Writing and the Early State: An Empirical Study of Mesopotamia

Abstract

The invention of writing can be considered one of the major technological innovations in human history. This giant leap in cognitive and information-processing capabilities is surprisingly ill understood. Scholarship in various disciplines has produced many explanations of the drivers and effects of writing, with a particular focus on the link between writing and state origins (Childe 1950; Goody 1986; Wang 2014). Yet, little formal work has probed these theories (Stasavage 2021). In this paper, we contribute to the empirical study of the relation between writing and states. We ask whether writing affected state capacity, not just its origins. We study Mesopotamia, one of the four places where writing was developed independently. We take advantage of regional variation between the South, where full-fledged writing developed, and the North, where it did not. This design allows us to keep a number of biogeographical and cultural variables constant. We look at 15 states in each region between 3500 and 2900 BCE, before and after the adoption of writing in the South around 3350 BCE. Whereas our design has obvious advantages, it also suffers from a potential confounder: the explosion in state capacity in the South has been linked to idiosyncratic climatic shocks that stunted urbanization in the rain-fed North, but transformed Southern marshes into productive agricultural lands (Kennett and Kennett 2006). To assess the role of writing we thus also compare states within the South.