More-or-less at the same time as the invention of the wheel, a second, perhaps even better, idea was born: writing things down.
In the beginning there was the picture, or, as writing scholars would say, the pictogram. A hand, a tree, a plow, an eye, a bird, the sun, water (indicated by two waves, one on top of the other). Simple rebuses were made out of individual symbols: mouth plus bread equals food. Pictograms and rebuses made it easier to trade, keep track of things, count. Yet over time, pictograms and rebuses were not enough. In the second half of the fourth millennium BCE in Sumerian country, at the delta of the Euphrates and the Tigris (later lands of southern Mesopotamia, and presently Iraq), a cuneiform system of wedges emerged—signs somewhat similar to nails or the letter “T,” drawn or carved (or simply pressed) in clay with a reed stylus. A combination of three vertical and four horizontal “nails” represented a head, four slanted ones were barley, and to depict bread, you would carve three “nails” standing on a fourth. Written symbols transformed to become increasingly abstract. After two thousand more years, around 2800 BCE, it became possible to record the sounds of human speech.
The Sumerians are widely considered to have invented writing. Though their system never transformed into a true alphabet, it was still a watershed phenomenon, marking the boundary between prehistory and antiquity. With one reservation: it could soon turn out that the first-place prize . . . may not go to them.
“Up until now, it was widely believed that the Sumerians were first. Yet in the light of recent archaeological research and discoveries, especially from the Egyptian tomb of U-j in Abydos, these theories have been cast into doubt. There remains little proof, and not everyone is convinced, but it looks as though the Egyptians may have been a bit quicker,” says Dominika Kossowska-Janik, curator of Warsaw’s Asia and Pacific Museum, and an expert in the history of writing. “It is not only the time that the first symbols appeared, but also their context. It was previously thought that writing served the Egyptians to praise their rulers, gods, and culture. Now it turns out that, as for the Sumerians, its administrative or accounting function was originally more important.”
Hieroglyphs on Papyrus
So long as we do not know for certain who was first, we shall keep to the old findings, by which Egyptian writing, or hieroglyphics, came about later, but developed for a long time parallel to Sumerian cuneiform. At its peak of development, it had around seven- to eight-hundred symbols.
As Kossowska-Janik recalls, hieroglyphs were used to record hymns to the kings and pharaohs, as well as the size of collections or expenditures and inflow to rulers’ budgets. The Egyptian system is one of the to the transition forms of writing, i.e. those that joined ideograms (simplified pictures) and phonetic signs. They were etched in stone, often on the walls of temples or tombs, on urns and statues. In the third century BCE, hieroglyphics also appeared on papyrus, a durable material produced from the galangal of the papyrus, which grew plentifully in Africa at the time. Those hieroglyphics, which were ideograms, described both concrete things and abstract concepts. “How might we write the words ‘shine’ or ‘day,’ for instance? The Egyptians dealt with this in a very simple way. […] They drew a sun or stars; to show movement they depicted a person taking a step, or simply a leg,” wrote professor, Egyptologist, and archaeologist Karol Myśliwiec in his Święte znaki Egiptu (Sacred Symbols of Egypt). The meanings could sometimes be implied by the context, and to resolve ambiguities, they also used determinatives—signs that had no phonetic value, but were only there to clarify the meaning of the preceding word.
The mighty Egyptian priests appropriated the right to use hieroglyphs, which explains the name they later acquired (from the Greek), meaning “writing of the Gods” or “holy symbols.” The ability to read and write was a source of prestige in Egypt. Whoever knew hieroglyphics held power—and did not always wish to share it.
Two other kinds of Egyptian writing evolved from hieroglyphics: hieratic and demotic. The former was dictated by the needs of the time. The world was speeding up, so written records had to follow suit. Simplifying symbols seemed the best solution. “They no longer needed to spend so much time creating beautiful, yet complicated symbols. We should recall that besides communicating, hieroglyphics had a decorative function,” says Kossowska-Janik.
