Jack Goody explains how the early writings from 3000 B.C.E. in Egypt and Mesopotamia have influenced the “cognitive operations” of the human mind (32). He focuses his argument on ‘the list’ because he believes that just like today’s writing, the list has a purpose, to influence “the organization of social life and ... the cognitive systems (33).” According to Goody, the list can be divided into three different categories: inventory, shopping, and lexical. The inventory list was used mainly for administrative purposes. Estate inventory, taxes, itemization and several other things were written down to keep track of things. It was an economic tool that helped keep records for the state. The shopping list was a sort of events list that recorded things to be done or things that had been done. Goody gives the example of recording star distances from one star to another by the Mesopotamians. Other things recorded with this type of list are recordings of the weather and administrative boundaries. Finally, the lexical list was like an early dictionary. Words of the same meaning or morphology were grouped together to show “relationships among the words in the vocabulary of the language (42).” Based on the Onomasticon of Amenope, an early Egyptian writing, Goody explains that the author of the Amenope creates a lexical list that is put in a hierarchy order. By doing this the author is showing how the people viewed society; the gods and kings at the top, working men in the middle and everything else (e.g. trees, animals, etc.) at the bottom. The list reflects a more complex idea compared to the inventory and shopping list, which are more simple abstract things. Overall, Goody says that words have a value when they are placed in a list because they the words grouped together have a relationship. The words can give a result (inventory), they can record happenings and help predict what’s going to happen (shopping), and they can reflect society’s awareness of the world or their beliefs (lexical).
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