Third passage from the set, and this one is the hardest of them all, I thought.

And there are eight questions, so it's going to be pretty time-consuming.

It's a science passage, we're talking about archaeology, history of language,

sort of one of the roots of writing. So let's take a look here.

Though the tablets date from roughly 3000 BC, that's 5000 years ago,

the writing on them uses relatively few pictographs, instead numerous abstract symbols are used.

So what does that mean, pictographs versus abstract symbols?

Well, here's an example. Take sheep, the concept of sheep.

To do this pictographically, you could just draw an image of a sheep, which is kind of our author hints.

Our author hints with using, though it's so old, there are relatively few pictographs.

Our author is hinting that one might expect for something so old, like proto-writing, to be more pictographic.

Because it kind of makes sense, right? Like, early humans saw a sheep, and how do you represent that?

Well, it seems the most natural way is to draw a picture of a sheep.

You get somebody that can actually draw, so not me.

But this could be a reasonable assumption of how writing evolved.

It kind of makes sense, as opposed to something more abstract, which doesn't make a lot of sense.

Like, what, a circled cross? What the hell? Why would this represent sheep?

So when you look at something so old, you would expect it to be a pictographic, as opposed to abstract.

But then you look at something that's 3,000, 5,000 years old, 3,000 BC, you actually find a lot of abstract.

Like a circled cross to represent a sheep.

And you find a crescent with five lines, to represent metal.

So because of its early date, this seemingly sudden appearance of such abstract writing has long puzzled researchers.

So it's like, okay, so this is a phenomenon that we've identified.

Can someone please come along and explain how this happened?

And we're going to get that someone down here in Besserat.

But, look, at the same time, among pre-pottery clay artifacts found in archaeological sites along the Jordan and nearby rivers

are thousands of small, hand-modeled tokens of fire clay, some dating to before 4,000 BC.

So that precedes this stuff by a thousand years.

And just think of them, I thought of them as like, you ever play Monopoly?

Like those little tokens you can pick up?

That's how I sort of imagined these tokens of fire clay, like little pieces.

So often ignored by archaeologists, the tokens are identified by Denise Schmandt-Besserat in her book

before writing as an overlooked predecessor to the written word.

So right there is where you get your biggest clue to where the rest of the passage is going to go.

So we identify this phenomenon, which is kind of surprising for people.

How come so long ago, 3,000 BC, we already started seeing what looked like a sudden appearance of abstract writing?

And Besserat is like, yeah, you know, it's not that sudden.

Here are the precursors, the predecessors, the predecessors, the overlooked predecessors of the written word, of the abstract.

It's in these token things, in these Monopoly pieces, which I know I totally skipped over this bit.

And I always say this, you want to read it without reading this additional detail in between the dashes.

But let's read this now.

Some concluded, some archaeologists concluded without evidence that they were amulets or game pieces.

Like me, right? Like I'm not an archaeologist, but these archaeologists, without any evidence, just said,

oh yeah, these must be game pieces. And they must like to play a lot of games.

So they were using these tokens as game pieces. Right? No.

That would be like a conclusion that an amateur like me might come to,

but it shouldn't be a conclusion archaeologists would arrive at.

OK, so before we move on to the second paragraph, just a quick summary of the first one.

We have 5,000 year old tablets with pictographs that are very abstract on them.

We think they're kind of sudden how the abstract writing popped up.

But Bessarab is like, actually, they're not that sudden.

We can find predecessors to them in these tokens of fired clay.

All right. So from there, let's move on to the second paragraph.

the like grandparents of abstract writing. They're simple in form.

You know, what do they look like? Well, the earliest of these, right, because they say some of them are dating before 4000 B.C.

So the earliest of them are really just like little cones, little spheres, like little marbles, right, or little pyramids.

OK, that's what like they, you know, that's our physical shape. And they were often inscribed.

So not only were they just like a sphere. I came and draw a sphere. This looks like a circle.

Right. Maybe I can draw a cone. Actually, let's see. Cone like that.

No. Anyways, whatever. Imagine this were a pyramid.

Right. Imagine this were a three dimensional object, a pyramid. And they were inscribed with like stuff on it.

Right. Stuff. So in 1966, a hollow tablet containing several of these tokens was discovered.

So a hollow tablet that was hollow in the center. So kind of imagine like a like like a vase or something.

