1.4 Development of Scripts

1.4 Development of Scripts

If the traditional arts are the best ways to grow then why were these systematic languages invented? Yuval Noah Harari in his book ‘Sapiens: A brief history of mankind’ describes the three primary reasons for humans to invent language.

Firstly, the capacity of a human brain is limited; there is only so much information that a person can remember, even one who has an extraordinary memory. (For example, a doctor might be able to name all the bones in a human body but not the details of all the cases he has handled in the last say fifty years of his career.)

Secondly, each human has a limited lifespan, they eventually die, and brains die with them. It is definitely possible to pass on information however, there is a high chance of the information being altered or bits of it being lost after a few transfers, as explained previously using the example of Ramayana.

The third limitation of the human brain is its ability to store and process only certain types of information. (Hunter-gatherers only used to remember what was essential for survival, for example which fruits were poisonous, in which area they were found or what tree gives which fruit at a particular time of the year and the whereabouts of dangerous wild animals. What they did not need to remember is the exact number of fruits each tree gives every blooming season, and they didn’t need to keep track of the exact number of dangerous animals in each type every few months.) This is the kind of information the brain is not used to storing and processing – numbers.

Figure 1.4.1 Earliest Scripts

Due to the Agricultural revolution, more hunter-gatherers and nomadic tribes started becoming settlers where there was fertile soil for farming and enough area for a small shed. Gradually these communities grew to become larger societies and forests became villages. Keeping track of mathematical data was important; the total number grain produced per village and per family had to be recorded every year. Down the line to maintain large kingdoms, one had to record information about incomes and possessions of each family for tax collection; debt recovery, exemptions etc. Since the human brain is not equipped to process these many numbers, entire townships and their systems would collapse, therefore the Sumerians invented a system for recording information outside their brains called ‘writing’.

Figure 1.4.2 An Egyptian sketch of a farmer ploughing the field, using animals and tools