Mesopotamian Politics

I. The Argument
The Narrative

Part I
Chapter 4

The Reification of the Word

Marco De Pietri – November 2023

4.1 Writing

The invention of writing stands as a threshold of “history”, specifically because it marks, as a watershed, the pre-writing time (prehistory) and the proper historical period, which is commonly characterized by the presence of written documentation we can use to reconstruct the even far ancient past (cf. below 4.9). That of the invention of writing in Mesopotamia (ca. in the second half of the fourth millennium BC, in southern Mesopotamia; see e.g. the fundamental volume Gelb 1963 Writing) was indeed a momentous technological endeavour.

Two specific feature of this invention can be enucleated:

it was a process, requiring time to be developed and structured, and not an instantaneous invention;
far from being a mere technological skill, writing profoundly effected human phyche, both at an individual and societal level; it was, in a way, a transformation of mind.

These are the reasons because writing deserves to be included into the sphere of the great transformation of the first “Axial Age”, a huge improvement and achievement of humankind^{Note 1} (cf. Chapter 1.2).

4.2 The Syntax of Symbols

Cf. Chapter 1.6.

Language shaped human mind, providing it with a very complex structure (see e.g. Johansson 2005 Language and Johansson 2021 Dawn), as attested in the first recorded languages, such as Sumerian.

The structure given by language allowed thought to take body, reifying it (cf. Chapter 1.6), offering a parallel reality at the same time; this reality has an inner linearity tied to specific and functional “grammatical” connections, where each referent in the reality has a specific referential expression (a lemma, a noun, a verbal expression) following rules independent from the starting referent; this grammatical structures implies a linear and almost fixed syntax, i.e. a sequence of referential segments structured in a marked way (e.g., linguistically speaking, English is a SVO [Subject-Verb-Object] language, while Sumerian was a SOV [Subject-Object-Verb] language, like Latin and Greek).

Writing added to language this syntactic allure, even though this notion of syntax was already present in the first calendars (cf. Chapter 1.6); specifically, “the critical element of writing is not so much that of creating symbols that correspond in an isolated way to words (and therefore to a physical reality, concrete referents), but above all in offering a synthesis of symbols through which the graphic sequence is just as important as the existence of single signs independent from their reciprocal connection. The “syntactic” connection acquired a symbolic value all its own” (Buccellati, Origins, p. 41). The first calendars already attested a directionality of symbols; now, with writing proper structured “texts” derives from the graphical organization of symbols.

We can briefly summarize the development of writing as follows:

the first step towards writing can be found in the use of tokens (often encapsulated into clay globular bullae [see e.g. this image; cf. also Schmandt- Besserat]) representing shaped in the form of real objects (e.g. a sheep, a truncated cone clay lump for a metal) and used at first for accountability in economical transactions or store processes (cf. below 4.9). This was still an asyntactic system;
the next step was to stamp the tokens on the surface of the bulla or even on a wet clay flat lump (a kind of proto-tablet) in a certain sequence: this is a first syntactic system;
the shape of the tokens was substituted by wedges signs imprinted on the clay with a reed stylus^{Note 2} (with two edges, one triangular, the other circular): cuneiform writing was born.

To sum up: from ideograms (e.g. the notion of “sheep”) we passed to logograms (the word “udu” in Sumerian for “sheep”^{Note 3}) and then to fixed words as elements of a syntactic flow (a specific Sumerian sentence).

4.3 The Reconfiguration of Perception

Writing allowed a graphical rendering of language; from this historical achievement, two important consequences followed:

the possibility of reifying phonic flows with a physical consistency;
a new coherence of thought assuming an innovative dimension and dynamic.

This was a further step in reconfiguring perceptions which acquires through writing a new literally tangible status (that of writing). The new configuration is connected to the notion of contiguity, i.e. the possibility of connecting and correlating in writing things that are not such in nature, where they are discontiguous from one another. This is like an “hypostatization” of physical elements which, in a way, absume a new ontological and referential status.

Such a phenomenon can be further analyzed in two ways:

“elements physically distant from the interior of the phonic flow acquire a physical (graphic) reality in writing that allows us to “see them” combined even when we cannot “hear” them thus associated” (Buccellati, Origins, p. 42);
the tabular structure of some lists and texts anticipates the superlinearity of the digital text; these documents are not “alphabetically” but logically structured: “this means that the text is not “read” as a string of sentences, instead it is “consulted,” keeping two fundamental parameters in mind: first, a contiguity that is not grammatical but only logical (alphabetical order), and, second, the super-linear contiguity through which non-adjacent elements are still seen as contiguous for other reasons […]. Proceedings of this type are not even conceivable in a purely oral context, and therefore serve to illustrate the profound impact that the introduction of writing had on the intellectual and social development of humanity […]” (Buccellati, Origins, p. 43).

