As a writer and reader, one thing that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember is the history and development of writing and the art of books that forms the components of our current literary world.
In the summer of 2022, a group of scholars made the announcement that they had cracked Linear Elamite, a Bronze Age script used in the trading cities of Elam in the highlands of southern Iran, through which Central Asian tin, a crucial ingredient in bronze, was transported north to the Mesopotamian kingdoms of Babylon and Assyria.
First identified by archaeologists in 1903, it is a beauty: stark geometric characters composed of diamonds and triangles, circles and straight lines. It has also long resisted decryption, not least because there is so little of it: only 40 texts are known.
Early clues came from objects found at the Elamite capital of Susa with inscriptions in both Linear Elamite and Akkadian, a Semitic language spoken in Mesopotamia and written in patterns of wedge-shaped (“cuneiform”) marks made in clay with a blunt stylus.
Akkadian was deciphered in the 19th century as a largely syllabic script - one whose characters represent syllables rather than individual sounds, as an alphabet does - and although the Linear Elamite inscriptions were not direct translations of the Akkadian ones, it was always a good bet that they would contain some of the same names, which should sound the same in both languages. One Akkadian inscription, for instance, refers to a local god, Sushinak (“Lord of Susa”), and a local king, Puzur-Sushinak; in this case the overlap meant that if Linear Elamite was a phonetic writing system it should be possible to find the same two names by looking for partially identical sequences of Linear Elamite signs. Once these sequences were indeed identified, specific sound-values could be assigned to the individual characters they contained.
By the 1920s nine of the 76 signs that appeared more than once in the small corpus had been tentatively read. By 2018, however, that number had only risen to 12. Then came another breakthrough, when investigators focused on a group of inscriptions written on chunky silver beakers, luxury items that must have belonged to kings and courtiers. Here there were no Akkadian inscriptions for comparison, but the texts did contain the names of known Elamite rulers, some of which were relatively easy to recognize: a phonetic rendering of the name Shilhaha, for instance, must contain the same sign or signs written twice in a row, and the sign for “shi” was already known from the Susa texts. In a stroke of luck, the writing on the beakers also turned out to overlap with other Elamite-language texts written in a different system, a version of the cuneiform used to record Akkadian. Since scholars had already been able to decode a fair amount of Cuneiform Elamite, including names, titles, and formulaic phrases that they now identified on the beakers as well, the puzzle came together quickly, and these scholars believe that they can now read 72 Linear Elamite signs with confidence.
Their efforts have courted controversy.
The Linear Elamite beakers are of uncertain provenance and are held in private collections, and one was impounded by the Norwegian police in August 2021 because “the evidence on balance…indicates modern looting, smuggling, and illicit trading.”
No major objections to the decipherment itself have yet been published, but it is early days, and scholars are resourceful.
Being able to read a script is not the same as understanding a language.
Even if the new hypothesis does find general acceptance, significant gaps will remain in our knowledge of Elamite grammar and vocabulary. It does not help that Elamite is “isolated,” that is, unrelated to any other known tongue. All the same, there is now reasonable hope of translating what survives of the records these adventurous ancient traders left of their world.
Deciphering unknown languages often depends on the fact that the same language can be written in multiple scripts (as with Elamite, and later Turkish or Malay), and the same script can be used to write multiple languages (as with cuneiform, and later the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets). But as we see in modern writing systems from musical notes to emojis, script is not always tied to language at all.
In ancient Mesopotamia numbers came first, in the form of token and tally systems. Adding a picture of what you were counting - a sheep, say - helped to keep the books straight. This was good for communication too: people speaking different languages could read the same thing the same way. Whether the first written document to change hands was a bill, a receipt, or a ration book, it did not look so different from an online shopping cart today.
The next step forward was to develop these early sketches into “signs” that represented specific elements in specific languages. Over time this produced a gloriously complicated writing system for Sumerian, the earliest surviving written language and another isolate. Its cuneiform characters can represent entire words, or individual syllables, or grammatical “determinatives”: signs that tell you that the next word is a kind of god, or city, or waterfowl. People needed these determinatives because despite the existence of hundreds of signs, many could be read in several different ways and in all three categories.
