When was written records first kept

It focuses attention not simply on the professional groups that arose to service the paper church and state but also places a wider penumbra of individuals whose lives were affected by the products of this culture under the spotlight. The rest of this introduction performs three functions. First it presents a series of working definitions that are themselves crucial tools for rethinking existing approaches to record-keeping.

Secondly, it sketches the historiographical frameworks within which the essays in this collection must be set, outlining the literatures from which they take their bearings and to which in turn they contribute. Thirdly, it describes how the contributors approach their task and discusses some of the key themes that emerge from their research. What are records and archives? Classical archival theory distinguishes between the two very precisely.

Records are widely understood to be documents made, received and maintained by institutions, organizations or individuals as active evidence of legal obligations or business transactions; archives were collections preserved permanently because of the enduring value of the information they contain. Records have immediate utility; archives are stored for posterity and for the use of others than those who originally created them. But the validity of these strict definitions themselves the consequence of the administrative revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been challenged in recent years by the complex dynamics of digital records.

It is equally problematic when applied to the early modern period, when in practice the relationship between these two categories was complex and fluid. Discernable a century before in the civic and domestic sphere, this was part of a more prolonged historical transformation. Records and archives functioned not merely as muniments, but also as monuments and memorials that bore witness to the presence of historical consciousness and of an impulse to preserve the past for the future.

Among these was the imagined site and space which, as Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers have shown, was how they conceived of memory itself.

Others found archive an apt analogy for the providence, wisdom and judgement of God. It was a compelling metaphor for divine secrecy and power. If they referred to concrete locations and tangible objects, they also denoted the act of preserving and storing things and the process of ensuring that noteworthy events, actions and persons were not forgotten by transferring them into writing, image or print.

It takes the former to refer to a whole range of physical repositories and rooms fixed in particular places as well as to encompass collections that remained on the move and were transported around in cases and chests. The latter is a broad umbrella under which hover not merely manuscripts, registers, rolls and charters, but also commonplace and account books, antiquarian transcriptions, ecclesiastical histories, printed tomes, ephemera broadsides, paintings and written traces of oral tradition, rumour and speech.

Blurring the boundaries between creation and consumption, manufacture and use, the contributors to this volume are interested as much in process as in end-product. They examine the political, economic, religious, social and cultural conditions in which record-keeping occurred and shift attention from the locations of archival activity to its wider ramifications as a cultural practice.

Approaching the archive as both an ideological and a sociological phenomenon, they explore how it shaped and was shaped by dynamic interactions between individuals and communities and by the quotidian circumstances of life. Crossing the divide between the institutional and official and the local and personal, they seek to recover the behaviours which led to the creation of records and the public and private repositories in which they were housed, alongside the multifarious ways in which writing and document-making became implicated in social relations.

This Past and Present Supplement must be situated in the context of a cluster of important historiographical developments. The first of these is the birth of historical interest in archives and the concurrent revitalization of the discipline of archival science. Founded in , the journal Archival Science has been a leading forum for a new style of enquiry that has moved beyond the traditional canonical definitions outlined above, broken out of its teleological framework, and begun to tackle hitherto neglected aspects of its subject.

Blouin and William G. They have provoked us to approach them, like the past itself, as a foreign country whose language we must learn to speak if we are to understand the societies from which they arise. Provoked by the dramatic changes in record-keeping that have accompanied the digital age, the efforts of these scholars to set traditional archivistics on a fresh foundation have not only inspired fellow specialists, but also an emerging cohort of historians.

In this volume, he directs our attention to the neglected seigneurial archives of eighteenth-century France, charting the rise of a professional class of feudistes whose activities shed light on how entrenched archives became in rural and provincial society in the decades prior to the French Revolution. Not merely satisfying demand but also fuelling new archival desires, their entrepreneurial activities both refine and qualify traditional narratives about the development of the archival profession in Europe.

Meanwhile, our understanding of Italian archives and how they were organized, indexed and catalogued is being transformed by the work of Filippo de Vivo and a team of scholars funded by a major European Research Council grant. De Vivo has exploded the myths that have accumulated around the Venetian Cancelleria Secreta and shown that they reveal more about the rhetoric of the self-styled Serene Republic than about political realities. In other city states, including Florence, the demands of diplomacy and governance also fostered new techniques of record-keeping.

Concealed in locked cupboards and chests and literally erased and scrubbed out, the archives of guilds and vestries in early modern London guarded secrets from citizens and skilfully manipulated information as a tactic of government. Such studies permit us a glimpse of a world in which the control and omniscience of the centre was imperfect.

