People used to believe that the ability to write had come from the gods. The Greeks believed that Prometheus had given it to mankind as a gift. The Egyptians also thought that literacy was divine, a benefaction from baboon-faced Thoth, the god of knowledge. Mesopotamians thought the goddess Inanna had stolen it for them from Enki, the god of wisdom—although Enki wasn’t so wise that he hadn’t drunk himself insensible.1
Scholars no longer embrace the “baboon-faced Thoth” theory of literacy. But why ancient civilizations developed writing was a mystery for a long time. Was it for religious or artistic reasons? To send messages to distant armies? The mystery deepened in 1929, when the German archaeologist Julius Jordan unearthed a vast library of clay tablets that were five thousand years old. They were far older than the samples of writing that had been found in China and Egypt and Mesoamerica, and they were written in an abstract script that became known as “cuneiform.”
The tablets came from Uruk, a Mesopotamian settlement on the banks of the Euphrates in what is now Iraq. Uruk was small by today’s standards—with a few thousand inhabitants, it would be a large village to us. But by the standards of five thousand years ago, Uruk was huge—one of the world’s first true cities.
“He built the town wall of ‘Uruk,’ city of sheepfolds,” proclaims the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest works of literature. “Look at its wall with its frieze like bronze! Gaze at its bastions, which none can equal!”
But this great city had produced writing that no modern scholar could decipher. What did it say?
Uruk posed another puzzle for archaeologists—although it seemed unrelated. The ruins of Uruk and other Mesopotamian cities were littered with little clay objects, some conical, some spherical, some cylindrical. One archaeologist quipped that they looked like suppositories. Julius Jordan himself was a little more perceptive. They were shaped, he wrote in his journal, “like the commodities of daily life: jars, loaves, and animals,” although they were stylized and standardized.2
But what were they for? Were they baubles? Toys for children? Pieces for board games? They were the right size for that, at least. Nobody could work it out.
Nobody, that is, until a French-born archaeologist named Denise Schmandt-Besserat. In the 1970s she catalogued similar pieces found across the region, from Turkey to Pakistan. Some of them were nine thousand years old. Schmandt-Besserat believed that the tokens had a simple purpose: correspondence counting. The tokens that were shaped like loaves could be used to count loaves. The ones shaped like jars could be used to count jars. Correspondence counting is easy: you don’t need to know how to count, you just need to look at two quantities and verify that they are the same.3
Now, correspondence counting is older even than Uruk—the Ishango bone, found near one of the sources of the Nile in the Democratic Republic of Congo, seems to use matched tally marks on the thigh bone of a baboon for correspondence counting. It’s twenty thousand years old.
But the Uruk tokens took things further, because they were used to keep track of counting lots of different quantities and could be used both to add and to subtract. Uruk, remember, was a great city. In such a city, one cannot live hand to mouth. People were starting to specialize. There was a priesthood; there were craftsmen. Food needed to be gathered from the surrounding countryside. An urban economy required trading, and planning, and taxation, too. So picture the world’s first accountants, sitting at the door of the temple storehouse, using the little loaf tokens to count as the sacks of grain arrive and leave.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat pointed out something else—something rather revolutionary. Those abstract marks on the cuneiform tablets? They matched the tokens. Everyone else had missed the resemblance because the writing didn’t seem to be a picture of anything; it seemed abstract.
But Schmandt-Besserat realized what had happened. The tablets had been used to record the back-and-forth of the tokens, which themselves were recording the back-and-forth of the sheep, the grain, and the jars of honey. In fact, it may be that the first such tablets were impressions of the tokens themselves, pressing the hard clay baubles into the soft clay tablet.
Then those ancient accountants realized it might be simpler to make the marks with a stylus. So cuneiform writing was a stylized picture of an impression of a token representing a commodity. No wonder nobody had made the connection before Schmandt-Besserat. And so she solved both problems at once. Those clay tablets, adorned with the world’s first abstract writing? They weren’t being used for poetry, or to send messages to far-off lands. They were used to create the world’s first accounts.
The world’s first written contracts, too—since there is just a small leap between a record of what has been paid and a record of a future obligation to pay. The combination of the tokens and the clay cuneiform writing led to a brilliant verification device: a hollow clay ball called a bulla. On the outside of the bulla, the parties to a contract could write down the details. On the inside of the bulla would be the tokens representing the deal. The writing on the outside and the tokens inside the clay ball verified each other.
We don’t know who the parties to such agreements might have been; whether they were religious tithes to the temple, taxes, or private debts is unclear. But such records were the purchase orders and the receipts that made life in a complex city society possible.
This is a big deal. Many financial transactions are based on explicit written contracts such as insurance, bank accounts, publicly traded shares, index funds, and paper money itself. Written contracts are the lifeblood of modern economic activity—and the bullas of Mesopotamia are the very first archaeological evidence that written contracts existed.
Uruk’s accountants provided us with another innovation, too. At first, the system for recording five sheep would simply require five separate sheep impressions. But that was cumbersome. A superior system involved using an abstract symbol for different numbers—five strokes for 5, a circle for 10, two circles and three strokes for 23. The numbers were always used to refer to a quantity of something: there was no “ten”—only ten sheep. But the numerical system was powerful enough to express large quantities—hundreds, even thousands. One demand for war reparations, 4,400 years old, is for 4.5 trillion liters of barley grain, or 8.64 million guru. It was an unpayable bill—600 times the annual U.S. production of barley today. But it was an impressively big number. It was also the world’s first written evidence of compound interest.4 But that is a tale for another time.
Writing, arithmetic, a number system, accountancy, compound interest, contracts: all in all, this is quite a set of achievements. The citizens of Uruk faced a huge problem, one that is fundamental to any modern economy—the problem of dealing with a web of obligations and long-range plans among people who did not know one another well, who might perhaps never even meet. Solving that problem meant producing a string of brilliant innovations: not only the first accounts and the first contracts, but the first mathematics and even the first writing.
Writing wasn’t a gift from Prometheus or Thoth. It was a tool that was developed by mortals, and for a very clear reason: to run their economy.