World book heritage. 12: Writing

World Book heritage A series of talks on the history of the written word 12. Writing.

Writing has been defined as "a visible representation of speech, rendering it capable of being transported and preserved". It is vital to civilisation; its absence restricts trade, science and technology, literature and history. Its importance has always been recognised; its invention was attributed to gods or heroes (the Greeks to Hermes). It is often associated with magic and divides history from prehistory. The study of writing, the conveyance of ideas and sounds by marks on a suitable medium is the basis of epigraphy for inscriptions on hard surfaces and palaeography for inscriptions on soft surfaces.

Diringer, David. Writing. London: Thames and Hudson, 1962.

Robinson, Andrew. The story of writing. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.

What constitutes writing? Cave paintings are forms of expression and communication but they are associated with magic and ritual and not a systematic attempt to fix language. They do show an attempt at recording but true writing shows an awareness of language.

Progress and development in the main is towards accuracy and efficiency but there are obstacles:

1. Conquest imposes a new script - Japan strongly influenced though not conquered by China.
2. Retention for religious purposes – Coptic.
3. Religious conquest or conversion – Arabic.
4. Linguistic constraints – Chinese.
5. Cabalistic reasons - Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The evolution of writing has resulted in the letter forms and other conventions we use today. A single script can combine several types of symbols:

• Memory aid devices:while these are not writing they can co-exist with advanced scripts. Examples are:
  Knot tying, especially for numbers, for example the rosary, the Inca quipu, knot or shell messages in Nigeria.
  Notched sticks, for example tallies used in England until the 19th century, clog almanacs in the Midlands in the 18th century, blocks notched to calculate the dates of festivals
  Woven beads, for example wampum in North America were used to commemorate events and were also used for barter.
  Symbolic objects, the language of flowers. Among the Lu Tze in Tibet a chicken liver, three pieces of chicken fat and a chilli wrapped in red paper signifies: prepare to fight at once.
  Identifying marks include totem poles, heraldry, mason's marks, printer's devices or the attributes of saints.
• Embryo writing:single disconnected images.
• Logograms:the symbol represents a whole word or concept. Typically there are several hundreds of basic symbols - Chinese has over 40,000.
• Pictograms: the sign represents the object itself. E.g. circle with rays represents "sun". They can be seen in earliest rock inscriptions, astrological signs, traffic signs, printer symbol on PC screen. The Aztec Codex Mendoza shows the use of pictographic script. In theory these signs could be expressed in any language and have no phonetic element.
• Ideograms: the sign represents an associated concept. E.g. in Chinese symbols for sun + moon = "bright". They can be seen in the printer's fist, the hourglass for loading pages on PC etc. Chinese ideograms can be complex e.g. symbols for two women means quarrel!
• Analytical transitional scripts: where the basic elements are still whole words but logographic elements are combined with phonetic elements. Maya hieroglyphs are an example of this.
• Determinatives: symbols, often indicating a sound, added to indicate a word's meaning. E.g. Chinese radicals (ca. 200 characters). Woman + ma = ma (mother).
• Phonograms: the sign represents a sound. Seen in rebus writing which often uses pictograms. E.g. Eye + can + bee + horse + pea + table to say "I can be hospitable".
• Syllabic scripts: the sign represents a syllable (vowel plus one or more consonants). Typically they contain 50-100 basic symbols. E.g. Linear B, Japanese katakana and hiragana. This is more flexible than logographic writing but can be cumbersome for languages with consonantal clusters.
• Alphabets: the sign represents a single sound. Typically 20-30 basic symbols. This is the most flexible system with an economy of number which made printing with moveable type a practical proposition.

Some ancient scripts

American scripts display many archaic features. the winter count of the Dakota nation inscrbed on deerhide covers the period 1800-1870 with drawings symbolising notable events. For example a crescent moon surrounded by dots recalls the meteros of 12 November 1833. The account uses simple pictograms and ideograms.

