One of the most important developments of humankind has been writing, but often people are unaware of how long and complicated this path has been. The history of writing records the development of expressing language by letters or other marks. It is believed that Mesopotamia is the birthplace for the first recorded words of history. Another belief is that the first recorded words were inscribed to promote the power of the temples and kings in the expanding city-states. I believe that development of writing was started many years back. We can look at document The Art of Chauvet Cave for an example. This spectacular discovery has been dated back to about 35,000 years ago and when it was discovered back in 1994 in southwestern France, they were labeled the oldest prehistoric cave paintings known in Europe. I believe the animals and humans drawn within the caves, was symbolic of the gathering and hunting that the homo sapiens depended on so greatly for survival, around the same period the paintings were crafted in. Not only that, but is it possible that the homo sapiens were also trying to tell stories of their livelihood through these paintings they left on the wall of the caves? When reading Problems in the Study of Hunters and Gatherers, I come to the conclusion it is very possible. I quote, “One of the challenges in studying the origins of humanity is that the evidence is incomplete.”
There is, however, stable evidence of writings in The Origins of Writing According to the Sumerians. This document is a Sumerian myth that records the invention of writing by the Lord of Kulaba, Enmerkar. In this document, the most important fact that I came across was the passages that went as follows, ”…O lord of Aratta, after you have examined the clay tablet, after you have learned the content of the message, say whatever you will say to me and I shall announce that message in the shrine E-ana as glad tidings to the scion of him with the glistening beard, whom his stalwart cow gave birth to the soil of aratta, who was given suck at the udder of the good cow, who is suited for office in Kulaba, the mountain of great me, to Enmerkar, the son of Utu; I shall repeat it in his gipar, fruitful as a flourishing mes tree, to my kingdom the lord of Kulaba.” This reveals the familiarity the Sumerian’s had with pastoralism.
Now we see how there once was writing in the homo sapiens era, which in turn, had direct effect into how the Sumerians created their language through the transfer of hunters and gathers to pastoralism. According to Problems in the Study of Hunters and Gatherers, ”At the dawn of agriculture 12,000 years, hunters covered most of the habitable globe, and appeared to be generally most successful in those areas which later supported the densest populations of agricultural peoples. As a result, our notion of acculturated hunter-gatherer life has been largely drawn from people no longer living in the optimum portion of their traditional range.” In this quote, topic of migration is very apparent and was a key factor of how the hunter/gatherer clans operated. When the hunter/gatherers of homo sapiens migrated, it lead them to food. With the process of finding food, their livelihood was increased and may have created light in the drawings/paintings found, such as in The Art of Chauvet Cave.
In the document The Origins of Writing According to the Sumerians, it also shows how we went from hunting and gathering which was based on oral celebrations of collective memories transmitted by families across generations to pastoralism with the development of writing as societies grew larger and more complex. When the technique of pastoralism started becoming more part of everyday living and cultures became less and less hunter/gatherers, we saw more knowledge drawn to trade and this increased the population in the cities/states of the era. Trade was a huge benefit for discovering how to account for all of your livestock and merchandise for selling and in order to account for all of your goods, the Sumerians created a system of written accounting using symbols. Only the Sumerians found a form of tying the accounting method they once used for trading to forming written word.
There were some other cultures that had formed writing systems. Other cultures, such as the Harappan, had a form of writing that included 400 symbols. I believe that these symbols were more so for trading purposes than anything else. They had huge trading posts and it would make since if the culture was based so far into trading with the surrounding area. The Harappan may have needed seals of inscription for marketing their products. Unfortunately, we do not know how to decipher those symbols because of the horrific flooding and soft land. When reading The Mystery of Harappan Writing, “The most important point, however, is the enormous intellectual advance that the emergence of writing signifies.” What the Indus River people show us is how much the urbanized parts of the world in this era were diverging from one another, even as they borrowed from and imitated their neighbors. Even though the cultures of the Sumerians and Harappans were around the same time era, one was easily deciphered while the other cannot be. It goes to show how through trade, both cultures boomed and it lead to writing from counting, but the culture of one is still yet to be fully understood.
From the evolving of hunter/gatherers to the pastoralism societies, we see how the development of writing occurred through the thoughts of these four documents. The evolving of trade and migration also created the development of writing. Without the eventual evolving of these aspects of the cultures in the eras, we would not have our written words today and I in turn would not have been able to write an of these thoughts as well.