different meanings depending on the context in
which it was written. Simultaneously, all symbols were tilted ninety degrees on
their side and what had originally been relatively groupings of symbols
scratched on the clay balls containing the tokens transitions into horizontal
rows and lines of pictographs read from left to right. Many of the original
pictograms lost their original meaning as cuneiform transitioned into a
syllabic alphabet, with symbols representing sounds rather than actual objects.
As such, groupings of symbols together formed complete ideas. For example, the
symbols that had originally represented the head became the symbol for “mouth”,
which in turn combined with the symbol for “bread” to now form the verb “to
eat”. As such, eventually the number of symbols shrank back down again and by
the mid-third millennium BCE cuneiform had become the syllabic language that we
now call “Sumerian”. It was during the third millennium that what is by far the
most famous extant example of Sumerian cuneiform, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was first written down, as it features
prominently many of the aforementioned names of gods, kings and cities in their
syllabic form.
The
more abstract form of cuneiform is mirrored in another writing system that, again,
developed independently in Europe dating to the 6th millennium BCE.[10]
A
writing system that developed, once again as far we know independently, in the
Indus River Valley in 3500 BCE resembles the intermediate transitional stage
that Cuneiform went through between in the mid-third millennium [2800-2600 BCE]
original iconographic form and its later abstract alphabet.[11][12]
The
first evidence of the Chinese language and writing script, which is still in
use today, dates back to 1200 BCE.[13]
During the first millennium BCE, the Phoenicians developed the phonetic
alphabet, a descendant of which we use today.[14]
The
first evidence of writing in the Western Hemisphere, the as-yet-undeciphered
written script of the Olmecs of Mesoamerica, dating from 1500 BCE, bears a
striking resemblance to the original pictographic form of Cuneiform.[15][16]
A thousand years later, the Mesoamerican heirs of the Olmec civilization, the
Maya, adopted this script.[17][18]
Like cuneiform, the Mayan Glyphic script was read horizontally in rows from
left to right. As was the case with the original intent of the tokens from
which cuneiform evolved, the Mayans also used their glyphic writing system for
the purposes of counting.
Simultaneously,
in India, the Hindus were developing another writing system.[19]
From 1500 BCE, Hindu cosmology had been dealing in numbers as large as tens of
billions of years for the age of the universe.[20]
While in Mesopotamia the Sumerians had developed a sexigesimal [base 6] system, the Hindus developed a
decimal system based on multiples of ten.[21]
Both of these required the invention of the concept of the number zero, which
was first devised in Ancient Egypt as early as the eighteenth century BCE and
in Mesopotamia shortly thereafter in the mid-second millennium BCE.[22][23][24]
Like
the Hindus, the Mayans, too, dealt with large numbers and like the Sumerian
they utilized a sexigesimal system.[25]
As such, it was the Mayans who devised the system for the measurement of time
that we use today: with sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, 24
hours in a day and approximately 360 days in a year, all based on multiples of
the number six. Indeed, it was the Mayans who calculated that, rather than
being composed of 365 24-hour days the way most people assume, each year in
fact contains only 364.25 [or 364 and 1/4th] days, resulting in a
leap year once every four years.[26]
Their understanding of this is demonstrated by the number of steps on the Mayan
step-pyramid nicknamed “El Castillo”
[“The Castle”] by Spanish
Conquistador Francisco Montejo Alvarez in 1532, the Temple to the Mayan Serpent
God Kukulcan, at the Mayan city of Chichen Itza. The 365th “step” is not actually a step at all but
rather merely a platform for the temple. That is to say: a quarter of a full
step. As a result, the Mayan calendar, which dates back at least to the 5th
century BCE, is only 17 seconds off in the last two and a half thousand years.[27]
Around
this same time, the third century BCE, the Chinese invented the medium on which
writing would be done for the next two thousand years: Paper.[28][29]
It
is this latter invention that has, ever since, made knowing anything for
certain on the basis of written records so exceedingly difficult, due in no
small part to one particular characteristic of the paper invented by the
Chinese, made from wood: It burns. It is an often-repeated cliché that history
is written by the victors. What is less-often emphasized is the fact that among
the most effective means of making one’s victories over one’s adversaries
complete is by destroying their history, effectively erasing them from having
ever existed at all. This concept was not foreign to even the ancient
Egyptians, who sought to erase any and all record of the fifteenth century BCE
female Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaoh Hatshepsut by not only smashing any statuary
representations of her but by systematically scraping, chiseling and rubbing
off the walls of the buildings constructed during her reign any references to
her.[30]
Perhaps
the most famous example of a conquering force seeking to destroy the history
and knowledge of a conquered people is the burning to the ground of the Great
Library of Alexandria, founded in the fourth century CE by Alexander the Great
of Macedonia, by the Christian Pope Theophilus and the Christian Roman Emperor
Theodosius in 391 CE.[31]
The Library’s collection dated back to the age of papyrus, and at its height
contained more than half a million books.[32]
As a testament to the effectiveness of the Christian’s efforts to rid the world
of ancient knowledge that they deemed “too pagan” by burning the Library, only
a very few of the authors of the tens of thousands of volumes it contained are
know to us today. Even then, this is only due to their works having been
otherwise preserved elsewhere. Some names are famous; such as Plato, Aristotle,
Euclid and Archimedes; others less so: Aristarchus, Democritus, Eratosthenes,
and Hipparchus. The fact that so few of the names of the authors over the more
than half-a-millennium-long history of the Library whose work was burned by the
Christians demonstrates the effectiveness of destroying written works as a
method of erasing entire civilizations from history.
