3.2

WRITTEN LANGUAGE

The technology that made the spelling mistake possible.

While the spoken word is great, it still suffers from significant limitations. It frees ideas from their original host, but it allows ideas to be transmitted only as far as the speaker can travel, or can shout, or can travel while shouting. Most critically, it depends on an unbroken chain of humanity for ideas to survive. Break this chain even once, and all information in it is lost forever.

Writing solves this problem. It allows ideas to become resilient, stronger than our fragile human bodies, which tend to get old and die all the time. It allows ideas to become fixed, immune to changing memories and historical revision. It allows ideas to be broadcast, reaching a much larger audience than could ever listen to your spoken words. Writing even allows ideas to survive not only when their original host has died, not only when everyone who has ever heard them has died, but even when everyone who has ever spoken their language has died too: the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs being the greatest example of this. Most incredibly, writing allows information to be shipped around the world with no more difficulty or expense than you’d encounter shipping grain: less, actually, since books don’t go bad nearly as quickly. Despite its huge advantages, humans have spent most of their time on Earth—over 98 percent of it—stumbling around without this technology.

Like spoken language, which written language you choose to base your civilization on is not particularly important, but we do recommend (assuming you are multilingual or feeling ambitious) choosing a language that is not English. That prevents you from accidentally teaching others how to read this text, which may be something worth considering, especially since your current temporal circumstances have conspired to make this book the most insanely valuable and dangerous item on the planet.

Though the idea behind writing is simple—store invisible noises by transforming them into visible shapes—the invention of writing was actually an incredibly difficult thing for humans to do. It’s so difficult, in fact, that across all of human history, it has happened a grand total of two times:

Writing shows up in other locations, such as China in 1200 BCE, but this is a result of the Egyptians culturally contaminating the Chinese.4 Similarly, Egyptian and Sumerian script developed at very close to the same time, and while visually quite distinct, they share many of the same influences. One of these cultures invented writing while the other just lifted the idea, probably after seeing what a super useful invention it was.

There are two other times when writing may have been invented: in India around 2600 BCE, and on Easter Island after 1200 CE but before 1864 CE. (We say “may” because this is one of several historical mysteries still unresolved. Confirmation could easily be obtained with an incident-free visit to the times and places in question, but for some reason most time travelers have historically been more interested in “experiencing the colossal breadth of human experience” rather than “settling obscure linguistic debates by running controlled temporal observation with an eye to publishing peer-reviewed research.”)

The older Indian script (called “Indus”) is pictographic and has never been deciphered. Most messages written in Indus script are short (just five characters) which does not suggest an actual language, but rather simpler pictograms or ideograms. What are pictograms and ideograms? We’re very glad you asked:

It’s important to note that neither pictograms nor ideograms are language, because there is no one-to-one correspondence between them and their meaning. Pictograms and ideograms are interpreted rather than read. As an example, consider the following images:

Figure 4: An extremely compelling narrative.

There are several different ways to interpret those images. If you know the story they’re trying to tell, these pictures can remind you of it, but if you don’t, you will have to make lots of assumptions. Perhaps it is the story of a very cool woman eating a peach. Perhaps it is the tale a regular woman eating a very cool peach. We will never know.

In contrast, the sentence “Cynthia waved, her hair catching in the warm ocean breeze, and in her sunglasses I saw reflected a horrible, monstrous giant peach: it was my body, forever transformed by those hateful scientists I’d once cut off in traffic” has a meaning that’s much more clearly defined. While there is ambiguity in any language,* the non-ideographic version has a much more particular and specific meaning than the alternative.

The Easter Island script, called “Rongorongo,” has also never been deciphered. It’s a pictorial language, comprised of stylized images of animals, plants, humans, and other shapes. It was written by the Rapa Nui people who inhabited their island, and it looks like this:

Figure 5: Possibly language, possibly cool pictures, possibly . . . both?

If the Rapa Nui independently invented writing here, it would be only the third confirmed time in human history this was done: a colossal achievement. However, it’s also possible this writing was invented only after European contact with the island: Spain annexed the island in 1770 CE and induced the Rapa Nui to sign a treaty. That could’ve introduced the concept of writing to the island, which then quickly evolved into Rongorongo.

There is a dark note here: early visitors to Easter Island were told reading and writing was a skill reserved for a privileged few among the ruling elites. And if Rongorongo script is writing—if the Rapa Nui did come up with the idea of turning invisible ideas into visible shapes, an idea so groundbreaking that it had only ever occurred twice before in human history—then they also forgot it. Within the space of a century—a century, it should be noted, defined on Easter Island by European diseases, catastrophic slaver raids, a smallpox epidemic, deforestation, and cultural collapse—the island population had been reduced from thousands to just two hundred individuals, and none of those survivors had ever been taught to read their island’s script. Words and sentences had decayed into meaningless shapes and squiggles, part of a cultural tradition that nobody left alive could understand.

This, by the way, should terrify you. Writing is not something humanity gets for free, and like all technologies, it can be lost.

We recommend building writing into your civilization as soon as possible.