The Mesoamerican civilisations such as the Mixtec and Aztec used a highly pictorial script preserved in screenfold manuscripts dating from around 1300 to 1530. For example a pictogram of a hill (tepetl) with curls representing smoke (popoca) is the logogram for Popocatepetl, the Smoking Mountain or volcano. Other cultures such as the Maya and their predecessors the Olmec and Zapotec developed a script from around 500 BCE which combined such pictograms, often highly stylised, with syllabic elements which often had their origin in pictograms. The syllabic nature of Maya script has only been fully realised since the 1950s since when decipherment has made rapid progress.

Other primitive scripts, such as the undeciphered Rongorongo tablets of Easter Island, used until the 18th century, may have been primarily memory aids to priests reciting rituals.

In Eurasia there is much controversy over the three Tartarian clay tablets discovered in Romania in 1961. Assigned to the Vinca Turdas culture they have been dated to 4500 BCE and termed Proto-Sumerian, although this date if correct (radio-carbon from similar layers on related sites suggests a more recent date) would make them more than 1000 years older than the earliest Mesopotamian writing. The short texts - if such they are - have been interpreted as religious magic, with fertility symbols. Others see a distinct European writing system, perhaps the ancestor of Linear A.

The clay tablets of Sumeria stand on much firmer ground. The Sumerian, who spoke a non-Semitic and non-Indoeuropean language entered Mesopotamia around 3,400 BE and their pictographic script developed around 3200 BCE in Uruk during the URUK IV period. Surviving tablets largely record trading accounts and it may be that the script developed from the bullae or clay tokens that had been used for counting for several thousand years. There are about 900 symbols from more than 1000 tablets for this earliest stage. During the Jemdet Nasr period (3100- 2900 BCE) ideographic and phonetic elements were introduced and a new style set in.

Cuneiform script resulted from turning the characters round 90 degrees and using a wedge shaped (cuneiform) writing implement to impress the script onto the damp clay rather than scratching it into the surface. The stylus was held upright in a clenched fist and the writing was done from left to right. Soon there was little trace of the original pictograms and once it was conventionalised the script was also used for stone inscriptions.

Determinatives were introduced to clarify homophones (same sound different meaning) and polyphones (same sign different sounds). They were placed before ambiguous signs to indicate the category to which they should be assigned. Some came from the stock of ideograms, others from phonograms to clarify the phonetic value. They were also used to clarify ideograms (leg/go/stand).

The script was adopted by later Semitic invaders: Akkadians about 2,350 BCE, Babylonians about 1900 BCE. The number of symbols stabilised at around 600-700: six vowels, 97 open syllables more than 200 closed syllables and 300 ideograms. Tablets have been found in Egyption and Hittite archves and the script was adopted by the neighbouring Elamites about 2000 BCE in a simplified form with 113 symbols more than 80 of them syllabic. About 550 BCE the Persians, speakers of an Indo-European tongue, adopted it in an even simper form with just 41 syllabic signs. Cuneiform script disappeared from about 400 BCE, the last surviving inscription dating from 75 CE.

The Indus valley was home to a pre-Aryan civilisation from around 2,500 BCE and a very different script is found on seals and pottery. It consists of between 250 and 400 characters, too large for a syllabary but too small for a fully developed logographic script and there is some resemblance to cuneiform pictograms. The inscriptions on seals are probably personal names. The script had no influence on later Indian forms of writing.

Egyption hieroglyphs (the word signifies sacred carved words) was described as the "speech of the gods". It was monumental in style but not only used for sacred texts. It appears fully formed in about 3100 BCE, the period of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, possibly an artificial creation influenced by the script evolving in Sumeria. It is a transitional script with a strong phonetic element from the start and survived with little change for 3,000 years. There are three main categories of character:

1. Ideograms. These rarely appear in isolation.
2. Phonograms. These only transmit consonants; the vowels have to be supplied by the reader. There are 75 biconsonantal phonograms and 25 uniconsonantal phonograms although the latter were not employed as an alphabet.
3. Determinatives.