4.4 Thought “squared”

Cf. Chapter 1.7 and Chapter 4.2.

Writing, implying the reification of thought (Chapter 1.7 and above 4.2), reconfigured the whole complex system of perceptions which inform human thinking; through writing, human though became more concrete and even manipulable. This represents a kind of thought “squared”, giving graphic articulation superimposed on phonic articulation (cf. below 4.6).

This phenomenon involves two aspects:

written texts were referential products, i.e. they value was not in immediate use, but rather referred to other primary realities; furthermore, the production of these texts require a specific technician: the scribe (cf. below 4.5), who in also entrusted of “decrypting” the content of the “encrypted” documents;
the second aspect represents the apex of the first “Axial Age” (cf. Chapter 1.2): “Written text, in the form of cuneiform tablets, made present a double absence, so to speak, that is, the absence both of the thing being referred to and the person to whom the reference is addressed” (Buccellati, Origins, p. 44).

4.5 The Scribes

At the very beginning, it fairly likely that the first “experiments” in writing happened to be perhaps casual, out of the genious of more than one individual, a kind of collective experimentation. Nonetheless, there are two important remarks, to stress the particularity of this epochal invention:

coherence in experimentation, which was not anecdotical but set into a precise and coherent framework;
persistence: writing was not at all just due to the curiosity of an individual dedicating him(/her)self to this purpose, but rather to the whole community which is cemented as such even through the invention of writing (cf. Chapter 1.8).

This praxis led to the formation of a new professionalism, that of the technicians of writing, i.e. the scribes, along with the development of a peculiar scribal art. Tablets were “useful” and manageable tools just for scribes (cf. above 4.4) who formed a new specific sector of the aformentioned hierarchical society (cf. Chapter 3.8), where food surplus (cf. Chapter 3.2) and the redistribution system granted scribes primary goods, allowing them to dedicate themselves (as professional “full-time” technicians belonging to a specific scribal class, handling a coherent and transparent system) to the art of writing, without being involved in political or economic power (cf. below 4.8), besides the compilation of lists (cf. above 4.2).

4.6 The Logic of Reflection

Scribal praxis retains a peculiarity: it is part of a system, implying a diverse and deeper level of technical knowledge. Furthermore the coherence of the whole scribal system needs to be verifiable at the moment of reading^{Note 4}.

Moreover, scribal praxis is not natural given, but discovered in practice, being it a logical system (closed in itself, impenetrable to non-Technicians but transparent to professionals) based on human reflection; this is the very moment when reflection acquires its own specific identity, a value consolidated by writing even if already present at the moment language developed, ca. 50,000 years earlier. The scribe, in this sense, was the first intellectual of history. Therefore, writing was indeed a form of extrinsication of thought and “a cuneiform tablet was thought itself […]” (Buccellati, Origins, p. 45).

4.7 Writing as an Index of Control

Writing can be also retained as the clearest and most explicit symbol of the human capacity of control, but a form of control different to those already seen in Chapter 3.1, since in this case nature is not just bent to human will but is set in place as a kind of “second nature”, a nature purely created by human force. That is the reason because writing had, in a way, the abstract power of communicate the sense of the new mental organization of things presented above: a clear example of this are the first tablets with accounting lists found at Uruk; this written lists put (in the concrete form of signs) element that were not physically contiguous together (see above, 4.3).

As a consequence, a new para-scribal conception developed, conditioning the way humans perceived things in nature: even not professional people started conceiving things through the lens of writing (cf. Chapters 5.11 and 7.9); “This means that the awareness of the power of control intrinsic to writing […] was starting to enter in a capillary way into the mindset of common people” (Buccellati, Origins, p. 46).

From now onwards, physical connections are entangled/embedded in logical connections impacting all the ways of perceiving reality.

4.8 Writing as a Structure of Control

A further important achievement came up along with writing: bureaucracy and, along with it, a bureaucratical mind (on this topic, see Mc Glynn 2021 Mind, Strauss 1969 Mind, Sheehan Sosna 1991 Boundaries; cf. also [with a diferent, medical approach] Taylor 2009 Mind).

In short, and from its very beginning, bureaucracy meant knowledge of the productive chain; documents kept in archives allowed a stronger control over this chain, with a deep and fully consistent diachronical introspection: “It is a parallel world where written registration offers at any moment a clear and comprehensive panoramic view of what is available and what is needed. It is the triumph of information as an instrument” (Buccellati, Origins, p. 46).

