The son of a merchant had as much a chance at becoming a scribe as the son of a king. This isn’t to say status was the requirement to become a scribe, but rather the usual source of the requirement: money. In fact, some 70% of the scribes we know by name were the sons of society’s elite, including royalty. If you could read and write in ancient Mesopotamia, you had a good life, and chances were pretty high you were born into that good life. Along with reading and writing cuneiform, scribes eventually evolved to have chops in math or science or business or literature. In 2000 B.C., scribes were some of the most educated people in the world. ( Source)Īnd so writing was born, bringing with it the demand for those who could do it. Cuneiform went through a series of innovations that turned it into cool-looking, abstract symbols. decided there was a better way to keep records, one that was quicker, more convenient, and undoubtedly one that was easier to file than a bunch of clay balls! Pictographs. The owner of the token-stuffed bulla (Latin for “bubble”) would’ve made impressions of the tokens on the outside before baking them in, of course, but, you know, that made the tokens even more pointless. Before writing, Sumerians had a system to record their business transactions it involved tokens made out of clay and a clay bubble to hold the tokens, which they baked into the bubble, rendering the tokens, well, completely pointless. ( Source)Īround 3500 B.C., just before the birth of writing, Sumerians had already been maintaining a civilization for thousands of years, complete with farming, temples, and all kinds of commerce, all of which required record keeping.īut how do you keep records without writing? Well, not very practically.
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