Demotic writing, in turn, came about when the custom of writing went beyond the circles of the highly educated, against the wishes of the Egyptian priests. Today we say it was the people’s writing: it was much simpler and easier to master. As Professor Myśliwiec points out, “Compared with the hieroglyphics and the hieratic writing, which might be compared to printed and handwritten language, demotic writing recalls stenography.” Thanks to its simplicity, demotic symbols spread and superseded hieratic writing.
Calligraphy and Knots
Meanwhile, in China, some three thousand years ago, an entirely different writing system took shape, presently thought to have functioned longer continuously than any other in the world. It was made up of signs corresponding to single words or syllables, which sometimes joined to create very complex concepts. The form of Chinese signs evolved over the centuries, but the principles of how they function has remained the same.
The oldest testimony of Chinese writing is thought to date back to the thirteenth century BCE: some prophetic inscriptions from the Shang Dynasty, carved in stone, tortoise shells, or the shoulder blades of oxen. Each text was written in a square, and was read from top to bottom, starting on the right-hand side. The oldest writings were about the sacrifices made to the spirits of ancestors and gods, as well as wars, hunts, and other events in the life of the court. Later inscriptions were made on bronze vessels or bamboo or silk scrolls.
The invention of paper, dating to around 105 BCE, had an enormous impact on the appearance of Chinese characters. Brush-and-ink calligraphy gave the characters a softness and refinement, and lines of varying thickness appeared as well. The words had no spaces between them, however, which is a source of some confusion for scholars of ancient Chinese writing.
There is a theory that, along the same time as the Chinese, the Andean people were consumed with the desire to record words. Their idea was entirely different from those we know from North Africa or Asia. The Quipu writing (we should note right off the bat that not all scholars consider it to be writing) they created is a system of knots woven into strings of cotton or llama, vicuña, or alpaca wool. Perpendicular to the main string they tied thinner strings (in some cases up to 1,500), in which knots were tied. Yet not every string was equal, nor every knot. They differed in thickness, color, and type of wool. Each of these factors carried information.
The ability to read Quipu vanished as a result of the Spanish conquest, which took over the territory of what was the Incan empire in the sixteenth century, from present-day Colombia to Bolivia and Chile. Spain systematically crushed native cultures in the lands they conquered, and attempts to preserve it were severely punished. Today, we have no idea what kind of information these “books’” contain.
There are, however, several hypotheses. The boldest of these speaks of a fully fledged, complex writing system for expressing knowledge from every walk of life. Other concepts do not go quite so far, stating Quipu could have only recorded basic numerical data or simple messages. The Incan rulers probably used Quipu to keep track of the populations of territories under their reign, heads of cattle, or the status of their stock. Perhaps this system was also helpful in calculating and exacting taxes. The Conquistadors, who ultimately prohibited the use of Quipu in 1583 and ordered existing strings to be burned, believed that this form of writing served to uphold the worship of local gods.
Letters Like Sounds
A breakthrough in the history of writing came with the creation of the Phoenician alphabet, dating back to around 1100 BCE According to Kossowska-Janik, “The Phoenicians were the first to use a codified alphabet. Much earlier, their ancestors, the Canaanites, had made similar attempts to introduce alphabetic writing. The Canaanites were a people who inhabited the land of Levant (author’s note: today Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon) before the Hebrews arrived. Canaanite writing was created by applying Egyptian hieroglyphs to the local language. This took place more or less at the start of the second millennium BCE, it would be hard to pin it down more precisely.”
