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Who Began Writing? Many Theories, Few Answers
______________________________________________________________

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

PHILADELPHIA -- The Sumerians had a story to explain their
invention of writing more than 5,000 years ago. It seems a
messenger of the king of Uruk arrived at the court of a distant
ruler so exhausted from the journey that he was unable to deliver
the oral message. So the king, being clever, came up with a
solution. He patted some clay and set down the words of his next
messages on a tablet.

A Sumerian epic celebrates the achievement:

Before that time writing on clay had not yet existed,
But now, as the sun rose, so it was!
The king of Kullaba [Uruk] had set words on a tablet, so it was! 

A charming just-so, or so-it-was, story, its retelling at a recent
symposium on the origins or writing, held here at the University of
Pennsylvania, both amused and frustrated scholars. It reminded them
that they could expect little help -- only a myth -- from the
Sumerians themselves, presumably the first writing people, in
understanding how and why the invention responsible for the great
divide in human culture between prehistory and history had come
about.

Early Writing: Cultures Make Their First Marks
Representing spoken language in writing grew out of the transformation
of pictures and random marks into images with consistent meaning.
Among the earliest cultures to do this were:

SUMERIA, 3,200 B.C. This Mesopotamian culture is generally thought to
be the first culture to produce written texts. In the example above
the Sumerians used a stylus and wet clay to record the ingredients for
beer.

EGYPT, 3,200 - 3,000 B.C. Early Egyptians used a system of pictorial
hiero-glyphics as a written language. The earliest examples (above)
were phonetically arranged symbols on small clay tablets used to
indicate payments for commodities. It reads Mountain of Light.

INDUS VALLEY, 2,500 B.C. Ceramic seals like the one shown above were
used by the inhabitants of what is now Pakistan to indicate ownership
or destinations for bundles of goods. The scripts in the upper right
corner are individual characters.

CHINA, 1,500 - 1,200 B.C. During the Shang Dynasty the Chinese began
to inscribe divinations on the underside of turtle shells and ox
bones. These artifacts are now referred to as oracle bone
inscriptions.

MESOAMERICA 250 - 300 B.C. The Olmecs, Mayans and Zapotecs are thought
to be the first of many cultures in this region to develop writing.
Shown above is an early Zapotec example that is still untranslated.

Sources: Old World Civilizations, by the American Museum of Natural
History

Jim McManus/The New York Times; Photographs courtesy of Margaret
Nissen, German Archeological Institute and Harappa Archeological
Research Project
_________________________________________________________________

The archeologists, historians and other scholars at the meeting
smiled at the absurdity of a king's writing a letter that its
recipient could not read. They also doubted that the earliest
writing was a direct rendering of speech. Writing more than likely
began as a separate and distinct symbolic system of communication,
like painting, sculpture and oral storytelling, and only later
merged with spoken language.

Yet in the story, the Sumerians, who lived in Mesopotamia, the
lower valley of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now
southern Iraq, seemed to understand writing's transforming
function. As Dr. Holly Pittman, director of the university's Center
for Ancient Studies and organizer of the symposium, observed,
writing "arose out of the need to store information and transmit
information outside of human memory and over time and over space."

In exchanging interpretations and new information, the scholars
acknowledged that they still had no fully satisfying answers to the
most important questions of exactly how and why writing was
developed. Many of them favored a broad explanation of writing's
origins in the visual arts, pictograms of things being transformed
into increasingly abstract symbols for things, names and eventually
words in speech. Their views clashed with a widely held theory
among archeologists that writing grew out of the pieces of clay in
assorted sizes and shapes that Sumerian accountants had used as
tokens to keep track of livestock and stores of grain.

The scholars at the meeting also conceded that they had no
definitive answer to the question of whether writing was invented
only once and spread elsewhere or arose independently several times
in several places, like Egypt, the Indus Valley, China and among
the Olmecs and Maya of Mexico and Central America. But they
criticized recent findings suggesting that writing might have
developed earlier in Egypt than in Mesopotamia.