Scott in the celebrated book in which he coined this phrase. The work of historians of the emerging empires of the early modern world has also been vital in complicating these models. Herman Bennett, Kathryn Burns and Sylvia Sellers-Garcia have delved into the prolific archives of imperial Spain and Portugal and demonstrated how documents overcame the tyranny of distance that separated European capitals from their colonial settlements overseas.

They were also entangled with and shaped by indigenous systems of knowledge formation in ways that question standard accounts of the rise of orientalism and carve out room for subaltern intervention. If earlier work on archives focused almost exclusively on those generated by governments and incipient nation states, more recent studies have investigated the spread of archival consciousness in other institutional settings, including commercial, diplomatic and religious ones.

In north-western Germany in the face of imminent military action, they were packed into boxes and tubs for removal and safe-keeping.

It has also become clear that some of the very techniques by which modern scholars still authenticate documents had their roots in the confessional struggles that punctuated the early modern period. As Randolph Head has demonstrated, the auxiliary science of diplomatics was a product of the debates about juridical proof that emerged around credited to the Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon, its foundation and subsequent institutionalization as the primary method of testing the reliability of sources has served to eclipse the part played by the archive in constructing meaning.

The impulses that drove the formation of archives must be connected with a wider set of incentives that fostered the spread of record-keeping in the early modern world. In particular, they need to be brought into closer dialogue with the histories of literacy and communication.

It has supplied questions to guide those who seek to understand the longer-term transition from a predominantly oral society to an increasingly, if only partially literate one in the early modern era. It has alerted us to how the technology and products of writing seep into social strata that include many people who do not possess the capacity to use them.

In most of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, the handwritten text still took second place to the spoken word as the medium by which most information circulated, although the balance between them was altering against the backdrop of educational changes linked with the Renaissance and the technical innovations connected with the invention of the mechanized press. Juliet Fleming has found graffiti in unlikely places: on pots, walls and bodies, as well as parchment and paper.

The collections of transcriptions that survive in the British Isles and elsewhere constitute a kind of archive of devotion and piety. Demand for such texts helped to foster a metropolitan industry in manuscript production. In the city and country alike, an army of amateur and professional clerks, notaries, scribes and amanuenses arose to meet demand for chirographic skills in commercial, legal and personal contexts. In delineating the contours of the early modern cultures of record-keeping that are the subject of this volume, humble private users of the pencil and quill must be set alongside the men — and women — who made a living from wielding them.

The paper trail left by the Dutch notary Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam, who worked in the fur trading settlement of Albany in seventeenth-century North America, has enabled Donna Merwick to write a fascinating micro-history of his life and tragic death, utilizing the stories he recorded and then archived in a trunk. Keith Wrightson has painted an equally compelling portrait of the scrivener, Ralph Taylor, who wrote the last wills, testaments and inventories of many of those who died of plague in Newcastle in His meticulous work casts fresh light on the rise of a profession that was becoming increasingly necessary at a time when people were coming to rely ever more heavily on bills, bonds, indentures, conveyances and other legal instruments.

Notaries are another comparatively neglected category of actors in early modern society. Her insights into the ambiguous position of these artisans in the interstices between market and state are extended in her contribution here.

As she shows, under Sixtus V they became a closed corporation of venal office-holders with a vested interest in promoting the use of their own services and in preserving records that carried the greatest potential for future earnings. Print not merely facilitated the rise of an international republic of letters and the evolution of novel concepts of authorship. The promise of durability and permanence that it seemed to offer assisted contemporaries in staving off the danger of losing the treasures of their cultural and intellectual heritage.

The artifacts, mostly of geometric forms such as cones, spheres, disks, cylinders and ovoids, are recovered in archaeological sites dating — BC Fig. The tokens, used as counters to keep track of goods, were the earliest code—a system of signs for transmitting information. Each token shape was semantic, referring to a particular unit of merchandise. For example, a cone and a sphere stood respectively for a small and a large measure of grain, and ovoids represented jars of oil.

The repertory of some three hundred types of counters made it feasible to manipulate and store information on multiple categories of goods Schmandt-Besserat The token system had little in common with spoken language except that, like a word, a token stood for one concept. Unlike speech, tokens were restricted to one type of information only, namely, real goods.

Unlike spoken language, the token system made no use of syntax. That is to say, their meaning was independent of their placement order. Therefore, the goods they represented were expressed in multiple languages. The token system showed the number of units of merchandize in one-to-one correspondence, in other words, the number of tokens matched the number of units counted: x jars of oil were represented by x ovoids.