Since
the rise of Christianity in the fourth century CE, several other famous
attempts at destroying written records have been made, such as the sacking of
the Library of Constantinople, which contained many of the volumes that
survived the burning of Alexandria, by the Fourth Crusade of Pope Innocent and
King Boniface in 1204 and the book burning by the Nazis under Adolf Hitler in
Germany in 1933.[33]
However,
the fact that each of these attempts at erasing history through the destruction
of written works was less successful than the ones before it is also testament
to what is perhaps the greatest virtue of the written word. Prior to the
invention of writing, what an individual could know was severely limited to
only what one could find out for oneself or hear told by others. Likewise, the
knowledge that an individual was capable of passing on was limited to what one
was able to tell others. All of the rest of what a person knew died with them
and was lost forever. With the invention of writing, however, people had access
to not only the knowledge of those within earshot of them, but also those who
had lived and died century and even millennia before they were born. For
example, the aforementioned Ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle died
in the fourth century BCE. Yet nearly two and half thousand years later, their
thoughts, beliefs, ideas and opinions continue to be read by people n very
nearly every city in ever country around the globe. Writing also gave people
the capability to pass on much more of their knowledge than they would ever be
able to relate orally or verbally, and to pass it on to people thousands of
miles away from them around the globe. As such, with the advent of the written
word, the knowledge of a given civilization became cumulative.
This,
if nothing else, makes the written word one of, if not the most world-changing
inventions in the history of human civilizations, if not indeed in all of the
history of the human species, since to our knowledge no other species on Earth
has ever yet developed this ability to pass on knowledge not merely to the next
generation [which has been documented in members of our fellow Species of Great
Apes such as Chimpanzees] but to
individuals living generations hence.[34]
This growth in the cumulative
knowledge of our civilization is also the reason why, while the Christians’ burning
of the Library of Alexandria in the fourth century was quite effective in its
goal of destroying the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the Classical
Ancient world, by the time that Adolf Hitler tried to do the same to the Jewish
culture in the twentieth century, his was nothing if not a hopeless Sisyphean
task.[35][36]
It
should be noted that, in what can only be considered as being among the
ultimate in historical ironies, it is the World War that Hitler’s attempted
systematic extermination of the Jewish people launched that resulted in the
invention of the technology that has, perhaps more than any other since the
invention of writing thousands of years before, made the growth in the
cumulative knowledge of human civilization exponential: The computer, invented
by Alan Turing in England in 1942.[37][38]
[1] Shmandt-Besserat, Denise. “Before
Writing: From Counting to Cuneiform”. University of Texas. 1992.
[2] Caldwell, Chris. “Ishango Bone”.
University of Tennessee. 2016.
[3] Keller, Olivier. “The Fables of
Ishango, or the Irresistible Temptation of Mathematical Fiction”. Foundation
House of Human Sciences. 2010. http://www.academia.edu/11670855/The_fables_of_Ishango_or_the_irresistible_temptation_of_mathematical_fiction
[4] Pletser, Vladimir. “Does the Ishango
Bone Indicate Knowledge of the Base 12? An Interpretation of a Prehistoric
Discovery, the First Mathematical Tool of Humankind”. European Space Agency
Research and Technology Center. April 4, 2012: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012arXiv1204.1019P
[5] Heise, John. “Cuneiform Writing
System”. Netherland Institute for Space Research. May 4, 1995.
[6] Mattessich, Richard. “The Oldest
Writings, and Inventory Tags of Egypt”. Accounting Historians Journal, Volume
29, Number 1. June 2002: http://clio.lib.olemiss.edu/cdm/fullbrowser/collection/aah/id/19512/rv/compoundobject/cpd/19526
[7] Evans, Elaine. “Papyrus: A Blessing
Upon Pharaoh, Occasional Paper.” University of Tennessee. September 2, 2008.
