The “Writing and Accounting in Early Mesopotamia” (WritEMe) project was hosted at the “Centre national de la recherche scientifique” (CNRS), within the research unit UMR 7041 — Archéologies et Sciences de l’Antiquité (ArScAn), and the team Histoire et Archéologie de l’Orient Cunéiforme (HAROC), based in Nanterre (France), Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Mondes.
The WritEMe project aimed at reconsidering the interplay between writing and accounting devices in antiquity, with special focus on early Mesopotamia (ca. 3330-2000 BCE). Mesopotamia offers in fact the best case study for the analysis of how humans first made language visible, as available sources cover in detail not only the developments of the writing technology, but also the long incubation period that pre-dates writing proper. There, prehistoric accountable devices – such as calculi and sealed clay envelops – provided fertile ground in the cultural milieu of the scribes to be, which freely borrowed and adapted ideas from well-established technologies for administration purposes. However, the research showed that writing in Mesopotamia did not replace prehistoric accountable systems, which continued to be used throughout millennia.
More in detail, the project was meant to achieve the following objectives:
1. To inquire what pre-literate accounting devices were used within the literate milieu of early Mesopotamia: how they emerged, interplayed, and affected the development of early urban cultures.
2. To evaluate the agency of such devices: their visibility and prestige within ancient society, as well as the social actors surrounding them.
3. To inquire their function(s), as well as the technologies involved in the transmission of knowledge in Mesopotamia.
4. To reassess literacy and education in antiquity, framing data in a broad historical narrative.
Needless to say, the invention of writing certainly marks a pivotal moment in the history of mankind, for it dramatically impacts on human cognition, fostering social complexity and cultural memory. In this regard, the project offers an important contribution in order to achieve a better understanding of how literacy came about, and how it spread, eventually reaching us.
As for the conclusions reached by the action, philological and palaeographical analysis produced substantial results, whereas analysis of cylinder seals proved to be inconclusive, as no clear identification of ancient scribal tools emerged. With this limitation in mind, it appears that the overall setting of the invention and dissemination of writing is more complex than acknowledged in modern literature.
Besides clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing, scribes had access to other media and bookkeeping tools, such as tokens, clay envelopes, cylinder seals, wooden boards, counting sticks, measuring devices, as well as dedicated containers for storing and retrieving information. In addition, the abundant lexicon attached to various types of scribes and accountant officials speak for an intellectually alive environment, within and outside of institutional scriptoria. Finally, textual analysis showed that perishable media might have played a key role in the transmission of knowledge in the earliest literate cultures of Mesopotamia.
