The first states, writing systems and cities

A small clay tablet covered with incised signs, arranged in boxes. — Clay tablet from the late Uruk period (3300-3100 BCE): a list of food rations in proto-cuneiform signs, in which the sign for “ration” combines a head and a bowl; British Museum. Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0, source

The oldest written text we know of is neither a poem, nor a prayer, nor a law.¹

It is an account. Someone recorded quantities of barley and head of cattle on a clay tablet, with the name of the person who owed or received them.

Writing began as counting

In Mesopotamia, around 3200 BCE, cuneiform was invented. It is the only writing system in the world whose entire history, back to its material origins, we believe we can trace — a reconstruction that is widely accepted, even though its details are debated.

Before signs, there were clay tokens. Small shapes that were enclosed in sealed clay envelopes to represent goods: so many tokens, so many sheep. Marks representing the contents were then impressed on the outside, along with the seals of those with an interest in the transaction — so that it could be checked without breaking the envelope.²

Then these shapes were drawn directly, and the drawings became stylised into signs.

So writing does not descend from storytelling. It descends from accounting.³

One reservation is called for, however. This line of descent is widely accepted, but it is debated. At a site in Upper Mesopotamia, more than a thousand small clay objects of this kind have been unearthed: their detailed study concludes that they were indeed used for counting in certain specific places, but that this single role cannot be attributed to them everywhere.⁴

This story is told in detail in our page on number systems.

From tokens to the first cities

Why did this need to count arise at that particular moment? Because humans were then inventing the city.

Older sites such as Çatalhöyük, in Anatolia, already brought together thousands of people, but without centralised institutions or administration. With Uruk or Susa, around 3500-3200 BCE, a threshold was crossed: the concentration of inhabitants transformed the social structure and gave rise to the first city-state.

For the first time, the majority of people did not produce their own food: craftsmen, builders and administrators had to be fed. An administrative city cannot function on human memory alone. Harvests have to be centralised, rations redistributed, and a record kept of who has paid their share and who still owes labour.

Writing did not create the city: it was the city, grown too large for human memory, that made writing indispensable.

Three times, or four

How many times was writing invented from scratch, without anyone copying anyone?

Three cases may have been independent inventions: Mesopotamia, China and Mesoamerica. Three regions of the world far apart from one another, where societies seem to have had the same idea independently — although, for China, the hypothesis that the idea came from the west is sometimes put forward.⁵

The fourth case, Egypt, is debated. This debate is illuminating.

Egyptian writing appeared at roughly the same time as Mesopotamian cuneiform — the oldest labels from Abydos date to about 3300 BCE — but it works very differently. Some researchers see it as a 100% independent invention. Others think the Egyptians learned, through trade routes, that it was possible to fix speech and accounts on a medium — and that they then devised their own system.⁶

This second possibility has a name: stimulus diffusion.⁷

One can borrow the idea of a technique without copying its form. Knowing that something is feasible is enough to set about achieving it in one’s own way.

Other pages on this site already show this mechanism at work among Indian weavers or in the choice of the Japanese school model. Here, it goes a step further: one does not even receive the object, only the news that it exists.

What we will never read

Not all ancient writing systems can be deciphered.

Linear A from Crete, Proto-Elamite from Iran, Meroitic from Sudan (whose signs we have known how to pronounce since the early twentieth century, without understanding the language), rongorongo from Easter Island, and the Indus script (used in present-day Pakistan and north-western India) keep their secrets.⁸

In the case of the Indus script, the problem is revealing: on a single surface, the longest known inscription has only seventeen signs, and the average is under five. (One sometimes reads twenty-six signs — by adding up the faces of a single object — or thirty-four, based on a copper plate published in 2019 whose authenticity is disputed. Whatever figure is adopted, it is the brevity that stands in the way.)⁹

This leads some researchers to ask a troubling question: is it really a writing system capable of transcribing sentences? Or mere merchants’ marks, family emblems or religious symbols?¹⁰

There is, however, a way of trying to settle the matter without reading a single sign.

