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revolutionary adaptation: writing.

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THE KNOWLEDGE BUREAU
     
    As literary craftsmen began to accumulate power over the conduct of day-to-day transactions, a new kind of collective entity began to form around them. Just as ancient bacteria had joined into complex organisms, so the ancient scribes slowly came together into larger social organisms: institutions.
    While writing had originated as a tool for helping individuals buy and sell, its use gradually expanded to encompass larger-scale governmental and religious functions. The economic power of writing afforded scribes a social status second only to the king, increasingly concentrating power in the hands of a literate bureaucratic elite. The escalating complexity of these relationships, coupled with the need for third parties capable of providing both authority and trust, gave rise to multiperson knowledge bureaus predicated on the power of the written word. As human settlements grew, the stewardship of writing slowly passed from the hands of individual craftspeople to fall under the purview of new organizational entities: institutions. The first government bureaucracies, religious temples, and educational institutions began to take shape.
    As writing gave rise to increasingly complex institutions, writing itself became more complex. At the Ebla site in Syria, archaeologists found a literary treasure trove of 2,000 tablets dating as far back as 2300 BC. Most contain records of routine transactions involving textiles, olive oil, cereals, and other staple products. The Ebla site also contains another set of tablets, set apart from the rest in a neat pile atop the other manuscripts. These tablets contain different kinds of lists that serve no apparent transactional purpose: lists of birds and fish, geographical locations, the names of professions. One tablet consists solely of a list of the other tablets (though not in any discernible order). Another such “meta” document appears at the ancient Hittite site of Hattusas, near Ankara, where archaeologists discovered what appears to be the first-known bibliographic record: a list of other documents that includes title pages and rudimentary colophons containing brief descriptions of each tablet. For example:
     
    Eighth tablet of the Dupaduparsa Festival, words of Silalluhi and Kuwatalla, the temple priestess. Written by the hand of Lu, son of Nugissar, in the presence of Anuwanza, the overseer. 8
     
    In addition to information about the author and subject of the document, each colophon included a number, indicating that the tablets were stacked in a predictable sequence. The colophon also allowed for a brief set of keywords to provide readers with a glimpse of the document’s contents, a kind of primitive abstract to help prospective readers limn the contents of a tablet before investing the time to read it. The Hittites had mastered all the basic functions of a library catalog, capturing information about authors and subjects in a digestible form and adding call numbers to help users retrieve the document they wanted. Melvil Dewey 9 would have been proud.
    List making has always constituted an important form of writing. Long before anyone started producing the familiar narrative documents that we associate with “writing” today, the first true writers were list makers. Indeed, we may have an epigenetic proclivity for creating lists rooted in the lateral sequencing of the human brain, as evidenced in the tiered oral lists of folk taxonomies. The first written lists emerged as a growing tide of transactions produced more and more documents, forcing people to develop new mechanisms for organizing the growing sprawl of data: tokens, then lists, then lists of lists, then bibliographical systems for organizing entire collections. By 3000 BC the scope of written knowledge had grown to the point where Sumerian temple libraries contained commercial records, grammars, mathematics texts, books on medicine and astrology, and