Review Article

The rise, zenith and fall of writing systems

Gordon Whittaker
Linguistische Anthropologie und Altamerikanistik
Seminar für Romanische Philologie
Universität Göttingen
Humboldtallee 19
37073 Göttingen, Germany
(Email: gwhitta@gwdg.de)

Books Reviewed
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STEPHEN HOUSTON (ed.). The first writing: script invention as history and process. xviii+418 pages, 123 illustrations, 2 tables. First paperback edition 2008 (first published in hardback in 2004, reprinted in 2005). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-0-521-83861-0 hardback £59 & $105; 978-0-521-72826-3 paperback £17.99 & $32.95.

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JOHN BAINES, JOHN BENNET & STEPHEN HOUSTON (ed.). The disappearance of writing systems: perspectives on literacy and communication. xviii+380 pages, 61 illustrations, 8 tables. 2008. London: Equinox; 978-1-84553-013-6 hardback £65.

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JOHN BAINES. Visual & written culture in Ancient Egypt. xviii+420 pages, 52 illustrations, 2 tables. 2007. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 978-0-19-815250-7 hardback £75.

Whittaker image

Uniting all three books under review is one central theme, writing, but there is an interesting divergence in their focus on this topic. The first two are cross-cultural in their treatment, the third is an in-depth look at the phenomenon as it pertains to a single culture. While The first writing casts its net widely, yet loosely, concentrating on the emergence of writing in chosen regions around the world, The disappearance of writing systems, no less global in its range, takes up the long-neglected study of the opposite end of the developmental spectrum, the decline and fall of writing systems. Visual and written culture in ancient Egypt, on the other hand, covers the entire sweep of written history and culture, but in the framework of a single case study.

The two books dealing with the beginning and end of a writing tradition overlap to an extent in the writing systems discussed and in the authors (John Baines and Jerrold Cooper on Egypt and Mesopotamia respectively, Elizabeth Boone and Stephen Houston on northern and southern Mesoamerica) chosen to discuss them. Thus, one can expect them to have benefited greatly from an ongoing exchange of perspectives. This is all the more important, given that the study of writing from a typological and developmental perspective is relatively new, in a field long dominated by Ignace Gelb's A study of writing (1952) and by a general tendency to treat the subject from a heavily Eurocentric and Near Eastern standpoint, with one overriding theme, the origin and development of the alphabet. Gelb's monograph was an attempt to apply ideas honed in connection with Ancient Near Eastern scripts to writing systems in general, but suffered from the author's (often grave) unfamiliarity with systems outside his focal area and from his inability to avoid cultural bias in his analysis of, for example, the Chinese and Maya systems. Most works on the general subject of writing tend even today to payfar more attention to the traditional fields ploughed intensively for most of the twentieth century, and the yield of such fields has, accordingly, for the most part nurtured only regional specialists.

It is, however, fair to say that, beginning around 1980, there has been a concerted effort to adjust focus and look further afield. This has involved, among other things, inviting specialists with expertise in East Asian, American and African writing systems to contribute to the discussion. Recent international conferences devoted to the study of writing in comparative perspective, two in the USA and UK, the products of which are the edited volumes presented here, and no fewer than three in China, have steadily enhanced our understanding of the nature and variability of this most far-reaching of communication systems.

The first writing

So, just how balanced is the coverage offered by these studies? In The first writing, one chapter each is devoted to the origins of cuneiform and Egyptian writing, one to the decipherment of the Proto-Elamite script of south-western Iran, two to the Shang system, two to Mesoamerican systems, and, somewhat curiously, given that it is hardly to be regarded as a pristine script, one to Germanic runes. The two chapters on Mesoamerica focus on different areas (Yucatan and Central Mexico) with quite distinct types of graphic communication, some of which have more to do with iconography and notation than with writing, whereas the two on Shang China discuss one and the same script and period. It is difficult to understand the reason for this overlap (and for the disappointingly limited depth of Françoise Bottéro's contribution on the characteristics and building blocks of Shang writing), especially when one considers the fact that other regions are left completely unrepresented. This is particularly serious with regard to Africa, which has received precious little attention to date. It is also surprising that the controversial invention of the Cherokee syllabary of North America failed to make it into the volume. Its monolingual Cherokee inventor was aware of the existence of the English writing system but unfamiliar with its principles and with the language it represents — thus a prime instance of stimulus diffusion. This script surely has more relevance to the topic of the volume than runes, a well-studied alphabet derived from a similar alphabet. And, if a European alphabet had to be included, then the Ogam script of Insular Celtic would have provided more evidence for innovation in form and usage, not least in its biplanar occurrence along, and straddling, the edge of a stone. There is no clear pattern to the coverage, nor to the order of chapters in the volume, which jumps back and forth geographically and chronologically.

