(no subject)

[watertank]

In the late 1960s she [Denise Schmandt-Besserat] noticed that thousands of 'rather mundane clay objects' had been found throughout the ancient Near East and rgarded as insignificant by most archaelogists. ... In the course of her study of her study, she found that the tokens wer sometimes geometrical in form - spheres, thetrahedrons, cylinders - while others were in the shape of animals, tools or vessels. ... Eventually, she came across an account of a hollow tablet found at Nuzi. The cuneiform insciption said: ' Counters representing small catlle: 21 ewes of lamb, 6 female lambs, 8 full-grown male sheep...' and etc. Whe the tablet had been opened, inside were found forty-nine counters, exactly the number of cattle in the written list. ...she examined more than 10,000 tokens and came to the conlcusion that they comprised a primitive accouning system and one which led to the creation of writing. Words, in a sense, began with numbers. This is , after all, what writing is, a form of communication which allows the two communicationg parties to be spatially and temporally separated. ibid, p. 77

Somebody still had to come up with the idea of writing texts.