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Hans Jörg Nissen

Robert K. Englund

Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East First Printing Edition

by Hans J. Nissen (Author), Peter Damerow (Author), Robert K. Englund (Author),

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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.

ISBN-10

0226586596
ISBN-13

978-0226586595
Edition

First Printing
Publisher

University of Chicago Press
Publication date

February 10, 1994
Language

English
Dimensions

9 x 0.75 x 8.75 inches
Print length

184 pages
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About the Author

Hans Nissen is professor of ancient Near Eastern archaeology at the Free University of Berlin.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press; First Printing edition (February 10, 1994)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 184 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0226586596
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226586595
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.5 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9 x 0.75 x 8.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,756,367 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #842 in Ancient Mesopotamia History
- #844 in Assyria, Babylonia & Sumer History
- #1,555 in Ancient History (Books)

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Hans Jörg Nissen
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Robert K. Englund
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Englund teaches at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Humanities Division at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has conducted his major research on the proto-cuneiform texts from late 4th millennium BC Mesopotamia, and, as principal investigator of the project Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), Los Angeles and Berlin, on the electronic documentation and edition of cuneiform generally. He is editor of and contributor to the online journals Cuneiform Digital Library Journal and Bulletin (CDLJ&B), and has collaborated with UCLA CS graduate student Sai Deep Tetali in the creation of an iPad app "cdli tablet" dedicated to informal daily presentations of cuneiform artifacts. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Englund attended high school in Yakima, WA; he finished his BA at the University of California at Berkeley in 1977, and following a year of graduate work at the University of Chicago, moved to Munich, where he wrote his dissertation entitled Verwaltung und Organisation der Ur III-Fischerei (The Administration and Organization of Ur III Fisheries). The thesis is concerned above all with the administration of Babylonian fisheries, focusing on an analysis of the accounting terminology in the Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 BC) archives as a tool for understanding the organization and social position of fishermen and comparable state-dependent workers and supervisors of household economic units. He conducted post-doctoral research and taught at the Free University of Berlin in the 1980's and 90's, and moved to Los Angeles in 1996.
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Alexei Rudakov

the real story how people invented writing

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 16, 2015

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The famous tale "How the first letter was written" by R.Kipling is nice, but not entirely correct. The book tells us the real story how people invented writing. One of the first letters is shown on the cover. The discovery of the details of this five millenia old invention is fascinating.

2 people found this helpful

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Giorgio M.

One Star

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 22, 2015

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Very interesting book

One person found this helpful

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Monica De Ycaza

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 13, 2016

Very usefull!!

Narrowly focused but excellent

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 22, 2000

"Archaic Bookkeeping" is an edited translation of the catalog that accompanied the sale of 82 proto-cuneiform tablets from the Swiss Erlenmeyer collection by Christie's in 1988 in London. These tablets had been purchased in late 1950s, but had not been subjected to any detailed study. Personally I am not opposed to individual ownership of antiquities, but I do believe that preventing these valuable texts from being studied by scholars for decades is inexcusable. The tablets analyzed are mainly from Uruk, and date to the Archaic period in Sumerian history, circa 3000 BC.
The casual observer might think that the study of ancient cultures might be a field without much in the way of rapid change, but this would be false. The advent of powerful computer programs have recently allowed the processing of large amounts non-numerical data and graphic information. A researcher is therefore able to instantly access an entire body of text when testing an hypothesis. The authors of "Archaic Bookkeeping" made use of this powerful technique, which is becoming more useful all the time. This is made clear by the fact that as of 1993 (the date "Archaic Bookkeeping" was published), only 600 of the 5000 archaic tablets from Uruk had been sufficiently published.
I am an interested student of Sumerology, and my purchase of this book was an attempt not so much to understand archaic bookkeeping but to see examples of the actual translation process, and, to the degree that I could, follow along. There is currently very little of this sort of material available for the interested amateur. In general it seems that this information is both too difficult to have much amateur appeal, and too rudimentary for specialists in the field. For those looking for a good introduction to Sumeria, I highly recommend "The Sumerians" by Samuel Kramer.
I found the prose in this book to be very clear and well-constructed, with no trace of the fact that it had been translated from German. I found it surprisingly free of philological and linguist jargon; its main purpose was the practical communication of how the authors used the tablets to extract information about Sumerian field administration, labor organization, and animal husbandry. The book's area of focus is quite narrow, but it needs to be to cover the subject fairly. I found the tablet photographs and diagrams to be a highlight of the book and uniformly excellent. The bibliography was arranged by chapter and was very useful.

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