Over hundreds of years, the Mesopotamian tokens were gradually absorbed into two subsequent systems of record keeping. The first system used perforated tokens with symbols on them to represent specific possessions. These perforated tokens were then strung in series to keep tallies of possessions and to keep track of trading transactions. The second system used a clay “bulla” – hollow sealed pocket of dried clay that contained several tokens – to keep records of possessions as well as providing a method of verifying deliveries. (The recipient of a delivery could see if everything that had been purchased was actually delivered by breaking the bullae.) Eventually, as this record-keeping system evolved to become more efficient, the outside of the bullae were marked with representations of their contents and the need to actually open them eventually became a ceremonial formality that fell into disuse. It was these representations of representations that went on to evolve into the Sumerian cuneiform writing system, the first true written language, that developed simultaneously with the advent of the great Sumerian city states, such as Uruk, some six thousand years ago. The clay tablets that early cuneiform writing appears on are curved, much like the clay bullae that preceded them. Writing, it seems, arose directly from the proprietary economics of trade.

(Julian Jaynes, the renegade neurophilosopher, contends that human consciousness, at least as we know it, came into being at the same time. He claims that with the abstraction of written language, itself caused by the complexity of the new city states, that the first “silent” inward spoken ruminations in language, or in other words interior monologues, began to dominate the activity of the human mind. Jaynes theorized that, prior to written language, all human thinking was vocalized involuntarily, in the same manner that readers of written texts, up until the Greeks (and later), always spoke them aloud. (Silent reading was a hard-won skill for humanity. Saint Augustine observed that his first teacher was the first person he’d seen who could read silently without moving his lips!) Jaynes also contended that this internal monologue was responsible for the first theistic religions. He claimed that the inner voice, the interior monologue, must have seemed like the voices of the gods to the first truly literate humans in Mesopotamia because they were experiencing it for the first time. It is a highly speculative theory, but it does have some excellent metaphorical potential. For example, it provides an oblique look at the first written languages as they must have seemed at the time – as a new, sacred technology. For those first humans who used writing, literacy was a completely radical technology, a special form of external speech that was mute, sculptural, but ready to “speak” when activated by a “reader.” In some respects Julian Jaynes’ theory, half-cocked or not, gets at the root of the curious, philosophically fascinating symbiosis between language and consciousness.)