Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near EastUniversity of Chicago Press, 1993 - 169 pages Archaic Bookkeeping brings together the most current scholarship on the earliest true writing system in human history. Invented by the Babylonians at the end of the fourth millennium B.C., this script, called proto-cuneiform, survives in the form of clay tablets that have until now posed formidable barriers to interpretation. Many tablets, excavated in fragments from ancient dump sites, lack a clear context. In addition, the purpose of the earliest tablets was not to record language but to monitor the administration of local economies by means of a numerical system. Using the latest philological research and new methods of computer analysis, the authors have for the first time deciphered much of the numerical information. In reconstructing both the social context and the function of the notation, they consider how the development of our earliest written records affected patterns of thought, the concept of number, and the administration of household economies. Complete with computer-generated graphics keyed to the discussion and reproductions of all documents referred to in the text, Archaic Bookkeeping will interest specialists in Near Eastern civilizations, ancient history, the history of science and mathematics, and cognitive psychology. |
Table des matières
Environmental Factors | 1 |
The Chronological Framework | 4 |
The Early History of Babylonia | 8 |
Prehistoric Means of Administration | 11 |
The Emergence of Writing | 19 |
Archaic Numerical Sign Systems | 25 |
The Archaic Bookkeeping System | 30 |
The Administrative Activities of Kushim | 36 |
Bookkeeping on Animal Husbandry | 89 |
The Education and Profession of the Scribe | 105 |
The Titles and Professions List | 110 |
The Development of Cuneiform Script | 116 |
The Development of Arithmetic | 125 |
ComputerAssisted Decipherment and Editing of Archaic Texts | 152 |
List of Figures | 157 |
Bibliography | 163 |
The Development of Bookkeeping in the Third Millennium B C | 47 |
Surveying and Administrating Fields | 47 |
Bookkeeping on Labor | 70 |
167 | |
HANS J NISSEN and ROBERT K ENGLUND are both at the University | |
Expressions et termes fréquents
administrative texts Akkadian amount of barley animals archaic period archaic script phase archaic tablets archaic texts arithmetical Babylonia bán barig barley groats beer Berlin bisexagesimal bookkeeping bullae bùr bur'u calculation cereal clay bullae contains context cows cubits cuneiform cuneiform script dairy fat debit documents economic emmer entries Erlenmeyer collection èše example female laborer days field area flour foreman gín grain gur sag+gál ideograms Jemdet Nasr kùš Kushim Lagash Late Uruk Mesopotamia metrological MSVO ninda Nissen numerical notations numerical sign systems numerical tablets obverse Old Sumerian original Photo probably proto-cuneiform proto-Elamite R. K. Englund rations recorded represented reverse sanga šar scribe script phase Uruk seal sexagesimal sexagesimal system Shulgi sign combination sìla stylus surface Susa text corpus text from Uruk Texte aus Uruk third millennium B.C. tokens units Ur III period Uruk period Vorderasiatisches Museum writing