История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 138 стр.

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139

THE VITAL QUESTION

In 1984, two small clay tablets of vaguely rectangular shape were found in

Tell Brak, Siria, dating from the fourth millennium BC. They are in the

Archaeological Museum of Baghdad. They are simple, unimpressive objects, each

bearing a few discreet markings: a small indentation near the top and some sort of

stick-drawn animal in the centre. One of the animals may be a goat, in which case

the other is probably a sheep. The indentation, archeologists say, represents the

number ten. All our history begins with these two modest tablets. They are among

the oldest examples of writing we know.

There is something intensely moving in these tablets. Perhaps, when we

stare at these pieces of clay carried by a river which no longer exists, observing the

delicate incisions portraying animals turned to dust thousands and thousands of

years ago, a voice is conjured up, a thought, a message that tells us, “Here were ten

goats,” “Here were ten sheep,” something spoken by a careful farmer in the days

when the deserts were green. By the mere fact of looking at these tablets we have

prolonged a memory from the beginnings of our time, preserved a thought long

after the thinker has stopped thinking, and made ourselves participants in an act of

creation that remains open for as long as these images are seen, deciphered, read.

Like the Sumerian ancestor reading the two small tablets on that

inconceivably remote afternoon, we too are reading , here in our room, across

centuries and seas. Abstracted for a moment from the changing light outside and

the sounds that rise from the street, we are following a story, a description, an

argument. Nothing moves except our eyes and our hands occasionally turning the

pages. But how does this process take place?

Reading begins with the eyes. “The keenest of our senses is the sense of

sight,” wrote Cicero, noting that when we see a text we remember it better than

when we merely hear it. Saint Thomas Aquinas called sight “the greatest of the