Posts Tagged ‘Informatics’
[DevoxxFR2013] The History of Writings
Lecturer
Clarisse Herrenschmidt is a French archaeologist, ancient historian, philologist, and linguist, born October 24, 1946, in Strasbourg. A CNRS researcher since 1979, she is affiliated with the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale at the Collège de France. She has taught at INALCO (Iranian history, scripts, and graphic cultures) and Paris 8 University (linguistic anthropology). Her book “Les Trois Écritures: Langue, nombre, code” (Gallimard, 2007) won the Georges Dumézil Prize from the Académie Française and the Georges Picot Prize from the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 2008.
Abstract
Clarisse Herrenschmidt’s lecture surveys 53 centuries of script evolution, from Mesopotamian origins to informatics. Focusing on numeric and monetary inscriptions, she traces innovations from calculi to Indo-Arabic numerals, linking them to societal transformations. Analyzing artifacts as corporeal metaphors, Herrenschmidt reveals scripts’ role in anthropology, economy, and mythology, emphasizing their global yet Western-centric conquest.
Origins in the Ancient Near East: From Calculi to Scripts
Herrenschmidt commences with seventh-millennium BCE calculi – stone/clay objects representing numbers in base-60 systems (sticks for 1, balls for 10, cones for 60). Used for tallying livestock or grain, they stored counts in bowls, aiding memory post-Neolithic shifts to agriculture and pastoralism.
Urban revolutions in Uruk integrated economy, politics, religion, necessitating sealed storage. Clay balls sealed knots on bales/doors; “envelope-bulls” enclosed calculi, representing stored quantities. Seals (e.g., carved stones with birds) identified social actors.
Innovation: marking envelopes’ exteriors with impressions, rendering invisible calculi visible – birthing numerals without destruction. Flat tablets followed: Susa examples bear workshop seals (weaving atelier) and numeric signs (pits for units).
Pictographic tablets added linguistic signs alongside numerals, evolving proto-cuneiform. This rendered invisible visible, foundational for informatics.
Monetary Inscriptions and Geometric-Arithmetic Evolution
Jumping to seventh-century BCE Lydia/Ionia, Herrenschmidt examines coined money: small electrum globules stamped with designs (e.g., lion heads). Coins bore issuer marks and values, disseminating arithmetic-geometric scripts.
Unlike Mesopotamian weight-based metals, coins standardized value via stamps, not weight. Inscriptions (e.g., Persian darics with archer-kings) embodied issuer, value, recipient – a tripartite structure persisting in modern currency.
Indo-Arabic numerals (1-9 from India sixth-seventh centuries CE, zero uniquely Indian) transmitted via Persian-Arabic mathematicians, reached Mediterranean. Sicilian coins (c.1150-55) feature Christ busts, Arabic text, Hijri dates with Indo-Arabic figures.
Fibonacci’s “Liber Abaci” (1202) introduced positional notation, fractions, algebra, geometry, loans/interests – secretly used by merchants despite Church bans.
From Letters of Exchange to Modern Differentiations
Indo-Arabic numerals birthed new money: 1404 letters of exchange – paper-based, metal-free, concealing loans via currency transfers (e.g., Italy to Barcelona). Ancestors of banknotes/checks, unimaginable in Greco-Roman antiquity despite intelligence.
Herrenschmidt notes exhaustion of monetary-arithmetic scripts providing informatics’ terrain. Mathematics developed binary (Leibniz), differentials (Boole), questioning foundations.
Hilbert’s problems (1900-1928): completeness (every statement provable/disprovable? Gödel: no), consistency (avoid absurdities like 1+2=5? Possible), decidability (method to verify assertions? Turing: no).
Informatics and Mythic Corporeal Metaphors
Responses negate mathematics as self-founding language; it differentiates from money (Nixon severs dollar-gold link August 15, 1971, coinciding networks’ rise). Nasdaq’s foundation and TCP/IP (1969-71) mark shifts, though historical-political opacity persists amid U.S. propaganda.
Turing’s 1936 “automatic machine” – theoretical reader-head and infinite tape – conceptualizes computers. Herrenschmidt synthesizes artifacts: envelope-bull (mouth, emitting signs), coin (eye, estimating magnitudes), Turing machine (brain).
These corporeal metaphors underpin script inventions: mouth for numeric/linguistic, eye for grandeur estimation, brain for computation. Humans remain ensnared in mythic bodies emitting/capturing signs, becoming techniques.
Informatics’ third graphic revolution transforms societies and selves, altering habits and constructing beings within immense myths. Developers enact this; observers marvel.