Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

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 such as the Sumerian and mathematical 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 eld 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.

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20.
 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 di erent from its Sumerian counterpart. In fact, it was so di erent
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 di erent colours, made of
wool or cotton. On each cord, several knots were tied in di erent places. A single
quipu could contain hundreds of cords and thousands of knots. By combining
di erent knots on di erent cords with di erent colours, it was possible to record
large amounts of mathematical data relating to, for example, tax collection and
property ownership.
2
For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, quipus were essential to the business
of cities, kingdoms and empires.
3
 They reached their full potential under the Inca
Empire, which ruled 10–12 million people and covered today’s Peru, Ecuador and
Bolivia, as well as chunks of Chile, Argentina and Colombia. Thanks to quipus, the
Incas could save and process large amounts of data, without which they would not

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have been able to maintain the complex administrative machinery that an empire
of that size requires.
In fact, quipus were so e ective and accurate that in the early years following
the Spanish conquest of South America, the Spaniards themselves employed quipus
in the work of administering their new empire. The problem was that the
Spaniards did not themselves know how to record and read quipus, making them
dependent on local professionals. The continent’s new rulers realised that this
placed them in a tenuous position – the native quipu experts could easily mislead
and cheat their overlords. So once Spain’s dominion was more rmly established,
quipus were phased out and the new empire’s records were kept entirely in Latin
script and numerals. Very few quipus survived the Spanish occupation, and most
of those remaining are undecipherable, since, unfortunately, the art of reading
quipus has been lost.
The Wonders of Bureaucracy
The Mesopotamians eventually started to want to write down things other than
monotonous mathematical data. Between 3000 
BC
and 2500 
BC
more and more
signs were added to the Sumerian system, gradually transforming it into a full
script that we today call cuneiform. By 2500 
BC
, kings were using cuneiform to
issue decrees, priests were using it to record oracles, and less exalted citizens were
using it to write personal letters. At roughly the same time, Egyptians developed
another full script known as hieroglyphics. Other full scripts were developed in
China around 1200 
BC
and in Central America around 1000–500 
BC
.
From these initial centres, full scripts spread far and wide, taking on various
new forms and novel tasks. People began to write poetry, history books,
romances, dramas, prophecies and cookbooks. Yet writing’s most important task
continued to be the storage of reams of mathematical data, and that task
remained the prerogative of partial script. The Hebrew Bible, the Greek 
Iliad
, the
Hindu Mahabharata and the Buddhist Tipitika all began as oral works. For many
generations they were transmitted orally and would have lived on even had
writing never been invented. But tax registries and complex bureaucracies were
born together with partial script, and the two remain inexorably linked to this day
like Siamese twins – think of the cryptic entries in computerised data bases and
spreadsheets.
As more and more things were written, and particularly as administrative
archives grew to huge proportions, new problems appeared. Information stored in
a persons brain is easy to retrieve. My brain stores billions of bits of data, yet I

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can quickly, almost instantaneously, recall the name of Italy’s capital,
immediately afterwards recollect what I did on 11 September 2001, and then
reconstruct the route leading from my house to the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem. Exactly how the brain does it remains a mystery, but we all know that
the brain’s retrieval system is amazingly e cient, except when you are trying to
remember where you put your car keys.
How, though, do you find and retrieve information stored on quipu cords or clay
tablets? If you have just ten tablets or a hundred tablets, it’s not a problem. But
what if you have accumulated thousands of them, as did one of Hammurabi’s
contemporaries, King Zimrilim of Mari?
Imagine for a moment that it’s 1776 
BC
. Two Marians are quarrelling over
possession of a wheat eld. Jacob insists that he bought the eld from Esau thirty
years ago. Esau retorts that he in fact rented the eld to Jacob for a term of thirty
years, and that now, the term being up, he intends to reclaim it. They shout and
wrangle and start pushing one another before they realise that they can resolve
their dispute by going to the royal archive, where are housed the deeds and bills of
sale that apply to all the kingdom’s real estate. Upon arriving at the archive they
are shuttled from one o cial to the other. They wait through several herbal tea
breaks, are told to come back tomorrow, and eventually are taken by a grumbling
clerk to look for the relevant clay tablet. The clerk opens a door and leads them
into a huge room lined, oor to ceiling, with thousands of clay tablets. No wonder
the clerk is sour-faced. How is he supposed to locate the deed to the disputed
wheat eld written thirty years ago? Even if he nds it, how will he be able to
cross-check to ensure that the one from thirty years ago is the latest document
relating to the eld in question? If he can’t nd it, does that prove that Esau never
sold or rented out the eld? Or just that the document got lost, or turned to mush
when some rain leaked into the archive?
Clearly, just imprinting a document in clay is not enough to guarantee e cient,
accurate and convenient data processing. That requires methods of organisation
like catalogues, methods of reproduction like photocopy machines, methods of
rapid and accurate retrieval like computer algorithms, and pedantic (but hopefully
cheerful) librarians who know how to use these tools.
Inventing such methods proved to be far more di cult than inventing writing.
Many writing systems developed independently in cultures distant in time and
place from each other. Every decade archaeologists discover another few forgotten
scripts. Some of them might prove to be even older than the Sumerian scratches in
clay. But most of them remain curiosities because those who invented them failed
to invent e cient ways of cataloguing and retrieving data. What set apart Sumer,
as well as pharaonic Egypt, ancient China and the Inca Empire, is that these
cultures developed good techniques of archiving, cataloguing and retrieving

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written records. They also invested in schools for scribes, clerks, librarians and
accountants.
A writing exercise from a school in ancient Mesopotamia discovered by modern
archaeologists gives us a glimpse into the lives of these students, some 4,000 years
ago:
I went in and sat down, and my teacher read my tablet. He said, ‘There’s something missing!’
And he caned me.
One of the people in charge said, ‘Why did you open your mouth without my permission?’
And he caned me.
The one in charge of rules said, ‘Why did you get up without my permission?’
And he caned me.
The gatekeeper said, ‘Why are you going out without my permission?’ And he caned me.
The keeper of the beer jug said, ‘Why did you get some without my permission?’
And he caned me.
The Sumerian teacher said, ‘Why did you speak Akkadian?’
*
And he caned me.
My teacher said, ‘Your handwriting is no good!’
And he caned me.
4
Ancient scribes learned not merely to read and write, but also to use catalogues,
dictionaries, calendars, forms and tables. They studied and internalised techniques
of cataloguing, retrieving and processing information very di erent from those
used by the brain. In the brain, all data is freely associated. When I go with my
spouse to sign on a mortgage for our new home, I am reminded of the rst place
we lived together, which reminds me of our honeymoon in New Orleans, which
reminds me of alligators, which remind me of dragons, which remind me of