Reading :: Visible Language

Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond

Edited by Christopher Woods

I ran into this book a while back and was intrigued: Although I’m hardly an archaeologist, I’m interested in the invention and development of writing, and this collection covers cuneiform, ancient Egyptian writing, early alphabetic writing, and early writing systems in China and Mesoamerica. 

In Woods’ introduction, he argues that to our knowledge, writing was invented ex nihilo only four times: in Sumer, ancient Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica (p.15). (Previous scholars have assumed that writing traveled from Sumer to Egypt, but new discoveries have pushed back the date of Egyptian writing; p.16.) He adds: “Broadly defined, writing represents speech. One must be able to recover the spoken word, unambiguously, from a system of visible marks in order for those marks to be considered writing. … Those systems that meet this criterion, and so represent true writing, are labeled glottographic, while systems of communication that represent ideas only,without that essential bond to speech and so do not meet our definition of writing — for example,musical and mathematical notation, international road signs and the like — are labeled semasiographic (Sampson 1985, pp. 29–30)” (p.18). And “What systems of communication that eventually develop into full-fledged writing do have, as opposed to their semasiographic counterparts and progenitors, is the germ of phoneticism — the rebus principal is integrated into these systems. That is, the existence of homonyms in the language is exploited in that the sound of one word, most often one with a referent that can be easily drawn, is used to write another word that is pronounced identically or similarly” (p.20). 

In Ch.2, “The Earliest Mesopotamian Writing,” Woods overviews the origins of Mesopotamian writing, which “may very well represent the world’s first writing system” (p.33). Intriguingly, he reports on Mesopotamian legends about the origins of written language (pp.34-35). When discussing precursors to writing, Woods describes the discovery of clay “envelopes” or hollow clay balls containing tokens, with the impressions of those tokens on the exterior of the envelopes. He notes that “The idea that these envelopes represented precursors to writing was first suggested by the French archaeologist Pierre Amiet in the 1960s” (p.46). Where Amiet thought that these token impressions inspired cuneiform, Schmandt-Besserat argued that they directly became cuneiform: “In Schmandt-Besserat’s view, both the numerical and logographic signs of cuneiform evolved directly out of the earlier token system. This theory is based on the visual similarities between the elements of the token and writing systems” (p.47). But Woods says that “many of her identification linking complex tokens to cuneiform signs are sim-ply not plausible” and “the distribution of tokens, if we accept Schmandt-Besserat’s identifications, is at odds with our understanding of early Mesopotamian economy and society” (p.48). 

In Ch.3, “Adaptation of Cuneiform to Write Akkadian,” Andrea Seri examines how the Sumerian cuneiform system was adopted by Akkadian neighbors. The two languages are quite different structurally, 

whereas the Sumerian verbal root was monosyllabic and could not be internally altered, Akkadian needed an essentially phonetic syllabic system in order to convey the semantically important structural characteristics of the language.The transition from logograms to syllabograms,therefore, played an important role in the adaptation of cuneiform to write Akkadian (pp.89-90)

In Ch.5, “The Conception and Development of the Egyptian Writing System,” Elise V. MacArthur reviews writing precursors: rock drawings, pot marks, pottery, seals, tomb tags, incised pottery, and funerary stelae (p.116). And in Ch.6, “The Earliest Egyptian Writing,” Andréas Stauder addresses the question of why Sumerians and Egyptians appear to have invented writing almost simultaneously: 

The close proximity in time and the relative proximity in space of the southern Mesopotamian and Egyptian inventions of writing remains remarkable, but is explained by taking into account the broader context. The development of the earliest Egyptian writing is contemporaneous with, and di-rectly related to, the emergence of regional political entities and associated elites. This in turn is part of a set of complexly interrelated phenomena that simultaneously affected various parts of the ancientNear East in the later fourth millennium, partly in relation to the development of, and attempts to control, supra-regional trade networks. In the con-text of major political and social changes affecting both southern Mesopotamia and Upper Egypt, the roughly simultaneous emergence of writing in the two regions is no coincidence. (p.142)

Skipping ahead, in Ch.12, “The Invention and Development of the Alphabet,” Joseph Lam notes that

The functional advantage of the alphabet over other writing systems lies in its economy. In contrast to logographic systems, in which a given symbol denotes a word, or to syllabic writing, in which sign represents a full syllable of sound, alphabetic writing is characterized by the graphic representation of phonemes, that is, the shortest contrastive units of sound in a language (consonants or vowels), thereby greatly decreasing the number of signs. (p.189)

In Ch.14, “The Beginnings of Writing in China,” Edward L. Shaughnessy points out that although many Chinese characters would be recognized as pictographic 3000 years ago, currently “99 percent or more of current Chinese characters … depict primarily the sound of the word” (p.215). He overviews what we know about the development of this writing system. Similarly, in Ch.15, “The Development of Maya Writing,” Joel W. Palka overviews Mesoamerican script history.

Overall, I found this book to be fascinating, although (paradoxically) I also ended up skimming a lot. On one hand, I learned a lot about writing systems around the world, including how they originated and changed over time. On the other hand, this book requires some antecedent knowledge and I didn’t always have it. Still, if you’re interested in writing as an ingenious, inventive set of human practices, definitely pick this book up.