The origin of writing is a contentious issue at the moment, for there are three possibilities. For many years it was assumed that the cuneiform script of Mesopotamia was the earliest true writing, but it was associated with a problem. Cuneiform consists of more or less abstract signs, whereas many people thought that writing proper would show a stronger link with paintings, or pictographs-symbols that were part pictures of objects and part symbols. This is where the work of archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat comes in. In the late 1960s she noticed that thousands of 'rather mundane clay objects' had been found throughout the ancient Near East and regarded as insignificant by most archaeologists. Schmandt-Besserat thought otherwise, that they might have formed an ancient system that had been overlooked. She therefore visited various collections of these 'tokens', as she called them, in the Near East, North Africa, Europe and America.22 In the course of her study, she found that the tokens were sometimes geometrical in form- spheres, tetrahedrons, cylinders-while others were in the shape of animals, tools or vessels. She came to realise that they were the first clay objects to have been hardened by fire. Whatever they were, a lot of effort had gone into their manufacture. Whatever they were, they were not mundane. Eventually, she came across an account of a hollow tablet found at Nuzi, a site in northern Iraq and dated to the second millennium BC. The cuneiform inscription said: 'Counters representing small cattle: 21 ewes that lamb, 6 female lambs, 8 full-grown male sheep...' and so on. When the tablet had been opened, inside were found forty-nine counters, exactly the number of cattle in the written list.23 For Schmandt-Besserat, this was 'like a Rosetta stone'. For the next fifteen years she examined more than 10,000 tokens, and came to the conclusion that they comprised a primitive accounting system and one which led to the creation of writing. Words, in a sense, began with numbers. This is, after all, what writing is, a form of communication which allows the two communicating parties to be spatially and temporally separated. The first tokens dated to 8000-4300 BC and were fairly plain and not very varied. They were found in such sites as Tepe Asiab in Iran ( c . 7900-7700 BC), where the people still lived mainly by hunting and gathering. Beginning around 4400 BC, more complex tokens appeared, mainly in connection with temple activity. The different types represented different objects: for example, cones appear to have represented grain, an ovoid stood for a jar of oil, while cylinders stood for domestic animals.24 The tokens caught on because they removed the need to remember certain things, and they removed the need for a spoken language, so for that reason could be used between people who spoke different tongues. They came into use because of a change in social and economic structure. As trade increased between villages, the headman would have needed to keep a record of who had produced what. The complex tokens appear to have been introduced into Susa, the main city of Elam (southern Iran), and Uruk, and seem to have been a result of the need to account for goods produced in the city's workshops (most were found in public rather than private buildings). The tokens also provided a new and more accurate way to assess and record taxes. They were kept together in one of two ways. They were either strung together or, more importantly from our point of view, enclosed in clay envelopes. It was on the outside of these envelopes that marks were made, to record what was inside and who was involved. And although this chronology has recently been queried by French scholars, this still seems to be the best explanation for how cuneiform script came about. Of course, the new system quickly made the tokens themselves redundant, with the result that the impressions in the clay had replaced the old system by about 3500-3100 BC. The envelopes became tablets and the way was open for the development of fullblown cuneiform.25 A system of marks, of more or less geometric lines, whorls and squiggles, has been found on a number of tablets, figurines, pottery, and amulets in south-east Europe, in Romania and Bulgaria in what is known as the Vinca culture. Associated with undoubted pictographs-goats, animal heads, ears of corn-these were found in burial and apparently sacrificial contexts, dating from c . 4000 BC. The Gradesnica Plaque, discovered in Vratsa in western Bulgaria in 1969, is even older, dating to 7,000-6,000 years ago.26 The
signs associated with this Vinca culture have been analysed according to which type of artefact they appear on-amulets or pottery, for example. The analysis has shown that their distribution is consistent. There is a corpus of 210 signs, forming just five core groups: straight lines, crosses, chevrons, dots and curves. But these nowhere form texts. Instead, they seem to be symbolic designs, no doubt with religious rather than economic meanings. They comprise a form of proto-writing. Some scholars believe that the users of these 'Old European' scripts (to use Marija Gimbutas' phrase) were forced out of their native lands by invading Indo-Europeans. Harald Haarman, of the University of Helsinki, is one of those who believes that the Old Europeans may have been driven to places like Crete. There, at Knossos and elsewhere, in the early twentieth century, Sir Arthur Evans and his colleagues uncovered a major civilisation-the Minoan, with Bull and Snake worship among its common features. But the Minoans also produced two scripts, known to us as Linear A and Linear B. The use of the term 'Linear' was originally Gimbutas' idea, to stress the mainly linear (as opposed to pictographic) qualities of the Vinca signs. But while Linear B was famously deciphered by the English amateur, Michael Ventris, in the 1950s, and shown to be a form of Greek, Linear A has never been deciphered. Haarman suggests that this is because Linear A is not an Indo-European language at all but an 'Old European' one. Haarman says he has found fifty signs in Linear A that are identical with Old European (see Figure 3, opposite). The most recent candidate for the birth of writing takes us to India. There, traditionally, the earliest major civilisation was known as the Indus civilisation, the capitals of which were Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, dating back to 2300-1750 BC. In May 1999 it was announced that a tablet, 5,500 years old, and bearing an inscription, had been discovered at Harappa. A month later, another announcement claimed that the script had been deciphered. This script consisted of a double M, a Y, a lozenge with a dot at its centre, a second lozenge, somewhat deformed, and a V. According to Drs Jha and Rajaram, this means 'It irrigates the sacred land.' The language is allegedly 'pre-Harappan', much more primitive than other Indus seals. Four other examples have been found in the region. The Indian scholars believe that this script, like other primitive scripts elsewhere, does not use vowels, though in this case the use of double consonants, as in the double M, is meant to indicate vowels. In other words, it shows early writing in the course of evolution. Scholars associated with the discovery believe this is enough to move the 'cradle of civilisation' from Mesopotamia to the Indus region.27 These are the latest researches, and in time they may well change the way we think about origins. For the present, however, the Vinca markings do not comprise full-blown scripts, while the tablets discovered in and around the Indus region are only a handful of examples. While undoubtedly intriguing, even promising, we must await further discoveries before abandoning Mesopotamia-and cuneiform-as the earliest example of true writing. Figure 3: Signs common to Old European script and Linear A [Source: Richard Rudgley, Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age , New York, The Free Press, 1999, page 70] Cuneiform script has been known about since the late seventeenth century. Partially successful attempts to decipher it were made in 1802 and again in 1846. But a complete understanding of Babylonian culture was only possible after the discoveries of a 'footloose young Englishman', a newly-qualified solicitor, Austin Henry Layard. On his way overland to Ceylon (as Sri Lanka then was), he stopped off in the Middle East and got no further than western Persia (now Iran). 'After undertaking some unofficial intelligence work for the British Ambassador in Istanbul, he won his backing for a period of excavation in Iraq, where he chose a huge mound called Nimrud, twenty miles south of Mosul.'28 Though he was not a trained archaeologist (hardly anybody was in those days), Layard was blessed with luck. He discovered a series of huge slabs, great limestone bulls up to fourteen feet high, images so striking that his account of his researches became a best-seller. But Layard also found many examples of what appeared to be wedge-shaped inscriptions on stone, and the dating of the site-3500-3000 BC-made this the earliest known form of writing. Sumerian was not finally understood until the twentieth century but once it was, the