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TPO53最早文字的证据

Evidence Of The Earliest Writing

Although literacy appeared independently in several parts of the

prehistoricworld, the earliest evidence of writing is the cuneiform Sumerian

script on theclay tablets of ancient Mesopotamia, which, archaeological

detective work has revealed, had its origins in the accounting practices of

commercial activity.Researchers demonstrated that preliterate people, to keep

track of the goods they produced and exchanged, created a system of accounting

using claytokens as symbolic representations of their products. Over many

thousands of years, the symbols evolved through several stages of abstraction

until they became wedge- shaped (cuneiform) signs on clay tablets, recognizable

as writing.

The original tokens (circa 8500 B.C.E.) were three-dimensional solid

shapes—tiny spheres, cones, disks, and cylinders. A debt of six units of grain

and eight head of livestock, for example might have been represented by six

conical and eight cylindrical tokens. To keep batches of tokens together, an

innovation was introduced (circa 3250 B. C. E.) whereby they were sealed inside

clay envelopes that could be broken open and counted when it came time for a

debt to be repaid. But because the contents of the envelopes could easily be

forgotten, two-dimensional representations of the three-dimensional tokens were

impressed into the surface of the envelopes before they were sealed. Eventually,

having two sets of equivalent symbols—the internal tokens and external

markings—came to seem redundant, so the tokens were eliminated (circa 3250-3100 B.C.E.), and only solid clay tablets with two-dimensional symbols were retained. Over time, the symbols became more numerous, varied, and abstract and came to represent more than trade commodities, evolving eventually into cuneiform writing.

The evolution of the symbolism is reflected in the archaeological record first of all by the increasing complexity of the tokens themselves. The earliest tokens, dating from about 10,000 to 6,000 years ago, were of only the simplest geometric shapes. But about 3500 B.C.E., more complex tokens came into common usage, including many naturalistic forms shaped like miniature tools, furniture, fruit, and humans. The earlier, plain tokens were counters for agricultural products, whereas the complex ones stood for finished products, such as bread, oil, perfume, wool, and rope, and for items produced in workshops, such as metal, bracelets, types of cloth, garments, mats, pieces of furniture, tools, and a variety of stone and pottery vessels. The signs marked on clay tablets likewise evolved from simple wedges, circles, ovals, and triangles based on the plain tokens to pictographs derived from the complex tokens.

Before this evidence came to light, the inventors of writing were assumed by researchers to have been an intellectual elite. Some, for example, hypothesized that writing emerged when members of the priestly caste agreed among themselves on written signs. But the association of the plain tokens with the first farmers and of the complex tokens with the first artisans—and the fact that the token-and-envelope accounting system invariably represented only small-scale transactions—testifies to the relatively modest social status of the