The method is to measure how far each sign makes it possible to predict the next. In a language, the sequence of signs is neither completely predictable nor completely random: there are rules, but also an element of choice. In 2009, a team argued that the sequence of Indus signs behaves, from this point of view, like a language.¹¹

The response was immediate: this test, other researchers objected, does not separate true writing systems from symbol systems that are not writing.¹²

The debate has lasted twenty years, between people who all work from the same four thousand inscriptions and the same four hundred signs. What separates them is not what they see, but what they accept as proof.¹³

As with the number of languages in the world or the threshold at which a village becomes a town: the number of writing systems recorded depends strictly on how one defines the word “writing”.¹⁴

And what was destroyed

There is another reason why texts are missing: systematic destruction.

In Mesoamerica, a whole series of distinct writing systems dating from before the arrival of the Europeans has been identified. Several are known only from a single inscription on stone.¹⁵

The vast majority of books — the codices — were destroyed during the Spanish conquest. In the sixteenth century, in Yucatán, Maya codices were burned on the orders of a Spanish cleric, who himself described the scene in writing. Only three original Maya codices have survived, four if one includes a long-contested manuscript.¹⁶

We do not know how many libraries disappeared in this way.

What we call a state

The word keeps coming up on this page, and it refers to something precise. A state is an organisation that exercises lasting power over a territory and over those who live there, beyond ties of kinship. It is this last point that makes the difference: in a village, one obeys relatives; in a state, one obeys people one does not know and will never meet.

Four features recur wherever states are seen to emerge, from the Nile to the Indus Valley.

A levy. The state takes a share of what is produced — grain, livestock, labour. This is what feeds it, and it is the reason it must count.
A hierarchy of specialists. Those who levy, those who record, those who command, those who officiate. None of them farms: they live off the levy.
A force. A capacity for coercion — guards, soldiers — without which the levy would cease to be accepted.
A written record, or an equivalent. A memory must be kept of what has been taken, what is owed, what has been promised — and one man’s memory is not enough when the levy concerns thousands of households.

The word “equivalent” matters. The Inca state administered millions of people without writing, by means of knotted cords, the quipus, which recorded quantities and accounts. This is not writing in the strict sense, since they do not transcribe any language — but it fulfils the same function: preserving information beyond what an individual memory can retain.

Each of these four features calls for the others. A regular levy requires knowing who has paid; knowing requires writing; writing requires people whose job it is; supporting them requires levying more. The state, writing and the city did not appear one after another: they appeared together, because none of the three can stand without the other two.

This is exactly what the object at the start of this page shows. The oldest known text is not a poem: it is an account — the trace of a levy.

What the state writes

When a state forms, its first reaction is to lay down written rules: tax registers, standards of measurement, debt cancellations.

In China, the emperor Qin Shi Huang unified the country in the third century BCE. His most far-reaching founding act was not a battle: it was to have unified the measures, the axle width of carts and the signs of writing throughout the empire.¹⁷

The axle width deserves a moment’s attention. Fixing this measurement means ensuring that all carts run in the same ruts — and therefore that the empire’s roads are usable everywhere. It is the same idea as the box of agreed dimensions discussed on our page on transport, twenty-two centuries earlier.

In Mesopotamia, debts recorded on clay ended up stifling the peasants. On his accession, a king would regularly proclaim an “amnesty” (andurāru): debts were cancelled and those who had sold themselves into service to repay their debts were freed.¹⁸

An important clarification: these edicts did not abolish slavery. They freed those who had been sold or pledged for debt, but a slave born in the household was excluded from this release. The details are on our page devoted to ancient social structures.¹⁹

Note 1

The development from tokens to script reveals that writing emerged from counting and accounting. Writing was used exclusively for accounting until the third millennium BC, when the Sumerian concern for the afterlife paved the way to literature by using writing for funerary inscriptions.

Schmandt-Besserat, Denise, “The Evolution of Writing”, in Wright, James (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Elsevier, 2014