What prompted the writing down of language? The traditional answer is the state: writing appears in Mesopotamia and many other places with the development of centralized political institutions. It suited their administrative and fiscal requirements, and it often worked to their benefit: the earliest surviving Chinese writing, oracles inscribed on pieces of bone including turtle shells, predicts the military maneuvers of the king’s enemies and neighbors.
Even writing that remains divorced from language can work on behalf of the state. From around 1400 to 1600 CE the Incans used the position, thickness, and direction of knots tied in long woolen strings hanging from a cord, called quipu, to record numbers. This was no simple accounting system: by turning events into dates and places into coordinates, like zip codes, quipu could communicate complex narratives. And the fact that the knots were not tied to any particular language made this three-dimensional script a useful tool of Incan imperial bureaucracy.
All the same, as Silvia Ferrara points out in The Greatest Invention, writing does not require states to take off. The runic script, more properly called futhark, appears in Northern Europe in the second century CE in the absence of strong central government, and although its letters are based closely on the alphabet used to run the Roman Empire immediately to the south, it was used primarily, as far as we can tell, for nongovernmental purposes like magic, fortune-telling, and graffiti.
Writing can even emerge in reaction against states. Ferrara tells the story of Sequoyah, a silversmith, member of the Cherokee Nation from Tennessee, and tenacious champion of Cherokee literacy as a means “to combat the white conqueror’s abuses of power.” Sequoyah spent a decade developing a syllabary - a syllabic script - with 85 signs adapted from the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets. He then devoted himself to promoting it,
Writing did still encourage state-style opposition: Sequoyah’s script was officially adopted by Cherokee National Council in 1825 for their laws and a bilingual newspaper, Cherokee Phoenix. But Ferrara goes further: a central argument of her book is that the fundamental idea of writing itself comes not from bureaucracy but from individual creativity and a human urge to communicate with others.
One obvious problem with claiming that writing is a universal human instinct is that it has rarely been invented from scratch.
There is an unassailable argument for independent invention in Mesoamerica, where Mayan languages were recorded in elaborate glyphs for more than 1,500 years before the European invasion. Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, however, appear at more or less the same time, around 3000 BCE. Neither script derives from the other, but the idea of writing could have traveled between these regions by the same indirect routes that brought Mesopotamian lion imagery and mudbrick architecture to Egyptian cities in this era.
A similar process of conceptual transmission might explain the appearance of Chinese writing around 1500 BCE, by which time wheat, which had first been domesticated in Western Asia’s so-called Fertile Crescent, could also be found in China, and millet domesticated in the Yellow River region had reached Eastern Europe. Here, though, the dating is trickier: the script written on the “oracle bones” was already fully formed, with 3,000 to 5,000 distinct signs, which suggests an earlier and so far invisible phase that might predate transcontinental contact.
States often maintain writing systems, as their bureaucracies depend on the transmission of information across long distances,
Linear A, which was used to write a Bronze Age Cretan language, is now securely established as the ancestor of Linear B, decoded in the 1950s as a syllabic system for writing Greek.
It is also the mother-script of Cypro-Minoan, used to write an as-yet-mysterious Cypriot language.
Conversely, insight into the language or languages spoken on Crete could provide useful clues for the decipherment of the Cretan Hieroglyphic writing system, a different script in use on the island at the same time as Linear A.
The biggest obstacle to deciphering ancient languages is the assumption that premodern societies were primitive. The signs that make up unfamiliar scripts are easy to dismiss as pictograms, symbols, or even art. But almost all writing systems turn out to be largely phonetic: Mayan glyphs, for instance, long thought to be simple memory aids, were finally decoded in the second half of the 20th century as a mixture of logograms and syllabic characters. The rules here are clear even for undeciphered scripts: several hundred signs point to a logo-syllabary; 50 to 100 to a syllabary; fewer than that and we enter the realm of the alphabet, in which each letter denotes a single unit of sound.
