Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action

Symbolic Record Keeping and Early Alphabets

Of course, flash forward to about 8-9000 years ago when settled agriculture started, and the first cities began to emerge on the agricultural plains, for the most part built of mud and bricks, and the evidence we have now is pretty strong that the next communication breakthrough was really based on a medium of mud or clay, as you will. Cities and writing seem to have come together. The ability to organize specialization, to gather people in larger numbers and proximity; whether that gave birth to writing or writing was necessary to organize that is not clear.

There was a mystery for quite a number of years among archaeologists about a lot of small clay figurines that were found at the sites of early large cities in the Fertile Crescent. A woman by the name of Denise Schmandt-Besserat solved that mystery and really came up with a good explanation of the emergence of writing from these cuneiform marks on clay.

They became more organized, but what people started doing was making these little figurines. If you were in a city in one of these early empires, and you were a farmer and contributed 40 bushels of wheat to the granary, you needed to prove that the granary owed you for the bushels of wheat when the time came to remove it. So contracts were created by making little figurines of bushels, or if they were sheep that you contributed, little figurines of sheep, and these were put in little clay envelopes and baked, and then when it was time to retrieve your contract the envelope was broken open.

Eventually, people figured out that they didn’t have to make these figurines and put them into envelopes, they could just impress the figure of the bushel or the little sheep on the surface of the envelope, and we began to get this simplified record keeping.

The people who were really in charge of symbolic record keeping were the ones who worked for the emperors. About 5000 years ago, the alphabet became the great breakthrough. The emperors, the large city states of the time, were organized with collective action on a scale that wasn’t possible before. Of course, this was a hierarchal system. Slavery was involved, organized military was involved, but it was, I think without much argument, a new level of complexity for human social collective action, and writing was truly a miraculous power.

If you learned a new hunting technique, or a new agricultural technique, it no longer depended on oral transmission to keep that knowledge alive. You could transmit knowledge across time and space, and that very powerful code for transmitting and storing knowledge was controlled, the literacy, the ability to encode and decode, was confined to an elite that was chosen by the emperors and controlled by them for thousands of years.