Notes From the Chapter Bibliography - 4. Alphanumeric Notation and the Calendrical-Musical Kosmos
From The Observatory
Notes From the Chapter Bibliography
The following paragraphs of notes from the author for Chapter 4 include quotations from Mogens Trolle Larsen, “The Mesopotamian Lukewarm Mind: Reflections on Science, Divination, and Literacy,” in Francesca Rochberg-Halton (ed.), Language, Literature, and History: Philological and Historical Studies Presented to Erica Reiner, American Oriental Series, Vol. 67 (New Haven: 1987), pp. 203–225. Can you help us work them into the body of Chapter 4?
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Hudson’s Original Note:
p. 208: “When writing first appeared in the cities on the [Mesopotamian] alluvium at the end of the fourth millennium [BC], it was used for two purposes: bureaucracy and lists. It is easy to understand these lists of signs as designed to facilitate the training of scribes, so that they form elements in the wider literate system of bureaucratisation which needed uniformity and standardisation.”
p. 209: Incidentally, these lists represented “a systematic and ordered picture of the world.” These lists led to organization by means of their written logogrammatic elements. (Hence, the mode of organization was not oral, Larsen emphasized.)
207: “A universe is created where every thing is in its place, related to other things and phenomena in an orderly and meaningful system. … Modern science operates with the concept of Chance on certain levels of explanation, but the Zande insist on a total explanation. They therefore introduce witchcraft as the final link in otherwise inexplicable causal chains.”
Irony: The study of writing is called “cryptology.” Is it hidden, or clear? Today: to make clear. Originally: for magic, hence, hermetic.
p. 210: The Sumerians had a “will to order,” that is, what Wolfram von Soden[1] (1936: p. 29) called an “Ordnungswillen.”
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- ↑ Wolfram von Soden, “Leistung und Grenze sumerischer und babylonischer Wissenschaft,” Die Welt als Geschichte, Vol. 2 (1936), pp. 411–464 and pp. 509–557 (repr. Darmstadt: 1965).