The step to alphabetical writing did not even occur in the cursive scripts which are merely transcriptions of the hieroglyphic script with the use of ligatures.

Hieratic script was the first to evolve, at first for religious use, but soon extended to business documents. The original hieroglyphic characters can easily be recognised in the script.

Demotic script (meaning "of the people") had evolved by 700 DCE for secular use. The latest known document dates to 476 CE. This script is very cursive with the letters run together and received very wide use for commercial and even literary purposes. It was used by the Ptolemies for their decrees and appears together with Greek and hieroglyphic script on the Rosetta stone in 196 BCE.

The Hittites, an Indo-European people, adopted Assyrian cuneiform about 1700 BCE. The script, which has 220 characters, 60 syllabic and the remainder ideographic, was also used to write the Luwian and Palaic languages.

In the Far East a number of unrelated scripts developed in the Chinese area.

Chinese is the oldest currently surviving script and it has changed little since its first use on oracle bones about 1300 BCE. The early script included some 4000 characters of which 1500 are currently understood. It already contained phonograms and was a fully developed script, designed to be scratched onto hard surfaces. Other forms of the script, such as those used on bronze castings, show a more fluid style, similar to that later used on bamboo or silk written with a brush. Calligraphy was a much cultivated art form in china. Kai Shu, the regular script, developed in the fourth century. It is normally written in columns from top to bottom and right to left and, in codices, from back to front. The Chinese language had a crippling effect on the script. It is monosyllabic with many homophones despite the use of tones. Meaning is distinguished by context or synonym compounds. Ideograms are common, for example woman+woman=quarrel, man+word=sincere. Phonograms are difficult but possible. The system of hsing shêng to was introduced "harmonise sound" and now accounts for the large majority of symbols. Each character is a combination of a phonetic element and a radical or determinative element, For example, the character for he “river” is composed of the radical shui “water” plus the phonetic ke, the meaning of which (“able”) is irrelevant; the combined shui-ke suggests the word he meaning “river.” This leads to a great multiplication of symbols. The numbers grew from 4,000 characters to 44,449 in 1700, about 30,000 of them no longer current. These are listed under the 214 radicals in dictionaries, arranged by the number of strokes. There is a problem that the radical can appear in any position within the character. There are now around 8,000 characters in the script of which 600-1000 form a basic vocabulary. One advantage of the script is that the often mutually incomprehensible spoken dialects are no barrier to understanding across the country through the medium of writing.

In Japan Chinese script of kanji was introduced in the fourth century. There was an immediate problem of adapting a monosyllabic tonal language to a totally unrelated agglutinative tongue. Borrowing of characters was inconsistent and ideograms were insufficient on their own. By the eigth century syllabaries had developed: katakana for learned works and hiragana for more popular literature. These were based on Chinese characters, some using Chinese and some using Japanese pronunciation, with about fifty symbols each each representing a vowel, normally preceded by a consonant (ba, be, bi etc). However the Chinese signs were still used for words with kana signs for affixes or phoneticism. This mixture of the two scripts still survives although since the 1880s various moves have been made to adopt the alphabet or to use the kana more fully.

The island of Crete is the home of several scripts. The orogen of the Minoan is unclear, but they were certainly a pre-Indoeuropean group, and were responsible for two unrelated scripts.

The Phaistos disc has been claimed as the earliest evidence of printing with moveable type. It is about the size of a small teaplate and both sides have a spiral winding inwards stamped with a total of 241 signs. The number of 45 different signs has suggested a syllabary to some, but it remain undeciphered.

The Linear A script is a full realisation of the efficiency of the phonetic system. It was in use from around 1700 to 1550 BCE and was written from left to right on stone, clay or metal. It contained between 75 and 90 signs and remains undeciphered.

