Revisiting the early uses of writing in society building: cuneiform culture and the chinese imperium

Résumé 0

Recent studies of ancient documents illuminate how writing transformed governance, law, and culture in the two earliest regions where writing emerged: Mesopotamia and China. By 3000 BCE the profession of scribes had emerged in Sumeria, with scribes soon becoming central in finances, accounting, government, administration, law, courts, astronomy, agriculture, land surveying and ownership, magic and divination, medicine, literature, and prayers. An elite urban scribal culture supported the reputation, power, and administration of royalty and royal states. In China the Qin and Han dynasties created a unified state and ex- tended regulatory control over a large empire through a standardized written language, regulation, documentation, monitoring, and administration by literates. The hierarchical state enforced coherence and unity among layers of government administrators through systems of written regulation, documentation, and review backed by highly restrictive laws and draconian punishments. Ordinary inhabitants were documented, regulated, and held in geographic locales through registration; attempting to avoid documentary control by unauthorized travel was itself a crime of abscondence. In both regions literacy concentrated land ownership, property, and wealth in privileged and powerful classes. Ideology, beliefs, knowledge, and values become articulated, spread, maintained, and enforced through literate means, including religious artistic, social, and educational formations, as they continue to today.