Agency in Ancient Writing

2. Bureaucratic Backlashes: Bureaucrats as Agents of Socioeconomic Change in Proto-Historic Mesopotamia

45 Writing systems, at their most fundamental level, are visual manifestations of established social norms and contracts. Such a notion is well expressed in a comment by the noted Assyriologist Ignace J. Gelb in his book A Study of Writing (first published in 1952), where he stated that “[w]riting began at a time when man learned how to communicate his thoughts and feelings by means of visible signs, understandable not only to himself but also to all other persons more or less initiated into the particular system” (Gelb 1969, 13). What Gelb vaguely referred to as a “particular system” is the very breeding ground for writing, a society at a crucial point of its socioeconomic development when the abstraction of the spoken word into symbols becomes desirable or unavoidable. It is the role of the scribe in Mesopotamia in this particular constellation that I shall make the focus of this study. No study of the agency of writing can be complete without considering Mesopotamia, home to some of the oldest civilizations known to us. To many scholars of the past this is where it all began, including writing. Gelb’s own studies on this topic still reflect a strongly diffusionist stance in which, as paraphrased by Cooper (2004, 71), “writing was invented in Babylonia just before 3000 BC, very soon stimulated the development of writing in nearby Egypt, and by T w o Bureaucratic Backlashes Bureaucrats as Agents of Socioeconomic Change in Proto-Historic Mesopotamia Clemens Reichel DOI: 10.5876/9781607321996.c02 46 Clemens Reichel means not well understood eventually stimulated the development of writing in China some 1500 years later.” Over the past decades Gelb’s approach, which clearly reflects influences from V. G. Childe’s work (Childe 1952), has been superseded by more region-based studies that take account of local development and idiosyncrasies. Scholars now agree that writing “was invented more than once, as the Mesoamerican evidence compels us to believe, it could have been invented four times” (Cooper 2004, 72). Mesopotamia may no longer be considered the cradle of all writing systems and, according to recent discoveries in Egypt, it might not even have the earliest known inscriptions.1 Such caveats, however, have not diminished the significance that Mesopotamia holds for our understanding of the impact that the development of a writing system has on society. Rather unusually, the precursors to Mesopotamia’s writing system , which can be traced back over millennia, are well-known. “True” writing finally emerged between 3500 and 3000 BC, at about the same time that a highly urbanized society manifested itself in Mesopotamia. My present study will address the mutual impact that urban society and the writing system had on each other’s development. When looking for individuals and individualism behind the emergence of Mesopotamia’s writing system, we are confronted with several problems. Data for scribal traditions in historical Mesopotamia (after 2500 BC) are abundant— we often know the scribes’ names, their patronymics, exact titles, overlords, and sometimes even elements of their characters. Such traits by definition are more difficult to recognize in prehistory. The scribe himself remains nameless, but his actions and abilities can be discerned from the artifacts that were left behind for us. The scenario evoked in my subsequent discussion not only echoes Adam Smith’s doubts about “intelligent” designs behind most writing systems to some degree (see Smith, this volume) but even suggests a certain “inevitability” in the emergence of an early Mesopotamian writing system. It would be thoroughly misleading, however, to see the Mesopotamian scribe as a “reactionary” who simply mimics newly established social and behavioral norms in writing. During a crucial time between 4000 and 3000 BC, scribes became significant agents that spurred social and economic changes in a fashion similar to those later observed during the Mycenaean period in Greece (cf. Nakassis, this volume). Their actions helped to establish and maintain the subsequent state societies of Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria, which dominated vast parts of the Middle East for millennia and even affect our modern-day society to a significant degree. DEFINING DATA SETs, AGENTs, ANd ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGs The origins of writing in other parts of the world, such as Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica, may be less obvious because of Mesopotamia’s larger numbers of religious, political, and even symbolic early texts. In Mesopotamia, hundreds 47 Bureaucratic Backlashes of thousands of administrative and economic documents, written on tablets in cuneiform...