Linear B is beleved to have been introduced to Crete about 1550 BCE from mainland Greece where it is more widespread. It has been identified as Mycenean Greek by Michael Ventris and the script contains 89 characters, each repesenting an open syllable, about half of them to be found in Linear A though not necessarily with the same phonetic value. It is written from left to right with lines separated.

In Byblos inscriptions were first discovered in 1929 with about 114 pictoial signs which are thought to be syllabic. Thre is clear Egyption influence in the signs used.

The Cypriot syllabary is made up of about 45 geometric symbols each representing an open syllable. It is probably an adaptation of a script developed for a non-Greek language, so transliterations are imperfect, for example Aphrodite is rendered as A-po-ro-ti-ta-i.

Persian cuneiform was a conscious adaptation of neo-Babylonian cuneiform under the influence of the Aramaic alphabet and it was the official script of the Achaemenid dynasty from 550 to 330 BCE. Written from left to right, it was made up of four ideograms, one word divider, three vowels and the rest consonants, either alone or with any of three vowels following.

Alphabetic scripts

William Blake, engraver of books and visionary poet, speaks in Jerusalem of God

Who in mysterious Sinai's awful cave,
To Man the wondrous art of writing gave.

He may be right, at least as far as the alphabet is concerned.

Proto-Caananite or Proto Sinaitic script, 1850-1500 BCE, [Wikipedia]. In an area on the borders of the Babylonian, Hittitte, Egyptian and Minoan Empires the people of Caanan devised a shorthand method of communicating in writing. One of the earliest was found in a turquoise mine in Sinai by Flinders Petrie in 1904. About 25 short inscriptions are known, superficially like Egyptian heiroglyphs deriving their phonetic value from the initial letter of the objects depicted. The Egyptian influence is enhanced by the discovery of similar inscriptions found at Wadi el-Hol near the Nile. Other inscriptions have been found in Caanan and it was used to write a semitic tongue.

Ugarit Cuneiform, 1400 BCE, [Wikipedia]. This was an alphabet derived from the Caananite script, although the very different method of writing makes it difficult to recognise the derivation of individual characters. It is not related to Mesoptamian cuneiform, the 29 characters are much simpler, though like Mesopotamian cuneiform it is written from left to right.

These early alphabets normally represented consonants only and the vowels had to be supplied by the reader - not so much an ABC as a BCD. Such consonantal alphabets are known as abjads, derived from the first letters of the Arabic alphabet. By the end of the second millennium BCE Proto-Caanaite had divided into North and South Semitic branches.

The South Semitic alphabets, also known as South Arabian from the location of their early development from around 1000 BCE developed into the classic Ethiopic script and present-day Amharic writing.

The North Semitic alphabet split into two main groups, Aramaic and Caananite, during and after the first millennium BCE as the decline of Egypt, the Hittites and Mesopotamia favoured the rise of Semitic kingdoms such as Israel, Phoenicia, Moab and the Aramaic states.

The Aramaic alphabet, 900 BCE is named after the peoples who set up a chain of petty kingdoms in the area of Syria. The breaking up of these kingdoms by Assyria (the last, Damascus, fell in 732 BCE) helped to spread Aramaic as a lingus franca. It became the diplomatic language of Persia, the vernacular of the Jews, the language of Christ. The ealiest inscriptions date from about 850 BCE, the stela of Ben-Hadad of Damascus, and there was a rapid spread in the sixth century BCE. From 515 BCE it is recorded in Egypt, in the third century BCE there is an inscription in Taxila in north-west India. It was the most widespread scriptofthe Near East in the later first millennium BCE but inscriptions in Aram itself are rare, its main moevement was eastward. It was differnetiated fromother branches of North Semitic from the seventh to 5fifth centuries by opening the tops and sides of the letter beth, daleth, resh, and 'ayin and the reduction of the number of strokes in heth and teth. Andles were also rounded and ligatures introduced.

This eastward spread meant that Aramaic influenced the development of scripts for non-Semitic tongues.

