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LitCharts | September 27 2024
Many animals that cooperate on a large scale in nature (like ants and bees) have “rules” embedded in their DNA. Humans don’t. Unlike social insects—which are genetically programmed to be worker bees or queen bees—Hammurabi's hierarchy of aristocracy, commoners, and slaves isn’t embedded in the human genome: Social rules have to be learned, enforced, and passed on. Harari thinks it’s easy to remember rules on a small scale (say, in a local community), but in large societies, it’s much harder to know all the rules and make sure others are following them. Harari thinks the evolution of large societies demands a new skill that our brains aren’t hardwired for—retaining massive amounts of data.
A clay tablet with an administrative text from the city of Uruk, c.3400–3000 BC. ‘Kushim’ may be the generic title of an officeholder, or the name of a particular individual. We have no idea what the builders of Göbekli Tepe actually called the place. With the appearance of writing, we are beginning to hear history through the ears of its protagonists.
To get around our limited capacity for retaining data in our minds, ancient societies invented ways of storing information outside the brain—like writing, which Sumerians invented in 3500 B.C.E. Early writing was limited to mathematical data, like tracking payments and taxes. Over the next thousand years, Sumerians added more symbols to their script (extending beyond data tracking symbols), which enabled more complex written communication—like royal decrees, personal correspondence, recipes, and poetry.
Harari thinks the invention of writing made humans think in more compartmentalized ways, thereby changing how we see the world. In the 9th century, Hindu cultures invented a numeral script, which Arabic empires spread globally as the Arabic numeral system, and humans around the world still use it today. Harari thinks the language of numbers dominates the world today. An “even more revolutionary system” that evolved from the language of numbers is binary code, which is the language computing. Harari thinks as computers get more sophisticated, they’ll use binary code in ways that humans won’t understand, and become the new “ruler of the world.”
At this early stage, writing was limited to facts and figures. The great Sumerian novel, if there ever was one, was never committed to clay tablets. Writing was time-consuming and the reading public tiny, so no one saw any reason to use it for anything other than essential recordkeeping. If we look for the first words of wisdom reaching us from our ancestors, 5,000 years ago, we’re in for a big disappointment. The earliest messages our ancestors have left us read, for example, ‘29,086 measures barley 37 months Kushim.’ The most probable reading of this sentence is: ‘A total of 29,086 measures of barley were received over the course of 37 months. Signed, Kushim.’ Alas, the first texts of history contain no philosophical insights, no poetry, legends, laws, or even royal triumphs.
Partial script cannot express the entire spectrum of a spoken language, but it can express things that fall outside the scope of spoken language. Partial scripts cannot be used to write poetry, but they can keep tax accounts very effectively.
Only one other type of text survived from these ancient days, and it is even less exciting: lists of words, copied over and over again by apprentice scribes as training exercises. Even had a bored student wanted to write out some of his poems instead of copy a bill of sale, he could not have done so. The earliest Sumerian writing was a partial rather than a full script. Full script is a system of material signs that can represent spoken language more or less completely. It can therefore express everything people can say, including poetry. Partial script, on the other hand, is a system of material signs that can represent only particular types of information, belonging to a limited field of activity. Latin script, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and Braille are full scripts. You can use them to write tax registers, love poems, history books, food recipes and business law. In contrast, the earliest Sumerian script, like modern mathematical symbols and musical notation, are partial scripts. You can use mathematical script to make calculations, but you cannot use it to write love poems.
A man holding a quipu, as depicted in a Spanish manuscript following the fall of the Inca Empire.
It didn’t disturb the Sumerians that their script was ill-suited for writing poetry. They didn’t invent it in order to copy spoken language, but rather to do things that spoken language failed at. There were some cultures, such as those of the pre-Columbian Andes, which used only partial scripts throughout their entire histories, unfazed by their scripts’ limitations and feeling no need for a full version. Andean script was very different from its Sumerian counterpart. In fact, it was so different that many people would argue it wasn’t a script at all. It was not written on clay tablets or pieces of paper. Rather, it was written by tying knots on colourful cords called quipus. Each quipu consisted of many cords of different colours, made of wool or cotton. On each cord, several knots were tied in different places. A single quipu could contain hundreds of cords and thousands of knots. By combining different knots on different cords with different colours, it was possible to record large amounts of mathematical data relating to, for example, tax collection and property ownership
The language of number
As the centuries passed, bureaucratic methods of data processing grew ever more different from the way humans naturally think – and ever more important. A critical step was made sometime before the ninth century AD, when a new partial script was invented, one that could store and process mathematical data with unprecedented efficiency. This partial script was composed of ten signs, representing the numbers from 0 to 9. Confusingly, these signs are known as Arabic numerals even though they were first invented by the Hindus (even more confusingly, modern Arabs use a set of digits that look quite different from Western ones). But the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system, understood its usefulness, refined it, and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe. When several other signs were later added to the Arab numerals (such as the signs for addition, subtraction and multiplication), the basis of modern mathematical notation came into being. Although this system of writing remains a partial script, it has become the world’s dominant language. Almost all states, companies, organisations and institutions – whether they speak Arabic, Hindi, English or Norwegian – use mathematical script to record and process data. Every piece of information that can be translated into mathematical script is stored, spread and processed with mind-boggling speed and efficiency
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