The origin of the writing process is so ahead in the time
that nobody knows for sure when and where it began. The first civilization that
we can know something about, reading books, is the one of the Sumerians. They
lived approximately 4000 years before Christ, on the land between the Tigris
and the Euphrates called by the Greeks: Mesopotamia (in the middle of the
rivers). This place is told by the CIESA Encyclopaedia to be considerate as the
“placenta” of the humanity. The
Sumerians organized a lot of cities with great skill. The centre of the city
was always a temple. They knew and administrated about justice, land
registration, installation of markets, irrigation channels, and a lot of
greatly advanced institutions more. The more important towns, or at least the
most known, are: Uruk, Ur, Nippur and Larsa. A priest-king named “patesi”
governed them and their living was mainly based on agriculture. They prospered
also as commercials. Such an organization could never have existed without the
help of this important communication medium that is the writing process.
Mesopotamia is the place where we may found the very first drawing of the very
first artist in the world, and the first straw of the very first writing man.
Mariette Cirerol
Bibliography: Encyclopaedias CIESA, LAROUSSE and
SALVAT
Essay
by Juan Eugenio Luengo Muro
The numbers, beginning of the
written communication
Written
communication began with numeration long before the words would have any kind
of shape. Numbers and words are inseparable and complementary on human
relations. The proof of it lays on the fact that if, and that in whatever book,
numbers were eliminated, the sense of the whole text would suffer a lack of
definition. If you have any doubt about it, try to do it with the Bible or any
theme of history, not necessarily a book of mathematics.
The idea
came to me once I was observing small strokes, elementary numerical, marked
with burned woods, appearing on the side of certain caves. Whenever I came into
one of them, I search carefully for the strokes and study them. Then the strokes
accompany me when I go out, and I enjoy myself trying to enter in the mind of
those who draw all of them at the moment they feel the need to do it.
The basic
resemblance I found between the cave strokes and others strokes made by
countrymen I met years before, in the sixties, originates the cause of this
study. When they had to transport repeatedly materials with their beasts to
some farm, they used to draw groups of short straight stripes, in order to know
how many times they made the transport and the number of beasts they used to
unload the merchandise. Taking into mind that different persons where doing the
job at the same time, but independently one from another, we must think that
they all of them had their own manner to reflect the number of times they did
the transport.
Very
antic cultures, far away one from another, came in my mind. And also it may
seem absurd, I thought I could connect with them, because countrymen’s common
denominator is to take a maximum of profit of all things; follow the tradition;
think positively, but in such a manner that the majority of people does not
understand, because this majority does not know that it is in the moments of
rest, after a very hard work, when the subconscious wakes, giving birth to
intuitions that most of the times, are solutions for everyday problems.
The
constant repetition of similar strokes in different cultures, faraway in time
and place, would not surprise me. I mention it because in some occasion,
walking along the road, I met with a muleteer and began to talk with him. Soon I noticed that the rope holding the load
of wood, carried on by the mule, was tautened and wrung by a beautiful stone
axe, of 22 cm, from the Neolithic. Because I wanted to know if he was aware of
the remote function of it, I told him that such a stone was very difficult to
found. He answered that it was effectively rare to see one of them and that
they were called “fire stones” ..., he did not know why.
Hand axe from the lower Palaeolithic Neolithic stone to grind
aliments
Generation
after generation, during several millennium, this words passed from one to
another, and they are repeated by the people of today; but they have lost their
sense, they have no real meaning to them. Nevertheless, it does not happen with
numeration, which has always been used and so will do.
Now, I
expose the logical process I have followed:
a) - When three muleteers, carrying material
with their beasts, had to do many transports, they put a mark on the nearest
building, or on a big stone - my observation was in a range -, each time they
unload, in order to take account of the work done. There were different group of strokes, each
one drawn by a different muleteer, indicating the number of beasts he needed to
do the work.