The Brahmi alphabet, used by the Maurya Empire from about 300 BCE is an early example of the adaptation of the alphabet to non-Semitic languages. It could have been introduced by Aramaic merchants as ealry as 700 BCE. The general shapes and directionof writing show Semitic influence but it may have been the idea rather than the details that was transferred. The Brahmi alphabet was the origin of Gupta script which was used to write Sanskrit. and it is the source of mmost later Indian scripts. Buddhist influence took Brahmi scripts to Tibelt, Siam, Laos, Viet-nam and Indonesia. Other scripts develped for non-Semitic tongues includeArmenian, Georgian and a variety of scripts for Turkic languages as far away as Mongolia and Siberia.

The Pahlavi alphabet was used by the Parthian Empire from 250 BCE, including for pre-Islamic sacred texts in Persia.

The Aramaic script was also adapted to other Semitic tongues.

The Square Hebrew alphabet derived from Aramaic about 500 BCE under the influence of Early Hebrew. It ousted Early Hebrew and a Palestinian script from the third century BCE to become the basis of modern Hebrew.

The Nabatean alphabet from about 200 BCE was used for the kingdom whose capital was Petra. While the spoken language of the Nabateans was a dialect of Arabic, Aramaic was used for the written language. Neo-Sinaitic was a cursive form of Nabatean that was used for rock inscriptions in Sinai from the first to fourth centuries. It may provide a link through to Arabic, but this is uncertain.

The Arabic alphabet has its earliest insciption only in 512 but its rapid and extensive spread meant that it ousted many earlier alphabets. The script has been adapted to many other languages.

Full transcription only complete to here, links and images to be added The Caananite alphabet was the other main branch of North Semitic.

The Early Hebrew alphabet, 1000 BCE

The Phoenician alphabet, 1000 BCE: Continues with Punic.

Greek alphabet: adopted most of the letters, their names and order of the Phoenician alphabet, using it also for vowels and adding new letters.

Etruscan alphabet

Latin alphabet: adopted via the Etruscans. Letter G adapted from the C to represent the voiced form of the sound.

Development of the Latin alphabet

Simplified table [lost on transfer of website, to be recreated. The columns show square capitals, rustic capitals, uncial, half uncial and Carolingian minuscule.

• Square capitals: employed on monuments (perhaps finest example Trajan's Column dating from 114, but also in manuscripts (e.g. codex of Virgil in library of St. Gall - 4/5th cent.) L and F sometimes slightly taller than other letters.
• Rustic capitals: more flowing version, usual book hand of Roman empire(e.g. codex of Virgil in Vatican Library - Palat. Lat 1631 - 4/5th cent., but first recoded in 1st cent.) A loses cross-bar.
• Uncials: formal rounded letters (e.g. in Gospel book in Vatican Library - Vat. Lat. 7223 - 5th cent.) D has sloped ascender, E rounded, H has ascender, L loses base line and has ascender, M rounded, U rounded.
• Half-uncials: smaller more cursive script often used with uncials (e.g. Works of Jerome at Bamberg - 6th cent.) Local versions included the insular script used for the Lindisfarne Gospels - before 698) B loses top loop, gains ascender, D has straight ascender, F has rounded ascender and also descender, G has curved descender, P has descender, R loses loop, S loses lower curve, T has rounded stem. Runic Ogham Glaogolitic Cyrillic
• Carolingian minuscule: developed at the scriptorium at Tours in late 8th cent. as a more cursive form of uncial script. Used for Domesday Book. Majuscules normally used for initial letters.
  Carolingian minuscule script, 9th Century (Maunde Thompson, 133).
• Gothic script: more angular script developed during 12th cent.
  Gothic script, 12th century, North German (Maunde Thompson, 179).
  Bastarda gothic script, English.
• Humanist script: developed by Italian scholars in 15th cent, based on Carolinigan minuscule.
  Humanistic script, Antonio Sinibaldi, Florence, 1480.Also sloped cursive version (basis of italic)
  Italic script.

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This page last updated 10 August 2020