[8] Seid, Timothy. “Papyrus”. Interpreting
Ancient Manuscripts. June 28, 2004.
[9] Freer-Sackler. “Oracle Bone Script”.
Smithsonian Institution Museum of Art. 2016.
[10] Cosmin, Suciu. “Early Vinca Culture
Dynamic in South-Eastern Transylvania”. Proceedings of the International
Conference. November 2010: https://www.academia.edu/625659/Early_Vin%C4%8Da_Culture_Dynamic_in_South-Easthern_Transylvania
[11] Robinson, Andrew. “Cracking the Indus
Script”. Nature, Volume 526, Issue 7574. October 20, 2015.
[12] Tharoor, Ishaan. “Decoding the Ancient
Script of the Indus Valley”. TIME Magazine. Tuesday September 1, 2009.
[13] Rincon, Paul. “Earliest Writing Fond in
China”. BBC News. Thursday April 17, 2003.
[14] “Phoenician Alphabet”. Encyclopedia
Britannica. 2016.
[15] Justeson, John and Kaufman, Terrence.
“Epi-Olmec Hieroglyphic Writing and Texts”. Project for the Documentation of
the Languages of Mesoamerica. 2001.
[16] Magni, Caterina. “Olmec Writing: The
Cascajal Block”. Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies. 2012.
[17] Inman, Mason. “Oldest Writing in New
World Discovered, Scientists Say”. National Geographic. September 14, 2006.
[18] Wilford, John. “Language of Early
Americans is deciphered”. New York Times. March 23, 1993.
[19] Cunningham, Alexander. “Inscriptions of
Asoka”. Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, Volume 1. 1877: https://archive.org/details/inscriptionsaso00hultgoog
[20] Kak, Subhash. “Akhenaten, Surya and the
Rgveda”. The Golden Chain. 2005: http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/Akhenaten.pdf
[21] Karpinski, Louis and Smith, Eugene.
“Hindu-Arabic Numerals”. 1911: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22599/22599-h/22599-h.htm
[22] Casselman, Bill. “All For Nought: By
Accident, it Records the Oldest 0 in India for Which One Can Assign a Definite
Date”. American Mathematical Society.
[23] Kaplan, Robert. “What is the Origin of
Zero? How Did We Indicate Nothingness Before Zero?” Scientific American. February
28, 2000.
[24] Matson, John. “The Origin of Zero:
First a Placeholder and Then a Full-Fledged Number, Zero Had Many Inventors”.
Scientific American. August 21, 2009.
[25] Holladay, April. “Counting to 60 by
Your Finger Joints”. USA Today. June 29, 2002.
[26] Mills, David. “The Classic Maya
Calendar and Day Numbering System”. University of Delaware.
[27] “The Mayan Calendar System”.
Smithsonian Institution.
[28] Safita, Neathery. “A Brief History of
Paper”. Saint Louis Community College. July 2002.
[29] Williams, Robert. “The Invention of
Paper.” Georgia Institute of Technology. June 13, 2006.
[30] Mickiewicz, Marta. “The “Co-Regency” of
Hatshepsut and Thutmose III in the Light of Iconography in the Temple of
Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari”. University of Poznan: https://www.academia.edu/1413854/The_co-regency_of_Hatshepsut_and_Thutmose_III_in_the_light_of_iconography_in_the_temple_of_Hatshepsut_at_Deir_el-Bahari
[31] “The Burning of the Library of
Alexandria”. Ohio State University.
[32] Grout, James. “The Great Library of
Alexandria”. University of Chicago. May 4, 2015.
[33] Pappas, Nicholas. “The Sack of
Constantinople by the Crusaders”. Sam Houston State University. 2011.
[34] Boesch, Christophe. “Teaching Among
Wild Chimpanzees”. Animal Behavior, Volume 41, Issue 3. March 1991. Pages
530-532: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.538.29&rep=rep1&type=pdf
[35] Corn-Revere, Robert. “Bonfires of
Insanity: A History of Book Burnings from Nazis to ISIS”. The Daily Beast.
February 28, 2015.
[36] Henley, Jon. “Book-Burning: Fanning the
Flames of Hatred”. The Guardian. Friday September 10, 2010.
[37] Harnard, Stevan. “The Annotation Game:
Turing (1950) on Computing, Machinery and Intelligence”. University of
Southampton. June 23, 2003.
[38] Turing, Alan. “On Computable Numbers”.
Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Volume S2-42, Issue 1. May 28,
1936: https://plms.oxfordjournals.org/content/s2-42/1/230.full.pdf
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