Even though we have to recall, as already stressed above, that scribes did not retain any political or economic power; they remained (all over the many centuries of Mesopotamian history) only intellectuals and bureaucrats.

4.9 Historiographic Specificity

The introduction of writing (starting with the first so-labelled “administrative” documents is commonly considered as the moment when history and historiography begin (cf. above 4.1), because writing allowed to exponentially augment human capability of recording details of events, institutions, and people.

In this general view, an historiographical dimension emerges prominently: indeed, we have sources allowing us to reconstructs history even of far ancient times more than just in terms of historical event (cf. Chapter 5); in fact, besides the mere historical happenings, we can, through text, even penetrate the most hidden nodes of relationships between individuals and institutions, something which is not possible for prehistorical times (for which we do not even know proper names of individuals). Written document shed light on inner dynamics previously unaccessible to us, because of lack of proper historical sources (even though even in prehistory “stories” and “history” already existed, at an oral level of communication and transmission, but without a coherent codification through writing).

An important remark: writing did not developed at first with the purpose of transmit information to posterity (but for accounting and trading aims; cf. above 4.2); it is us, interpreting – phylologically and historiographically – ancient documentation, who “decrypt” and reconstruct ancient history.

There are also some important implications to be stressed:

the antecedents of writing (for which cf. Chapter 1.6) and the first written documents “are deeply anchored in the awareness of having to account for concrete and verifiable facts. […] They [i.e., the documents] never indulge in vagueness unanchored in concrete reality, which would therefore lack in a precise referentiality” (Buccellati, Origins, p. 47).

4.10 From Prehistory to “Post-History”

The present volume, in retracing the paths from prehistory to history, necessarily has also to deal, in a way, with the larger perspective on universal history; and this is particularly on topic in describing the origins of writing, since this great transformation can be compared to the modern other impotant “discovery”, that of the digital dimension.

We can define writing as the “extra-somatic extension of the intellectual faculty originally articulated with the spoken word” (Buccellati, Origins, p. 48). The effect of this extrinsication or “reification” is a completely static and passive object: in fact, in order to become an active object, it requires a reader interpreting the signs and reproducing the reality hidden behind them. Neither the introduction of the alphabet (see e.g. Naveh 1987 Alphabet) or the invention of the printing press (for which see, e.g., Childress 2008 Gutenberg) changed this static and passive status of written texts.

The very substantial quantum leap in writing history was the introduction of the computer and digital systems; here, the extra-somatic extension of thought develops a dynamic and active object “where thought is included in a device that triggers new correlations and modalities, not predicted by the original author. In this sense, the computer is similar to the first complex machines (1.4) that gave a much greater value to the extrinsication of man’s material faculties” (Buccellati, Origins, p. 48).

Thus, as writing marked the beginning of history, the coming into being of digitality equally marks a phenomenon which we could label as the “end of history”, since “the new digital language now marks another major fracture, reifying the possibility of thought to correlate within itself.

To this extent, we are living in time of “post-history”.

Notes

Note 1: about the “mythical” origins of writing, a Mesopotamian composition tells us about the story of a messenger who, entrusted by his king to dispatched a message to another king, since he was not able to keep in mind the answer the second king gave him to report to the first king, wrote the content of the message on clay (thus, becoming the first mythical scribe); for the text of the composition, known in literature as Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, see, on E T C S L, ll. 500-514. In Mesopotamian tradition, the invention of writing was considered as a great improvement; as an interesting counter-argument, it would be worth recalling the opposite, negative view of Plato, who considered writing as a dangerous tool, weakening the power and value of memory (see, on Perseus, Phdr. 275c-275e). _{Back to text}
Note 2: since they were made of organic material, we do not have actual styli retrieved thanks to archaeology; nevertheless, we can advance a comparison with some bronze styli found in the Hittite capital Ḫattuša/Boğazköy, dating to the second half of the 2^nd millennium BC, for which see e.g. the dedicated section Hethitische Schreibkunst (bottom page, Figure 9) on the H P M website. _{Back to text}
Note 3: for the Sumerian word, see e P S D 2, under lemma; for the development of the cuneiform sign, from pictogram to abstract shape, see Malbran Labat 1988 Cuneiform, pp. 222-223 [no. 537]. _{Back to text}
Note 4: for this reason, we could maybe speak of a “science” of writing, since verifiability is a feature of science in the moder, post-Illuminism sense. _{Back to text}