In December, Dr. Günter Dreyer, director of the German
Archeological Institute in Egypt, announced new radiocarbon dates
for tombs at Abydos, on the Nile about 250 miles south of Cairo.
The dates indicated that some hieroglyphic inscriptions on pots,
bone and ivory in the tombs were made at least as early as 3200
B.C., possibly 3400. It was now an "open question," Dr. Dreyer
said, whether writing appeared first in Egypt or Mesopotamia.

At the symposium, Dr. John Baines, an Oxford University
Egyptologist who had just visited Dr. Dreyer, expressed skepticism
in polite terms. "I'm suspicious of the dates," he said in an
interview. "I think he's being very bold in his readings of these
things."

The preponderance of archeological evidence has shown that the
urbanizing Sumerians were the first to develop writing, in 3200 or
3300 B.C. These are the dates for many clay tablets with a
proto-cuneiform script found at the site of the ancient city of
Uruk. The tablets bore pictorial symbols for the names of people,
places and things for governing and commerce. The Sumerian script
gradually evolved from the pictorial to the abstract, but it was
probably at least five centuries before the writing came to
represent recorded spoken language.

Egyptian hieroglyphics are so different from Sumerian cuneiform,
Dr. Baines said, that they were probably invented independently not
long after Sumerian writing. If anything, the Egyptians may have
gotten the idea of writing from the Sumerians, with whom they had
contacts in Syria, but nothing more.

In any event, the writing idea became more widespread at the
beginning of the third millennium B.C. The Elamites of southern
Iran developed a proto-writing system then, perhaps influenced by
the proto-cuneiform of their Sumerian neighbors, and before the
millennium was out, writing appeared in the Indus River Valley of
what is now Pakistan and western India, then in Syria and Crete and
parts of Turkey. Writing in China dates back to the Shang period
toward the end of the second millennium B.C., and it dates to the
first millennium B.C. in Mesoamerica.

Archeologists have thought that the undeciphered Indus script,
which seemed to appear first around 2500, may have been inspired in
part from trade contacts with Mesopotamia. But new excavations in
the ruins of the ancient city of Harappa suggest an earlier and
presumably independent origin of Indus writing.

In a report from the field, distributed on the Internet, Dr.
Jonathan Mark Kenoyer of the University of Wisconsin and Dr.
Richard H. Meadow of Harvard University showed pictures of marks
incised on potshards that they interpreted as evidence for the use
of writing signs by Indus people as early as 3300 B.C. If these are
indeed proto-writing examples, the discovery indicates an
independent origin of Indus writing contemporary with the Sumerian
and Egyptian inventions.

Dr. Meadow, using E-mail, the electronic age's version of the king
of Uruk's clay tablet, confirmed that the inscribed marks were
"similar in some respects to those later used in the Indus script."
The current excavations, he added, were uncovering "very
significant findings at Harappa with respect to the Indus script."

At the symposium, though, Dr. Gregory L. Possehl, a Pennsylvania
archeologist who specializes in the Indus civilization and had
examined the pictures, cautioned against jumping to such
conclusions. One had to be careful, he said, not to confuse
potter's marks, graffiti and fingernail marks with symbols of
nascent writing.

Of the earliest writing systems, scholars said, only the Sumerian,
Chinese and Mesoamerican ones seemed clearly to be independent
inventions. Reviewing the relationship between early Chinese bronze
art, "oracle bones" and writing, Dr. Louisa Huber, a researcher at
Harvard's Fairbanks Center for East Asian Research, concluded,
"Chinese writing looks to be pristine."

But few pronouncements about early writing go undisputed. Dr.
Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language at Penn, offered
evidence indicating, he said, that "the Chinese writing system may
well have received vital inputs from West Asian and European
systems of writing and proto-writing."

Dr. Mair cited an intriguing correspondence between the Chinese
script and 22 Phoenician letters and also Western-like symbols on
pottery and the bodies of mummies found in the western desert of
China. The recent discoveries of the mummies, wearing garments of
Western weaves and having Caucasoid facial features, have prompted
theories of foreign influences on Chinese culture in the first and
second millennia B.C. It had already been established that the
chariot and bronze metallurgy reached China from the West.