The Phoenicians’ system was composed of twenty-two letters, had only consonants (vowels did not have their own symbols), and was read from right to left. The letters corresponded to the sounds of particular vocalizations and not entire words. This made it easier to express people’s thoughts more precisely. Writing no longer required you to memorize hundreds of difficult pictures or characters. Letters were written on leather, papyrus, or parchment, which was initially quite expensive and was produced from sheep, kid, or calf skin (interestingly, not only white parchments were produced, but blue, yellow, purple, and black ones as well). The word “alphabet” was made of two letters, alpha and beta, whose origins trace back to the Phoenician words aleph, or “ox” (the letter “a” written as an ideogram recalls the head of an ox) and beth, or “house” and “success” (a square with an opening; presumably a house with a window). Two other Semitic writing systems took a similar route: Hebrew and Aramaic. In both cases, the vowel sounds had to be added, which was problematic, particularly for those who tried to read what they wrote centuries later. To this day, debates between interpreters of fragments of the Hebrew Bible rage on.
Soon thereafter, this system was refined by the Greeks, who added vowels to the alphabet and created their own system of twenty-four characters: seventeen consonants and seven vowels. Greek letters were simple, of identical height, with a prevalence of rounded and triangular forms. Over time, four kinds of Greek letters took shape: majuscule (capital letters), minuscule (lowercase letters), italics, and uncial script (rounded writing, with no angular letters). The reading direction also changed—the left-to-right mode was ultimately accepted.
According to the historian Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century BCE, the writing system was brought to Greece by the Phoenicians with the son of King of Tyre, Kadmos. The Greeks are said to have approached this curiosity with skepticism. As per tradition, they were still passing down their literature to descendants through wandering minstrels accompanied by the lyre. For several hundred years, writing did not play a substantial role. Books only entered trade circulation as papyrus scrolls in the fifth century BCE, as reading and writing became more available. Even then it was criticized by Pseudo-Plato. “No one, therefore, who has any sense will dare to entrust his intuited notions to language, especially to language that is unalterable, like the words spelt out in written characters,” he thought. In his mind, weighty philosophical thought should not reach “wider circles,” and the spread of writing he saw as a danger. “No one who is at all serious will ever write about serious matters, and so expose them before all the world, where jealousy and lack of understanding prevail,” the philosopher wrote in The Seventh Letter. The paradox here is that Pseudo-Plato’s attack on the written word is made in writing.
The Elegance of Latin
With the Hellenization of the ancient world, Greek writing spread in the Mediterranean Basin, to the Near East, and Central Asia. Greek writing swiftly became the lingua franca of the day. It inspired other peoples to create new systems. Around the fifth century BCE three variants of the Greek alphabet developed: southern (used in Crete and Thira), western (in the Peloponnese, Thessaly, the colonies in Italy, and in Sicily), and eastern (in the Ionian colonies in Asia Minor and Attica). From the east came writing such as Orthodox Glagolitic and Cyrillic, still used to this day. From the west—the Latin alphabet, which dominated the languages of Europe (and beyond). “Glagolitic was created by St. Cyril to write the Gospels in the Slavic languages. The creator of the three Caucasian languages—Georgian, Armenian, and Caucasian Albanian—was one man, St. Mesrop,” says Kossowska-Janik.
The greatest success story among the new writing systems was undoubtedly Latin. The Romans’ phonetic alphabet system most probably did not come directly from the Greeks, but from the Etruscans in Italy. The popularity of this alphabet was due to its simplicity, universality, and ease in adaptation, as well as the territorial reach of the Roman empire. Latin also conquered the world of antiquity later, along with its Christianization.
The twenty-four-letter Latin alphabet took time to become the writing we currently use, however. It is believed that it only gained its final shape at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Before that, there was a lot of tinkering, adding and removing letters depending on the intellectual trends or even the whims of rulers or patricians. For instance, the x, y, k, or g would come and go. The letter v was both a vowel and a consonant for a time. In the fourth century BCE, one censor removed the z, because he found it unnecessary. Three entirely new letters were introduced by Claudius, but they did not survive his death in 54 CE.
With the expansion of the Roman Empire, writing became a vast purveyor of religion and culture. By around 500 CE, Latin was the most widely used alphabet throughout Europe. The Romans also tended to its form. A response to the typefaces that came out of Greece were the Roman types:
– the elegant, or square capital (capitalis quadrata): monumental, precise, presently a model for upper-case letters;
– the rustic capital (capitalis rustica): simple, with slender vertical lines and wide horizontal ones;
– Roman italics: rather imprecise, for everyday use;
– Roman uncial: characterized by rounded shapes and varying thickness of the letters.