After four millennia, the token system led to writing. The transition from counters to script took place simultaneously in Sumer and Elam, present-day western Iran when, around BC, Elam was under Sumerian domination. It occurred when tokens, probably representing a debt, were stored in envelopes until payment. These envelopes made of clay in the shape of a hollow ball had the disadvantage of hiding the tokens held inside. Some accountants, therefore, impressed the tokens on the surface of the envelope before enclosing them inside, so that the shape and number of counters held inside could be verified at all times Fig.

These markings were the first signs of writing. The metamorphosis from three-dimensional artifacts to two-dimensional markings did not affect the semantic principle of the system. The significance of the markings on the outside of the envelopes was identical to that of the tokens held inside. About BC, once the system of impressed signs was understood, clay tablets—solid cushion-shaped clay artifacts bearing the impressions of tokens—replaced the envelopes filled with tokens.

The impression of a cone and a sphere token, representing measures of grain, resulted respectively in a wedge and a circular marking which bore the same meaning as the tokens they signified Fig. They were ideograms—signs representing one concept.

The impressed tablets continued to be used exclusively to record quantities of goods received or disbursed. They still expressed plurality in one-to-one correspondence. Pictographs—signs representing tokens traced with a stylus rather than impressed—appeared about BC. These pictographs referring to goods mark an important step in the evolution of writing because they were never repeated in one-to-one correspondence to express numerosity.

Besides them, numerals—signs representing plurality—indicated the quantity of units recorded. The symbols for numerals were not new. They were the impressions of cones and spheres formerly representing measures of grain, which then had acquired a second, abstract, numerical meaning.

The invention of numerals meant a considerable economy of signs since 33 jars of oil could be written with 7 rather then 33 markings. In sum, in its first phase, writing remained mostly a mere extension of the former token system.

Although the tokens underwent formal transformations from three- to two-dimensional and from impressed markings to signs traced with a stylus, the symbolism remained fundamentally the same. Like the archaic counters, the tablets were used exclusively for accounting Nissen and Heine In all these instances, the medium changed in form but not in content. The only major departure from the token system consisted in the creation of two distinct types of signs: incised pictographs and impressed numerals.

This combination of signs initiated the semantic division between the item counted and number. About BC, the creation of phonetic signs—signs representing the sounds of speech—marks the second phase in the evolution of Mesopotamian writing, when, finally, the medium parted from its token antecedent in order to emulate spoken language. As a result, writing shifted from a conceptual framework of real goods to the world of speech sounds.

It shifted from the visual to the aural world. With state formation, new regulations required that the names of the individuals who generated or received registered merchandise were entered on the tablets. The personal names were transcribed by the mean of logograms—signs representing a word in a particular tongue. Because Sumerian was mostly a monosyllabic language, the logograms had a syllabic value. A syllable is a unit of spoken language consisting of one or more vowel sounds, alone, or with one or more consonants.

When a name required several phonetic units, they were assembled in a rebus fashion. A historical event that has been verified by hard science is the supernove observed by the Chinese in and by Native Americans, but not recorded in writing that created the Crab Nebula. Calculations by astronomer have confirmed that the original Chinese observations.

Martin Porter, Glossop, UK Thanks for the interest, I realise what the difference between history and prehistory is, but I guess I was really after an event which involves humans eg. Maybe we could use that as the start of history! Man's story A king's list need not be analysed to be and remain a written record, true or not, of man's story. The historical narrative began, in divers places, about years, give or take, BC.

Perhaps that's actually the birth of human consciousness, i. A flash of microwaves that have been echoing around the universe ever since. You can't get any earlier than that. If written history is 5k-ish years old, and modern humans are k?

Years old. What kind of cool ass shit probably happened in those k years where humans were running around "un recorded"? Can you imagine all the cool battle scenes??

The first libraries consisted of clay tablet archives. Ancient Mediterranean civilizations used clay tablets for sophisticated accounting systems. Ancient Athenians used ostraca to cast votes when the government wanted to banish a citizen. Scholars theorize that Southeast Asian scripts contain mostly rounded shapes because angular letters split and broke the palm leaves. The oldest discovered papyrus scrolls date back to BCE. It was often washed and reused to save money.

Parchment is made from goat, sheep or cow skin. Its use as a writing medium was perfected in Pergamon modern day Turkey as a cheaper alternative to Egyptian papyrus.