Though no one seemed ready to endorse his thesis, Dr. Mair said,
"We simply do not know for certain whether the Chinese script was
or was not independently created."

Dr. Peter Damerow, a specialist in Sumerian cuneiform at the Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, said,
"Whatever the mutual influences of writing systems of different
cultures may be, their great variety shows, at least, that the
development of writing, once it is initiated, attains a
considerable degree of independence and flexibility to adapt a
coding system to specific characteristics of the language to be
represented."

Not that he accepted the conventional view that writing necessarily
started as some kind of representation of words by pictures. New
studies of Sumerian proto-cuneiform, he said, challenge this
intepretation. The structures of this earliest writing, for
example, did not match the syntax of a language. Proto-cuneiform
seemed severely restricted, compared with spoken language, dealing
mainly in lists and categories, not in sentences and narrative.

This presumably reflects writing's origins and first applications
in economic administration in a growing, increasingly complex
society, scholars said. Most of the Uruk tablets were documents
about property, inventory and, even then, taxes. The only texts
that do not concern administrative activities, Dr. Damerow said,
were cuneiform lexicons that were apparently written as school
exercises by scribes in training.

Sal DiMarco Jr. for The New York Times

Dr. Holly Pittman, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center
for Ancient Studies.
_________________________________________________________________

For at least two decades, in fact, Dr. Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a
University of Texas archeologist, has argued that the first writing
grew directly out of a counting system practiced by Sumerian
accountants. They used molded clay "tokens," each one specially
shaped to represent a jar of oil, a large or small container of
grain, or a particular kind of livestock. When the tokens were
placed inside hollow clay spheres, the number and type of tokens
inside was recorded on the ball with impressions resembling the
tokens. Finally, simplifying matters, the token impressions were
replaced with inscribed signs, and writing was invented.

Though Dr. Schmandt-Besserat has won wide support, some linguists
question her thesis and other scholars, like Dr. Pittman of Penn,
think it too narrow an interpretation. They emphasized that
pictorial representation and writing evolved together, part of the
same cultural context that fostered experimentation in
communication through symbols.

"There's no question that the token system is a forerunner of
writing, and really important," Dr. Pittman said in an interview.
"But I have an argument with her evidence for a link between tokens
and signs, and she doesn't open up the process to include
picture-making and all other kinds of information-storage practices
that are as important as the tokens."

Dr. Schmandt-Besserat, who did not attend the symposium, vigorously
defended herself in a telephone interview. "My colleagues say the
signs on seals were a beginning of writing, but show me a single
sign on a seal that becomes a sign in writing," she said. "They say
that designs on pottery were a beginning of writing, but show me a
single sign of writing you can trace back to a pot -- it doesn't
exist."

In its first 500 years, she asserted, cuneiform writing was used
almost solely for recording economic information. "The first
information that writing gives you is only the same information the
tokens were dealing with," she said. "When you start putting more
on the tablets, products plus the name of who has delivered and
received them, that is where art would enter the picture. Then
writing is out of the box, in all directions."

Dr. Damerow agreed that cuneiform writing appeared to have
developed in two stages, first as a new but limited means of
recording economic information, later as a broader encoding of
spoken language for stories, arguments, descriptions or messages
from one ruler to another.

Even so, it was a long way from the origin of writing to truly
literate societies. At the symposium, scholars noted that the early
rulers could not write or read; they relied on scribes for their
messages, record keeping and storytelling. In Egypt, most early
hieroglyphics were inscribed in places beyond the public eye, high
on monuments or deep in tombs.

In this case, said Dr. Pascal Vernus of the University of Paris,
early writing was less administrative than sacred and ideological,
"a way of creating and describing the world as a dominating elite
wants it to be."

Dr. Piotr Michalowski, professor of Near East civilizations at the
University of Michigan, said the Uruk proto-cuneiform writing,
whatever its antecedents, was "so radically different as to be a
complete break with the past, a system different from anything
else." It no doubt served to store, preserve and communicate
information, but also was a new instrument of power.

"Perhaps it's because I grew up in Stalinist Poland," Dr.
Michalowski said, "but I say coercion and control were early
writing's first important purpose, a new way to control how people
live."

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company