Accounting for Civilization
Fred Flintstone could not count to ten. Until about 5000 BCE "one, two, many" was the limit of human thought about quantity.
Numeracy is not natural and was invented for commerce and from that came literacy.
In Sumeria, starting about 8000 BCE, a system of small clay tokens representing debts led to the conceptualization of numbers greater than 3 -- and ultimately to literacy. Lists of goods owed to the temple preceded The Gilgamesh by at least 2000 years.
These little clay objects were given scant attention by museums. When art history professor Denise Schmandt-Besserat queried and visited museums for their oldest ceramics, she was surprised to be shown these little bullets, pyramids, cones, and disks. Most were uncatalogued. After a few years of puzzling over them, the truth dawned on her: these were tokens. And they – not pictographs – were the true origin of writing.
Pictographs did, indeed, antedate cuneiform. However, the pictographs themselves show much epistemic development, representing abstractions such as “food” rather than only concretes such as “bread.” As many pictographs mimicked tokens, it was clear that the clay promises came first. The clay tokens show a long development of their own, from simple representations such as “sheep” and “wheat” to differentiations of kind and measure, as well as to manufactured goods such as beer and cloth.
Before these tokens, there were no large numbers such as 4, 5, 6, and 7. Today, we accept decimal tallying on our ten digits as “natural” but it surely was not. The first representations of “five” were "three passed one“ and "three one one.” Our modern languages still hint of that earlier time, as in French three is big (trois/tres) or in Hungarian big follows three (nagy/negy). Slavic languages still carry the old Indo-European singular-dual-plural grammar for 1-2-many. (Other languages have other divisions; none at root speaks distinctly of four, five, and six.)
The work of University of Texas art historian Denise Schmandt-Besserat demonstrated from empirical historical evidence that civilization began with accounting. The first writing began with records of promises and debts.
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...
Numeracy is not natural and was invented for commerce and from that came literacy.
In Sumeria, starting about 8000 BCE, a system of small clay tokens representing debts led to the conceptualization of numbers greater than 3 -- and ultimately to literacy. Lists of goods owed to the temple preceded The Gilgamesh by at least 2000 years.
These little clay objects were given scant attention by museums. When art history professor Denise Schmandt-Besserat queried and visited museums for their oldest ceramics, she was surprised to be shown these little bullets, pyramids, cones, and disks. Most were uncatalogued. After a few years of puzzling over them, the truth dawned on her: these were tokens. And they – not pictographs – were the true origin of writing.
Pictographs did, indeed, antedate cuneiform. However, the pictographs themselves show much epistemic development, representing abstractions such as “food” rather than only concretes such as “bread.” As many pictographs mimicked tokens, it was clear that the clay promises came first. The clay tokens show a long development of their own, from simple representations such as “sheep” and “wheat” to differentiations of kind and measure, as well as to manufactured goods such as beer and cloth.
Before these tokens, there were no large numbers such as 4, 5, 6, and 7. Today, we accept decimal tallying on our ten digits as “natural” but it surely was not. The first representations of “five” were "three passed one“ and "three one one.” Our modern languages still hint of that earlier time, as in French three is big (trois/tres) or in Hungarian big follows three (nagy/negy). Slavic languages still carry the old Indo-European singular-dual-plural grammar for 1-2-many. (Other languages have other divisions; none at root speaks distinctly of four, five, and six.)
The work of University of Texas art historian Denise Schmandt-Besserat demonstrated from empirical historical evidence that civilization began with accounting. The first writing began with records of promises and debts.
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...
“There is undoubtedly a feeling of bathos in the uses to which this marvellous discovery was put initially. Mostly it was used for business documents, contracts, inventories, deeds of sale! But also it was used for Royal inscriptions and at a later stage for recording religious texts.”
In this view only its use by the king (note the capital letter) and priests could elevate writing from the common clay of commerce.
(This was copied from the article cited in the original post above.)