Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies

Abstract

Much of contemporary scholarship in the archival studies field grapples with the problems of today and tomorrow—how archivists might structure their work methods, institutional operations, and conceptual framings for immediate and long-term solutions in preserving and making available archival collections. As such, theoretical and practical approaches within the archives profession tend not to delve too far into the past for inspiration or direction, both because of the increasingly technology-focused nature of archival work and because of growing consensus around which usable histories and modern conceptual lenses ought to inform the profession going forward. Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies, by Geoffrey Yeo, feels exceptional in this regard, as it wisely avoids such presentist filters in offering a detailed and comprehensive analysis of records production across several premodern societies.As an internationally recognized scholar, the University College London–affiliated Yeo has long been an authority on archives and records management in contemporary and historical contexts. Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies shows that humans have always had limited biological capacity for memory but could usually muster the wherewithal to innovate and gain new abilities commensurate with the growing complexity and changing needs of our societies. As Yeo illustrates, this occurred all over the world among different cultures at various points in history, sometimes as part of a chain of regional cultural diffusion and at other times in relative isolation. But Yeo is careful not to conflate current understandings of record making and keeping that suggest a perennial “urge to record” or compulsion to organize and find meaning; instead, early records activity “probably arose from relatively short-term needs” in providing evidence and supporting individual and collective memory (182).Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies is organized into eight thematic chapters that offer examples from around the ancient world, including Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, China, and the Americas. Yeo begins in the distant preliterate Neolithic era, when marks and seals were employed as symbols of ownership, property, and accounting in predominantly herding and farming communities. As such, these precursors to records should be understood as “persistent representations” of activities and events of that time, rather than in how they may have been collected or utilized beyond their immediate sociomaterial context (x). Yeo demonstrates that the creation of any recording device or system from this time was tied to its effectiveness at facilitating contemporaneous business functions, and any longevity it held was contingent on its adaptability to shifting social and cultural realities. For example, in what is now Syria, from about 6000 to 4600 BCE, the ubiquitous presence of family seals on pottery, containers, and other durable items found in homes indicates the role of the household as the primary economic unit and corresponded to a decline in communal property ownership (34).Many “persistent representations” of memory prior to the development of writing took the form of pictographic symbols similar to what later became more formalized systems such as cuneiform and hieroglyphics. But the use of physical objects, including bone tallies, clay tokens, and knotted cords, for tracking quantities was instrumental in developing numerical systems, which led to further innovations in conveying abstract and complex information, particularly in Mesopotamia (47). According to Yeo, by about 2500 BCE, “Mesopotamian record-makers were experimenting with a new approach to writing that sought to represent the words used in spoken language,” where cuneiform symbols “came to be linked with the pronunciation of words and parts of words, in such a way that the signs took on phonetic values” (52). Yeo shows that the challenges of encoding language, recording precise dates, and applying security measures to communications media and transactions were being addressed throughout the ancient Near East and beyond.By the second millennium BCE, records creation and recordkeeping were integral to administering the increasingly complex and expansive functions of state bureaucracies. During this time records primarily were not “driven by the needs of individuals” but rather by the “requirements of institutions or rulers” (87). Organized states became the primary actors in defense and empire-building, food production and distribution, and religion and cultic practice. Decision-making was increasingly centered in urban agglomerations of commercial activity, within broader social and economic networks that spanned continents. Literacy and cultural production were mostly relegated to a ruling elite. Communications technologies and methods (including records creation and recordkeeping) were essential in consolidating and maintaining that elite power, especially in the religious, economic, and political systems that would come to define civilizations around the globe for centuries onward (138).Throughout the book, Yeo analyzes in great detail many practical matters related to records in the ancient world that archivists still grapple with today, albeit from a very different perspective. The problems of media, fixity, reliability, authenticity, storage, and preservation all factored into premodern practices, but a major conceptual leap seems to have occurred when records gained a sort of formal authority unto themselves and their purposes became more similar to what we are now familiar with in terms of usage, access, and availability (114–15). Yeo further explores the theoretical implications of this shift in the final two chapters, which focus on the influence of oral traditions and literacy on records production and how the social roles of records have functioned over time. At a high level, things have not changed that much; records creation did not and does not attend most everyday activity conducted informally and personally, but when important matters are at stake, the creation and keeping of records “would help ensure that the obligation was remembered and difficult to repudiate” (157).The steady movement away from orality and toward written language in late antiquity meant that records would gain a foothold in “establishing rights, responsibilities, and social relations,” but this was not truly transformational until much more recent times with the spread of popular literacy, the further refinement of recording technologies, and the growth of expansive communications networks that attended other civilization-shaping trends (165). In other words, Yeo cautions against “claims of continuity between ancient and modern practice,” even if similarities can be found in records creation and recordkeeping along that temporal continuum (170). In this vein, Yeo specifically calls out Ernst Posner’s 1971 study, Archives in the Ancient World, and refutes other claims in more recent archives disciplinary writing that seem mostly interested in finding historical antecedents that somehow justify or explain contemporary professional values and practices.Yeo’s offering certainly is written for an archives professional audience, but it is largely sourced from archaeology, anthropology, classics, linguistics, and other disciplines outside of (and thus not restrained by) the archival studies field. Yeo does a wonderful job synthesizing all of this disparate research, which was most certainly not conducted or published with any consideration for how it might illuminate records creation, recordkeeping, or archival practices. Crucially, Yeo goes even deeper into the past than other recent works that primarily focus on analyzing different aspects of the “library culture” in the ancient Near East, as opposed to the production of recorded information objects and systems before libraries were even a consideration. As such, Yeo contributes significantly to the body of literature on this general topic and should be read alongside such works as Libraries before Alexandria by Kim Ryholt and Gojko Barjamovic (2021), Ancient Libraries by Jason König, Katerina Oikonomopoulou, and Greg Woolf (2013), The Idea of the Library in the Ancient World by Yun Lee Too (2010), The History of the Library in Western Civilization by Konstantino Staikos (2004), and Libraries in the Ancient World by Lionel Casson (2001).