In history of the Bible, we’ve been studying the development of writing. Interesting stuff.
First off, writing is a result of counting. Things like this always tend to happen out of necessity, and it was necessary for the early Ancient Near Easterners to count. “How many sheep do I have this year in comparison to how many sheep I had last year?” That sort of thing can mean the difference between survival and death.
We have to understand a few things about early counting. (1) Counting was concrete and (2) it was one-to-one.
Let’s say you are an Ancient Near Eastern farmer who needs to count sheep.
1. You would have to have an object that represents a sheep. None of this intangible stuff on paper. No, you must be able to hold the object in your hand.
2. Also, this object represents one sheep and one only.
3. Finally, it only represents a sheep. You can’t use this object to count cows, for example. None of this universal number stuff; two sheep, two cows. There is a different object to represent different realities.
So here you are counting your sheep. You see one sheep and lay out one of the objects that represents sheep. You see another sheep and you lay out another object. And so on. Literally, these are screaming at you, “one sheep, one sheep, one sheep, one sheep . . .” Then you move to cows. You see one cow and lay out one different object that represents cows. These are telling you, “one cow, one cow, one cow . . .”
Well, they started using a category of objects for counting purposes that we call “tokens.” These were little clay objects that represented the things that were counted. There are tons of different kinds. After all, they had to have a different kind for each thing they wanted to count. Often they were just small versions of the real thing. A little sheep-looking token would be used to count sheep. For storage purposes, these were kept in clay containers called envelopes (they don’t look like mail envelopes).
Now watch the progression from concrete to abstract. Since they didn’t want to have to break these clay envelopes every time they needed to find out what tokens were inside, they started to make an impression of the tokens on the outside. They would kind of stamp it on the outside before putting it in. Now check this out. One fine day, a bright young Ancient Near Eastern (probably taking a brisk morning walk) realized something: “Dude! Since we have the impression of the token on the outside representing the things we are counting, we don’t necessarily have to have the tokens inside! We never look at them anyway.” Brilliant. All of a sudden, we’ve gone from concrete hold-it-in-your-hand kind of stuff to abstract markings on clay.
It was just a step then (okay maybe a few hundred years) from impressing the tokens on the clay, to making other marks, to picture writing.
I love this stuff.