Right. Like a rectangular vase. That's a hollow tablet. And inside the vase were just lots of these little tokens or several of these little tokens.

And later, more than 100 additional tablets, vases, right, these rectangular vases were discovered, which are now recognized as sealed envelopes of clay have since been found.

So we thought they were tablets, but actually, you know what they are? They're just envelopes of clay that contain these things that were sealed.

Right. So it's like if you want to transport some of these things, I guess one way to do it is to, you know, toss them into a tablet of a hollow tablet of clay and then seal them.

So there's like seven of these things in there. Later envelopes. So that not the earlier ones, but the later ones were also inscribed with impressions of the tokens in the outer clay signaling exactly what was what in each envelope contained.

So that's kind of interesting. Once you seal up the clay envelope, how are you going to know what's inside? Like did I put seven of these?

Maybe I put like three of these pyramid. Right. Maybe maybe like two of the two of the cone vases in there.

Right. Maybe two of these. And then like maybe three more of four more of the circular ones.

How am I going to know what I put in there? It's sealed already. I can't really look inside.

I have to break the seal to look inside. Right. I can shake it around, I guess, to get a sense of it's empty. But why not just inscribe the envelope, the outer clay?

Right. Maybe like what I just did here. This could be an inscription. You know, instead of getting people to guess at what's in there or break the envelope open, you could just write on the outer outer envelope like what's in there.

You know, so that's what they did later on. And noting that these inscriptions are clearly traceable to later known descriptions of farm products.

So she looks at the inscriptions of these envelopes that are sealed and she's like, oh, yeah, I can trace these later known description farmers.

I know what they are. She theorized that the envelope contain official records of villagers contributions to temple based grain and livestock pools.

Right. So it's like I'm a villager. I brought to my local temple like five heads of sheep.

So I get like I don't know how sheep were was represented, maybe like a pyramid token. Right.

So there are five pyramid tokens that represent sheep. I pop them into a clay envelope. I sealed envelope. I write on the envelope.

You know, I inscribe on the outer surface of the envelope, you know, five sheep. Right. By drawing the token out.

And then I bring it to my local temple. And there's the record that I've done my part. I've contributed to the grain and livestock pool.

So now after 4000 BC, that's a little a little bit later on in development, because the earliest ones were from before 4000 BC.

So after 4000 BC, hundreds of new token forms developed as rise in industry boosted token system.

See, in the beginning, it was just these like very simple forms, right, like cones, spheres, pyramids.

But later on, hundreds, hundreds of new forms developed. Right.

For example, a lot of the forms are figurative, like, for example, a bowl, right, like a bowl.

Yeah. Like a jar. Right. Like a jar. I don't know why I keep embarrassing myself with handles suggesting their diverse diversify sophisticated.

You can imagine like better symbol forms. The author is suggesting that these symbols, right, these figurative symbols suggest that the economy diversified and became more sophisticated.

Like later, earlier on, you didn't really have like nobody was a special jar maker or a bowl maker.

But now maybe you have people who do just that. Right.

So actually, before we move into the third paragraph, let's sum this up.

The second paragraph here is kind of a history of these tokens. Right. They started out very simple.

And, you know, you pop them in in these like envelopes, these clay envelopes.

Right. You seal them up and then you write on top of the envelopes with what's in there.

And then later on, your economy got more sophisticated. So your your tokens got more sophisticated.

You had like jar tokens pop up. You had bowl tokens pop up.

So we're already seeing sort of a development in the tokens.

Yeah. Don't worry if you didn't understand that. First time I read this, I didn't really understand it either.

I had to go back and read it a couple of times. But this token system, the one that we just talked about, was replaced in about three thousand and ten B.C.

Three three thousand one hundred B.C. Right. So this token system was no longer used after about a thousand years of use.

Actually more than a thousand years because we know it started before 4000 B.C.

So after about more than a thousand years of use, it was replaced by a system of marks on clay tablets.

I see. If you if you kind of think about this, you know, back here, what do we do?

We pop these tokens into the clay tablets and then we seal the clay tablets and then we write on top of the clay tablets what's inside.

What does that make this seem like? It was unnecessary.

Right. Like why do we even pop the tablets, the tokens in the first place into the top?

Why don't we just write on the clay tablets like what's in there?

You know, just bypass this token making step. Right.