The Gutenberg Era
Behind the next revolution in the history of writing was a machine. In 1448, a jeweler from Mainz named Johannes Gutenberg founded his first print shop. Based on extant bookbinding technologies, he designed a press. A similar device, using interchangeable letters, was known as far back as eleventh-century China, but the difference here was that Gutenberg’s press cast its type in metal, which shaped easily and was very durable. This could not have been said of the old presses, whose letters were carved in stone or produced from soft materials.
The Mainz goldsmith was also famed for popularizing Gothic type. He gained world fame with his publication of the Vulgate, or the Bible translated from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, in 1452–55. The Gutenberg Bible was published in 180 copies, forty-eight of which have survived.
Before Gutenberg’s machine was created, text was written out on parchment by hand. It was mainly monks who performed this job in special monastery rooms known as scriptoriums. Copying one solid book sometimes took a scribe twenty years, which means written works were costly and hard to find. Thanks to the German inventor, Pseudo-Plato’s worries came to fruition: writing finally had the chance to reach a wider public, and thus, had a greater impact on the organization of societies, politics, law, and religion. The invention of print (and the popularization of paper) also introduced the possibility of universal education.
Perhaps without Gutenberg’s press, many epochal inventions, revolutionary ideas, or vital products of culture would not have survived. Who knows what would have happened to Copernicus’s work if it had not been printed at the right moment? Not long thereafter it landed on the papal list of forbidden books, and whole print runs were confiscated. Happily, owing to the sufficiently wide distribution of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Copernicus was not forced to rely solely on human memory, as Pseudo-Plato would have wanted.
History Comes Full Circle
And finally, there are the latest technological inventions that have changed how we record our thoughts: the typewriter, and its immediate successor, the computer. After the spread of digital forms of storage, paper no longer has such significance, and handwriting is increasingly rare (many people do not write by hand at all). According to some, this is a cause for alarm. Handwriting is necessary for proper intellectual development. It activates brain centers responsible for concentration, spatial navigation, good memory, and problem-solving abilities.
Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan stated back in the 1960s that the medium had more impact than the message itself. His Gutenberg Galaxy called for breaking with the old, linear style of writing, and thus with a “rigid” scientific method of public discourse. He contemplated the impact of print, and the phonetic alphabet in particular, on the consciousness of the people and culture of modern Europe. McLuhan contrasted preliterate thought of oral cultures with the thinking of people raised on writing, and print in particular. To his mind, the spread of Gutenberg’s invention had a significant impact on the rise of the nation-state, and thus, of nationalism, and the dominance of societies of rationality and individuality.
McLuhan has been compared to Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and Freud, but there are also a fair share of scholars who have accused him of having a naive faith in technology, and of going out on a theoretical limb despite his modest knowledge about the human nervous system. Even back in the 1980s and 90s, McLuhan’s critics pointed out that some media at the turn of the millennium were drifting further toward locality than globality—this, they said, was the future. Their voices were drowned out in the mad development of the internet in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Beginning in the 1950s, a field similar to McLuhan’s was explored by his peer, the outstanding literary historian and philosopher Walter Jackson Ong. His conclusion was that “more than any other human invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.”
Today, writing is no longer even rows of letters familiar to all, to which we must grow accustomed in order to learn or express something. It is also a “mind map,” a fairly detailed, non-linear method of noting down and remembering information, more like a color drawing than a traditional notepad. It is full of icons and symbols, various writing styles and letters of various sizes. This example, but also, to a larger extent, the departure from handwriting (even in schools) and the popularity of internet emoticons (sometimes accurately associated with hieroglyphics) allow us to hazard the hypothesis that the history of writing has not come to an end. Moreover, though it is far too early to make any definite predictions, we may assume that the revolution now underway will take its effect on how people think and perceive the world.
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