As much as I would love to believe that writing evolved out of humanity’s desire to express profound emotion, I am in no way surprised it originated with practicality. Across time and space, technology has always been the answer to making life easier. Writing was simply another link in the chain of ease.
But one aspect about the origins of writing that still bugs me, to be completely honest, is the clay ‘envelopes’ that were used to hold tokens and then eventually became space to press the tokens on to. While it makes sense in the evolutionary stepladder, as obviously we couldn’t have progressed from just tokens directly to pressings of tokens, I’ve been puzzling if there could have been a more effective way to make these envelopes. The issue I take with them is that they had to be sealed shut with clay for transportation, making the tokens inside basically useless until someone forgot how many goats they had bought. And then, my other question is, were there two clay envelopes with the same information, one for the seller and one for the buyer? Because that’s a lot of clay and effort for records. And a lot of smashing if your memory isn’t great. I guess my complaints are similar to the ones that must have propelled the evolution of writing forward, since this envelope and token process is so exceedingly complex.
