(4 inches by 3) – almost exactly the same shape and size as the mouse that controls your computer.
Clay may not seem to us the ideal medium for writing, but the clay from the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris proved to be invaluable for all kinds of purposes, from building cities to making pots, and even, as with our tablet, for giving a quick and easy surface on which to write. From the historian’s point of view, clay has one huge advantage: it lasts. Unlike the bamboo used by the Chinese to write on, which rots quickly, and unlike paper, which is so easily destroyed, sun-baked clay will survive in dry ground for thousands of years – and as a result we’re still learning from those clay tablets. In the British Museum we look after about 130,000 writing tablets from Mesopotamia, and scholars from all over the world come to study the collection.
While experts are still working hard on the early history of Mesopotamian script some points are already very apparent, and many of them are visible in this oblong of baked clay. You can see clearly how a reed stylus has pressed the marks into the soft clay, which has then been baked hard so that it is now a handsome orange. If you tap it, you can hear that this tablet is very tough indeed – that’s why it has survived. But even baked clay doesn’t last for ever, especially if it has been exposed to damp. One of our challenges in the British Museum is that we often have to re-bake the tablets in a special kiln in order to consolidate the surface and preserve the information inscribed on the clay.
Our little beer-rationing tablet is divided into three rows of four boxes each, and in each box the signs – typically for this date – are read from top to bottom, moving right to left, before you move on to the next box. The signs are pictographs, drawings of items which stand just for that item or something closely related to it. So the symbol for beer is an upright jar with a pointed base – a picture of the vessel that was actually used to store the beer rations. The word for ‘ration’ itself is conveyed graphically by a human head, juxtaposed with a bowl, from which it appears to be drinking; the signs in each of the boxes are accompanied by circular and semicircular marks which represent the number of rations recorded.
You could say that this script isn’t really writing in the strict sense, that it’s more a kind of mnemonic, a repertoire of signs that can be used to carry quite complex messages. The crucial breakthrough to real writing came when it was first understood that a graphic symbol, like the one for beer on the tablet, could be used to mean not just the thing it showed, but what the word for the thing sounded like. At this point writing became phonetic, and then all kinds of new communication became possible.
When the earliest cities and states grew up in the world’s fertile river valleys around 5,000 years ago, one of the challenges for leaders was how to govern these new societies. How do you impose your will not just on a couple of hundred villagers, but on tens of thousands of city dwellers? Nearly all these new rulers discovered that, as well as using military force and official ideology, if you want to control populations on this scale you need to write things down.
We tend to think of writing as being about poetry or fiction or history, what we might call literature. But early literature was in fact oral – learnt by heart and then recited or sung. People wrote down what they could not learn by heart, what they couldn’t turn into verse. So pretty well everywhere early writing seems to have been about record-keeping, bean-counting or, as in the case of this little tablet, beer-counting. Beer was the staple drink in Mesopotamia and was issued as rations to workers. Money, laws, trade, employment: this is the stuff of early writing, and it’s writing like that on this tablet that ultimately changes the nature of state control and state
Clay may not seem to us the ideal medium for writing, but the clay from the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris proved to be invaluable for all kinds of purposes, from building cities to making pots, and even, as with our tablet, for giving a quick and easy surface on which to write. From the historian’s point of view, clay has one huge advantage: it lasts. Unlike the bamboo used by the Chinese to write on, which rots quickly, and unlike paper, which is so easily destroyed, sun-baked clay will survive in dry ground for thousands of years – and as a result we’re still learning from those clay tablets. In the British Museum we look after about 130,000 writing tablets from Mesopotamia, and scholars from all over the world come to study the collection.
While experts are still working hard on the early history of Mesopotamian script some points are already very apparent, and many of them are visible in this oblong of baked clay. You can see clearly how a reed stylus has pressed the marks into the soft clay, which has then been baked hard so that it is now a handsome orange. If you tap it, you can hear that this tablet is very tough indeed – that’s why it has survived. But even baked clay doesn’t last for ever, especially if it has been exposed to damp. One of our challenges in the British Museum is that we often have to re-bake the tablets in a special kiln in order to consolidate the surface and preserve the information inscribed on the clay.
Our little beer-rationing tablet is divided into three rows of four boxes each, and in each box the signs – typically for this date – are read from top to bottom, moving right to left, before you move on to the next box. The signs are pictographs, drawings of items which stand just for that item or something closely related to it. So the symbol for beer is an upright jar with a pointed base – a picture of the vessel that was actually used to store the beer rations. The word for ‘ration’ itself is conveyed graphically by a human head, juxtaposed with a bowl, from which it appears to be drinking; the signs in each of the boxes are accompanied by circular and semicircular marks which represent the number of rations recorded.
You could say that this script isn’t really writing in the strict sense, that it’s more a kind of mnemonic, a repertoire of signs that can be used to carry quite complex messages. The crucial breakthrough to real writing came when it was first understood that a graphic symbol, like the one for beer on the tablet, could be used to mean not just the thing it showed, but what the word for the thing sounded like. At this point writing became phonetic, and then all kinds of new communication became possible.
When the earliest cities and states grew up in the world’s fertile river valleys around 5,000 years ago, one of the challenges for leaders was how to govern these new societies. How do you impose your will not just on a couple of hundred villagers, but on tens of thousands of city dwellers? Nearly all these new rulers discovered that, as well as using military force and official ideology, if you want to control populations on this scale you need to write things down.
We tend to think of writing as being about poetry or fiction or history, what we might call literature. But early literature was in fact oral – learnt by heart and then recited or sung. People wrote down what they could not learn by heart, what they couldn’t turn into verse. So pretty well everywhere early writing seems to have been about record-keeping, bean-counting or, as in the case of this little tablet, beer-counting. Beer was the staple drink in Mesopotamia and was issued as rations to workers. Money, laws, trade, employment: this is the stuff of early writing, and it’s writing like that on this tablet that ultimately changes the nature of state control and state
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