There are a few surprises in The first writing. One is surely the introductory statement by the editor (p. 13) that 'Seers rather than technocrats may have been the more likely creators of scripts', a conclusion that may reasonably, but not necessarily correctly, be drawn with respect to Shang writing, given its close association with oracles and ancestor worship, but is hardly valid in the case of the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Proto-Elamite and runic scripts. Another surprise is the lack of adequate discussion of the origins of cuneiform, one of the two earliest systems of writing (the other being Egyptian) ever to have developed, and for this reason crucial to an understanding of the paths leading to writing. The author of the chapter on 'Babylonian beginnings: the origin of the cuneiform writing system', Jerrold Cooper, an excellent Sumerologist, exhibits only cursory familiarity with the earliest Mesopotamian system known as proto-cuneiform. It is unfortunate that Robert Englund, the author of the masterful chapter on Proto-Elamite but also the world's leading expert on proto-cuneiform, did not co-write this section. The key controversy surrounding the origins of writing in Mesopotamia centres on the Sumerian Question, specifically the debate as to whether writing evolved in a monolingual (Sumerian) or in a multiethnic, multilingual environment, such as has been characteristic of Iraq throughout history. Englund has found no evidence for Sumerian in the proto-cuneiform record, but his well-considered and highly informed position is a lone one in Assyriology, not because there is widespread familiarity with proto-cuneiform and good evidence for the counter-position, but because his findings are perceived as a threat to the decades-old status quo. It would, thus, have been instructive and helpful in sharpening our understanding of the arguments and evidence, as viewed from each side of the debate, if Cooper had provided us with a detailed exposition of why the consensus opinionis should be maintained. Regrettably, all he has to say on this is buried in footnote 26 (pp. 97-8): 'This [Englund's point that the pictorial forms of proto-cuneiform signs lack an obvious relationship to Sumerian words they represent in later times] is a strong argument to contend with (see also Englund in this volume), but wrong, I think'. No reason why it might be wrong is given, thus generating more frustration than enlightenment.

The disappearance of writing systems

In contrast to the latter work, The disappearance of writing systems is arranged in a rough but consistent chronological progression and is considerably more ambitious both in its geographical scope and in its presentation. While the book is heavily slanted towards East Mediterranean and Near Eastern systems, which make up the bulk of the case studies, we are, nevertheless, provided with a battery of instructive and impressive discussions of the decline of scripts: (1) Mediterranean: Linear A, early Italian (pre-Roman to Roman) scripts; (2) Near Eastern: Hieroglyphic Luwian, cuneiform Elamite, Babylonian cuneiform, Egyptian, Arabian scripts; (3) African: Meroitic; (4) South and Central Asian: Kharoşṭhi; (5) East Asian: Manchu; (6) Mesoamerican: Maya, Central Mexican writing and iconography; and (6) one South American non-script used in state administration: the Andean khipu (or quipu).

Especially thought-provoking is Richard Salomon's chapter on Kharo??hi, in which he reviews what he sees as the three basic types of environment conducive to script loss: (a) 'civilizational shifts', occurring when a 'radically different culture is adopted or imposed' — his examples being Egyptian and cuneiform; (b) 'a general collapse of the society' — exemplified by Mayan, 'Cretan Linear B' (sic, presumably Minoan Linear A, rather than Mycenaean Linear B) and the Indus Valley script; and, to a far lesser extent, (c) dynastic change or decline — represented by Hieroglyphic Luwian, Kharoşṭhi and Old Persian. Unfortunately, these types, or at least the assignment of specific instances of script change and disappearance to them, are often anything but clear-cut. Where, for example, do we draw the line between the adoption or imposition of a radically different culture (without undergoing conquest) on the one hand, and the same in the aftermath of conquest on the other? Is the shift from Egyptian to Coptic writing really more an instance of the adoption of a radically different culture than the shift of hieroglyphic to alphabetic Mayan in the face of Spanish domination? In both instances the shift took place over time and after the imposition of foreign (Ptolemaic Greek, then imperial Roman, vs. Spanish) rule. Moreover, is the disappearance of Hieroglyphic Luwian more an instance of simple dynastic change or decline than of the 'destruction by the Assyrians of the states, or perhaps more specifically the dynasties which used it' (Hawkins, p. 41)? As for the Indus Valley system, the jury is still out on the question of whether we are dealing with a case of writing (rather than iconography), and thus its value in the discussion of types is limited. The complex nature of the relationship of scribal elites to ruling and religious elites and of these to cultural policy and change has yet to be properly assessed in a coordinated fashion, although this volume does indeed go a long way towards providing the groundwork for such an analysis.

While both comparative volumes are more interested in the origins and disappearance of writing as a process (thus the subtitle of the first volume), it should not be forgotten that we are still very much in the dark with respect to the onset of the earliest stage of writing, which may have been as much an event as a process. That is, the basic structure of a writing system may well have been the result of a conscious event of invention, as myth often suggests. We just do not know in many cases. We lack evidence for this earliest stage in China and Mesoamerica, and it is debatable whether we have enough evidence to decide the matter in regard to Mesopotamia and Egypt. It would have been useful to have had a discussion of known instances of script invention (e.g. the Cherokee script again) and of script repression. By the same token, it would have been advisable to include at least one instance of the discarding of a writing system as the result of internal policy — that is, as a politically driven event, as in the case of the Arabic-based Ottoman Turkish script in the early twentieth century, touched on only briefly in Baines' summary chapter. The replacement of the Ottoman script with a Latin-based one effectively cut off Turkish society from its literary and religious heritage, since the average Turk is now unable to read texts of the pre-Atatürk era, and most such works have never been transposed into the new script.

The Egyptian context

One of the primary contributors to both volumes, John Baines, is also the author of Visual & written culture in Ancient Egypt, a handsome and well-balanced assessment of the nature and contexts of writing in, and the impact of writing on, Egyptian society and culture. Although the cover and title page fail to announce it, this excellent tome is for the most part a collection of republished essays. Addressed to non-Egyptologists, most predate 1990, but one, Chapter 6 entitled 'Orality and literacy', has never appeared in print before. Although there have only been minimal adjustments made to harmonise the collection and to bring the information up to date, the essays provide valuable glimpses into virtually all major aspects of writing in Egyptian culture down into the Graeco-Roman period. Of great interest to linguistic comparativists and anthropologists will be the chapter on colour terminology and classification. The volume as a whole, complemented by Baines' incisive articles in the first two works, is compelling reading for all those interested in the transformations in the phenomenon of writing over a span of three millennia within a single culture.

Summing up, all three books are important and indispensible contributions to the still-fledgling study of writing and can be highly recommended to all.


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