The alphabet is an odd fish, going beyond the human impulse to organize sounds into syllables. There is no doubt that the origins of the alphabetic writing system adopted by Greek speakers centuries after they abandoned Linear B lie in a much earlier script invented to record the languages of the ancient Levant and brought west by merchants from Phoenicia in the eighth century BCE. Until a year or so ago most scholars would have placed the first examples of this Levantine consonantal alphabet, or “abjad,” in the early second millennium BCE, a thousand years before it reached the Greeks. Now, however, signs with strong resemblances to later alphabetic letters have been identified on four small clay cylinders found in a northern Syrian tomb that is at least 500 years older.
Unfortunately, these brief inscriptions feature only 12 letters in total, and specialists do not yet know which direction to read them in, let alone what they say.
The Greeks themselves were committed to the foreign origins of their script, and often called their letters “Phoenicians.” They added vowels by recycling existing Phoenician letters that had been used for sounds that did not exist in Greek. And the vowels themselves were not so much an improvement on the existing writing system as a necessary adaptation of it to their own language: many Greek words begin with vowels, and the distinctions between them play a larger part in communicating meaning in Greek than in Semitic languages.
Greeks were not the first to add vowels either: that honor goes to the Bronze Age port of Ugarit on the Syrian coast, where 13th-century BCE scribes reinvented the traditional Linear Alphabetic letters of the region as a set of 30 cuneiform characters that included three vowels. On current evidence, in fact, Greeks were not even the second. The earliest alphabetic inscription with vowels found west of the Levant is written in Phrygian in the city of Gordion, in what is now central Turkey, and dates to around 800 BCE. It is another generation before the same vowels appear in Greek inscriptions.
It was only in the 20th century that scholars began to build a case for an “alphabet effect,” seeing the addition of vowels to the Levantine abjad as a change of immense significance that enabled voweled writing systems to capture - or impose - the smallest details of sound responsible for Greek philosophy, democracy, and individualism.
Before examples of Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs were collected in bulk by colonial archaeologists, writing to Europeans simply was the alphabet. This meant that the invention of the alphabet - whether attributed to Greeks, Phoenicians, or God - was the invention of writing. In such debates most scholars were prudent enough to let God win: the first writing must have been in Hebrew, they concluded, though the Huguenot theologian Samuel Bochart made a spirited attempt in 1646 to derive Hebrew from Celtic and Teutonic. The alphabet itself was generally treated as a divine revelation, but what happened after that was up for grabs. Scholars competed to collect different versions, including a variety of “angel alphabets” that were made up for the purpose of mystery and magic but never used for ordinary writing.
By the end of the 18th century, writing was largely understood as a human invention, and the study of ancient inscriptions was taken more seriously as historical evidence for its origins and history than the claims of ancient texts, whether biblical or secular. The Unicode system that provides digital fonts for almost all known scripts assigns each character an alphanumeric code, and even Chinese characters are typed by entering text in alphabetic “pinyin” before the appropriate traditional signs can be selected from suggested lists.
How worried should we be by alphabet supremacy? Is it simply an improvement on earlier scripts, just as syllabaries improved on picture-coded accounting systems? This might seem obvious: with fewer letters, alphabets should be easier to learn. But there is more to reading and writing than learning your letters, and schoolchildren today can be taught to communicate effectively in all sorts of writing systems. Even the cuneiform script, with its hundreds of characters and specialized equipment, was no bar to functional literacy in the early second millennium BCE: in some Babylonian cities, writing tablets were found in more than half the houses.
There is a bigger question about whether writing, the handmaiden of imperial taxation, conscription, and surveillance, is a good thing at all. A survey conducted by Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology rated the invention of writing below that of the zipper. In a world without writing, we would live suspended in a continual present. The power of collective memory is remarkable. The songs and stories of past glory that the Greeks called Homer were passed down for centuries without the help of writing. Indigenous coastal legends from Australia to the Outer Hebrides appear to describe landscapes that have not existed for thousands of years, and in some cases since the end of the last Ice Age.
Oral history does not survive the onset of literacy, when the time before writing becomes myth. But writing has been around for only 6,000 years or so, and most people did not see much of it - it was not omnipresent in daily life - before the invention of the printing press and the rise of the modern nation-state.
There is no particular reason to think it will long outlive them.
Comentários