Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Mental Models in the history of Knowledge / administrative experience and conceptual structures
The ancient Mesopotamian administrative record enables us to reconstruct in great
detail the social structures of these ancient societies, among other things. Using the
more than 25 000 extant documents from the ancient city of Umma (the modern Tell
Djokha in southeastern Iraq), dating to ca. 2100–2000 B C, a revised version of a dissertation
has been published on the structures of succession within the ruling family
of that city (Jacob Dahl). The empirical basis for such a work—tens of thousands of
unique, seemingly unrelated texts—become meaningful only after being made accessible
in a coherent format that allows extensive data-mining and enables the reconstruction
of the original ancient archives. The CDLI provides a framework for this
kind of study, the results of which can at times be surprising. For example it could be
shown that succession in southern Iraq during the last century of the 3rd millennium
B. C. was not patrilineal, although inclusion in the line of succession was based on
paternal affiliation, but rather can best be described as a system of seniority, whereby
all male members of a family held rights to inclusion in the line of succession.
Equally surprising results were reached in the study of the earliest writing systems of
the region, where it could be shown for example that what may be the world’s earliest
syllabary (found in the proto-Elamite texts from Iran) was apparently not based
on the rebus principle. Instead, new signs for indicating owners were rather invented
seemingly ad hoc.
Early writing and arithmetics has been a research focus of Department I over a number
of years, and it has been conclusively demonstrated that writing and arithmetics
had a common origin in early Mesopotamian administrative tools, highlighting the
importance of early Babylonian practical knowledge for the understanding of modern
sciences. Whereas the origin of writing in Mesopotamia and Iran is relatively well
understood in terms of initial use and early development, the same is not true for
the other seemingly independent inventions of writing, in Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica.
Within the framework of the project on the globalization of knowledge and
its consequences, the topic of the diverse backgrounds of the inventions of writing is
being further explored.
An ancient Egyptian commodity label
(ca. 3000 B.C.)
MPIWG ReseaRch RePoRt 2006– 2007 25