SPEAKER_00: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
SPEAKER_01: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy, with Tim Harford.
SPEAKER_02: People used to believe that writing had come from the gods. The Greeks thought that Prometheus had given it to mankind as a gift. The Egyptians also believed that literacy was divine, a benefaction from baboon-faced Thoth, the god of knowledge. Mesopotamians thought that the goddess Inanna had stolen it from them, from Enki, the god of wisdom. Scholars no longer embraced the baboon-faced Thoth theory of literacy, but why ancient civilisations 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 a German archaeologist named Julius Jordan unearthed a vast library of clay tablets that were 5,000 years old. These 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 have
SPEAKER_02: been a large village to us. But by the standards of 5,000 years ago, Uruk was huge, one of the world's first true cities. He built the town wall of Uruk, city of sheep-folds, 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. Uruk posed another puzzle for archaeologists, though 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 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, though they were stylised and standardised. But what were they for? Nobody could work it out. Nobody, that is, until a French archaeologist named Denise Schmand-Besserat. In the 1970s she catalogued similar pieces found across the region, from Turkey to Pakistan. Some of them were 9,000 years old. Schmand-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're the same. 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 20,000 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, is a great city. An urban economy requires 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. Denis Shmand-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 Shmand-Besserat realised 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 realised it might be simpler to make the marks with a stylus. So, cuneiform writing was a stylised picture of an impression of a token representing a commodity. No wonder nobody had made the connection before Shmand-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's just a small leap between a record of what's 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 of the obligation, including the resources that were to be paid. 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 ties 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. Most financial transactions are based on explicit written contracts. Insurance, a bank account, a government bond, a corporate share, a mortgage agreement, they're all written contracts. 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 five, a circle for ten, two circles and three strokes for twenty three. 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 and thousands. One demand for war reparations 4,400 years old is for 4.5 trillion litres of barley grain or 8.64 million gudu. In all it's quite a set of achievements. The citizens of Uruk faced a huge problem, a problem that's fundamental to any modern economy. The problem of dealing with a web of obligations and long range plans between people who didn't know each other 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, a tool that was developed for a very clear reason, to run an economy.
SPEAKER_01: The mystery of cuneiform is described by Felix Martin in Money, the Unauthorized Biography. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50things.
