#2 Writing

There is a simple reason why the story of humankind is divided into prehistory and history. In prehistory, there was no writing to record the story; in history there was. The discovery of writing was the most significant watershed in human history. It made history possible.

Of course, people could pass on thoughts in the prehistoric age. Stories and valuable information could even be learned and transmitted verbally from person to person and generation to generation. Everything from myths and epic poems to practical ideas such as how to skin a bear could be spread across the world and remembered through the years like this. But the story was only as reliable as the teller. For all kinds of reasons, stories passed on verbally would shift, getting further from the original like the famous game of Chinese whispers.[1]

Writing changed all that. It preserved the original message exactly as it was expressed. That was vital for legal agreements, laws and government decrees, and meant that nobody could argue about what was said and what wasn’t (in theory!). More significantly, stories and information could be read by anyone at any time – whether it was the next day in the next street, or far away and many years later (as long as the writing was preserved). That meant that you didn’t have to be face-to-face to give someone a message. You didn’t even have to be living in the same era. In other words, writing allowed accurate communication at a distance.

It also meant that a store of stories, ideas and information could be accumulated over time, so that each generation built on the learning of those that had gone before. Instead of continuously fragmenting and becoming corrupted over time, information could become increasingly ordered, increasingly reliable, as each generation added its own contribution. Without this, the great storehouse of ideas bequeathed to us by history would have been largely lost. The thousands of years of progress in science and other areas would have been much, much slower if not impossible. And we’d never have the wonderful treasury of literature from Shakespeare and Tolstoy to Alice in Wonderland and Harry Potter.

The creation of writing was an astoundingly powerful, world-changing event. Yet it is something we take a little for granted. We learn it, slowly, when we are so young that the memory of our struggle with words and sounds is soon forgotten. As adults we rarely stop to think of the incredible mental process which turns thoughts in our head instantly into letters on a page or on screen. And we read those letters then, mostly, translate them into ideas almost as fast as the eye can scan them. It’s probably the most astonishing of all common feats of the human brain. Yet it didn’t evolve; we weren’t born with this skill. It had to be invented in the first place, and every human being has to learn it afresh when he or she enters the world. Remarkably, most do.

The origins of writing are shrouded in mystery. The oldest proper writing was traditionally thought to be the cuneiform of Mesopotamia, the wedge-shaped marks on clay, dating from around 3000 BC. But in the last few decades, other scholars have been putting the case for other scripts.

Some argue that Egyptian hieroglyphs came before cuneiform, for instance, while Chinese scholars put the case for the first writing appearing in China. Then, in 2009, a team from America and Pakistan used computers to analyse ancient marks on clay tablets and amulets and other artefacts found in the Indus valley in Pakistan. The language of the ancient civilisations which flourished in the Indus valley from around 3,200 to 1,700 years ago has been lost, so it is hard to interpret whether symbols found on artefacts are proper writing or just signs, such as road signs and loading marks. But computer analysis of the marks suggested that symbols recurred in particular sequences that suggest they might be letters. More controversially, Indian doctors Rha and Rajaram claimed in 1999 to have deciphered the inscription on a tablet dating from 3500 BC, as reading ‘It irrigates the sacred land’. If confirmed, this would be the oldest writing, but they were accused of faking the data.

Almost equally controversial are interpretations of mysterious marks found on tablets, figurines and pottery belonging to the Vinca culture in south-east Europe. Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921–94) believed these marks, which date back 7,000 years or more, were a form of writing in a script which she called Old European. Finnish linguist Harald Haarman believes the Old Europeans were driven out of Europe by the invasion of Indo-Europeans (from who most people in Europe and southern Asia are now descended) and ended up on Crete where they became the Minoan civilisation. Haarman notes remarkable correspondences between ‘Old European’ and the mysterious Linear A script on the famous Rosetta stone.

At the moment, the consensus is still that cuneiform came first, but that could easily change. What’s clear, though, is that writing didn’t suddenly appear. It gradually developed over a very long time. The consensus is that the immediate precursor was marks made for trade and administration, such as the cuneiform-like marks on clay tokens found across the Middle East, which seem to be receipts for particular numbers of cattle, sheep or bags of corn. But marks and symbols date back much earlier. In 2010, for instance, palaeontologists found that certain symbols seemed to be repeated in cave paintings found across France dating from 10,000 to 40,000 years ago, such as spirals, zig-zags, arrowheads, crosses and so on. They may not be writing, but they seem to be attempts to record or communicate through particular marks.

The theory is that full-blown writing evolved through pictograms – iconic drawings of particular objects, such as a fish, a reindeer or a spear. Pictograms like these have been found in Mesopotamia and Egypt as well as the Indus valley and China. At first they were identifiable little drawings, but over time they became reduced to just a few symbolic strokes. This kind of development is clear in cuneiform.

The limitation of pictograms is that they cannot express anything but abstract ideas. That’s why the discovery of the ‘rebus’ principle was such a massive breakthrough. It seems like a child’s game to us, but it was ingenious. The idea is that pictograms can be combined for their sounds alone to make other words. Thus, in an English system, the pictogram for ‘bee’ might be put next to the symbol for ‘4’ to create the word ‘before’. The Egyptian spelling of the name of the pharaoh Ramesses, for instance, begins with the sign for ‘sun’, Ra. Similar correspondences can be seen in cuneiform.

In time, these rebuses probably developed into entirely phonetic symbols – that is, letters with a particular sound from which any word at all can be built up. Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters are a mixture of pictograms and phonetic symbols. But in Europe and the Middle East, at some time around the second millennium BC, the pictograms were abandoned altogether when it was discovered that every known word, and any that could be invented, could be built up just from a simple ‘alphabet’ of phonetic symbols, with the key addition of sounds for vowels as well as consonants. There is an argument that this was an even more radical breakthrough than the rebus principle, and maybe it was one of the key factors that allowed cultures in the Middle East and the West to overtake China, which had once seemed so advanced.

It’s well known how the Western alphabet was inherited from the Greeks, with even the name coming from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. But just how the Greek alphabet evolved is a mystery. There are alphabetic signs in later Egyptian hieroglyphs and in later cuneiform, but there is a suggestion that it was traders such as the Phoenicians who may have found it a convenient shorthand way to write down the Babel of languages they encountered as they moved around the Mediterranean. Pictograms and rebuses only work in one language – alphabets can build up a word in any language, letter by letter.

However it came about, the alphabet unleashed the power of writing by allowing the writer to construct and even coin anew any conceivable word. Indeed, it is quite possible that the scope of the alphabet allowed writers and scholars to think in new abstract ways as well. It would have been hard to develop a complex, abstract idea through conversation alone. Writing opened the way for really elaborate, and rigorous, trains of thought to develop. Indeed, it may have been the key factor behind the astonishing flowering of thought in Ancient Greece. Either way, the Greeks certainly took advantage of it, and scholars such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle showed just what you could do with writing to move human thought on to another plane entirely – and we still have their written words to prove it.

Writing is now so integral to our lives that it is impossible to imagine life without it. Whether it’s used for brief text messages to friends or great literary masterpieces, cooking instructions or scientific treatises, it is absolutely indispensable. And you have that in writing …

[1] There’s an apocryphal example of the errors that can creep in from the First World War, when the message was passed down the trench: ‘Send reinforcements; we’re going to advance,’ which reached the far end as: ‘Send three and four pence; we’re going to a dance.’