Commentary: Writing is among the great achievements of humanity. It allows literary authors to explore the depth of the human condition, and to affect the emotions of readers never met. But the origins of writing come from the more prosaic area of finance, not the arts.
The origin of writing can be traced back 7000 years to the middle east. Early agriculturalist population had begun to increase; social interactions were becoming more complicated. Near Eastern societies had to obtain foodstuff for distribution to growing urban populations. At the same time, trade routes were become geographically more complicated.
The increasing scale and scope of Middle Eastern civilizations depended more and more on complex financial transactions. For example, people would deposit wheat into storehouses for safe keeping that later could be withdrawn as needed; or some one might borrow seed for planting, using a sheep as collateral.
To keep track of these transactions, People began to use small clay tokens shaped into stylized representation of the object. A tiny clay sheaf of wheat would represent an actual sheaf of wheat. A stylized sheep represented an actual sheep. The possibilities were without limits. There was even a token representing a day’s labor.
With time, the first true cities emerged. Among the very earliest was Uruk where the new token technology was taken to the next step. People began to place the tokens into clay envelopes, called bullae. We don’t exactly how these bullae were used. Where they in effect a complex contract involving multiple commodities? Or where they more like a purse, used for safe keeping of valuables? We can’t tell.
But regardless of how the bullae were used, they had a problem. To see the contents, they had to be broken open, rendering them useless. To overcome this problem, the Sumerians of Uruk began to use marks to represent the objects contained within. A pictograph of a sheep followed by five slashes meant five sheep.
The next step was obvious. Do away with the bullae altogether and simply use the marks, now written on clay tablets, directly to track transactions. These pictographs evolved into the famed Sumerian cuneiform, the first true writing.
From accounting ledge marks to true literature was a surprisingly short step as Gilgamesh, the oldest know written story, was composed about the same time in Uruk. Indeed, it was while excavating the Uruk Central Temple complex described in Gilgamesh that the accounting tokens were first found.
The nexus between finance and writing is a story repeated frequently in the history of innovation. Financial markets have always been quick to adopt new technologies that are latter important for society in general. The reason for this is obvious. Anything that allows a trader to squeeze a few pennies from a transaction can quickly mean riches when applied over and over to many transactions. Examples abound. Early textbooks on algebra where aimed at merchants. The first telegraph lines connected cities, like New York and Philadelphia, with active financial markets. The first private sector users of handheld electric calculators were Wall Street traders.
Christopher A. Erickson, Ph.D., is the interim department head of Economics/Applied Statistics/International Business