So that's that's what is suggesting that's what our authors suggesting happened here.

They just they were just like, yeah, maybe let's just use the clay tablet. Just write what's on there.

Right. A few centuries later, this latter system was to display the first use of numerals.

So it gets a little more progress, progressively a little more mature.

Right. Where simple marks coded the concept of one, two and so forth.

The eventual evolution of the system into mature writing, Vessara suggests, can be seen in the following example.

At first, it's a two ovoid tokens to record two jars of oil. A little later, it took two markings on a clay tablet to achieve this.

So initially. Right. What what do we we had to take to avoid like actual tokens, actual three dimensional things, physical objects to represent two jars of oil that I contributed, say, to my temple.

Right. That was the first step. Later on, second step, it took two markings on a clay tablet.

Right. This I would toss into a clay tablet and seal up later. It's like actually forget it.

Let's just use the clay tablet. Right. Let's just use the clay clay tablet itself. Right. Just write on it.

What do we write? We wrote two markings on it. One mark using the outline of the old token to record the customary unit for oil.

So we took this token. Right. We just outlined the token on as as a carving onto the clay tablet.

Right. This is no longer a physical three dimensional object. It's just a scratch on this on this on this clay tablet.

Right. That's one marking. And the other a second Martin include numerous to write two of these.

So this times two. Right. Eventually, this is three. Eventually, it's like three sides on the tablet.

So now it evolved a little bit more. Right. One for the numeral two.

So we got to one for the standard jar full. So maybe the standard jar full could be like, I don't know, like an actual jar thing.

Right. With a handle. Right. And a new symbol to denote oil itself. So I how the hell am I going to know oil?

Something like this. Right. So two jars of oil. So now we actually have a pretty mature system writing.

Right. You got a noun. You got two adjectives. So now with three such signs, an abstract flexible form writing had arrived.

So really, like this whole passage came together after reading this one example, you know, it kind of just really nicely summed up what was going on over here.

So initially. Right. So then I read the second paragraph over again. Initially, physical objects were used.

Right. Then the physical objects got more complicated. And then in the process of using physical objects, almost like by accident,

you discovered a sort of more abstract way when you when you tuck these physical objects into other physical objects like envelopes.

And you wanted to indicate what was on the envelopes. You kind of came upon this more abstract way of representing things.

Right. Well, we already had it written on the envelope. Why do we even have things inside the envelope?

Why don't we just get rid of the stuff inside the envelope and just use the envelope?

And that later developed into something more sophisticated. So that's it. Like that's the.

Well, now that we're at the end of the passage, the main conclusion, the main point of this whole passage is that

Bessarab identified that this is not that surprising. It's 3000. Right. 3000 BC.

We had like over 1000 years of development of proto writing. You know, so it's not that surprising where this come from.

It came from this. Right. The tokens. OK, so now let's take a look at the questions.

Question 21 says, which one of the following statements regarding the sign for sheep would the author be most likely to agree?

So we're asked to make an inference from the author's perspective about the sign for a sheep, which is over here, right?

It could, the sign, which is to say this

cross with a circle, could have been replaced without loss of significance by any other sign that was not already being used for something else.

So it's just abstract. It doesn't even represent sheep.

So you easily could have replaced this, say, you know, instead of like a cross that looked like, replace it with an X, right?

Or replace it with an S, right? Whatever. You could use this to represent sheep. You could use this to represent sheep.

I think the author would agree with this.

cuneiform sign for metal gets its meaning. No, I think it's pretty much the same.

It's all abstract, right? Because the cuneiform for metal was this crescent. I don't even know how this crescent goes,

but it's like some crescent with lines, right?

I mean, they're both abstract. So what do you mean it's radically different?

the way in which represents meaning, that is to say,

abstractly, it seems to be fairly similar to this human industry metal thing, right? The agriculture and industry.

Yeah, they're both abstract.

So Besra was the first one to give a scientific scrutiny.

In other words, Besra was the first one to scientifically investigate, right? No, I don't think so.

They said it was a puzzlement, right? A puzzled researcher.

So if they're puzzled researchers, I would expect that there was much scientific scrutiny even prior to Besra.

They just couldn't figure it out. Besra was the first one that cracked the case, so to speak, right?

E says the abstract nature sign revealed a great deal of political life. What? What does it reveal about political life?