Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction
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WRITING AND SCRIPT
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Andrew Robinson
Writing and
script
A Very Short Introduction
3
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ISBN 978–0–19–956778–2
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
List of illustrations xi
1 Writing and its emergence 1
2 Development and diffusion of writing 17
3 Disappearance of scripts 36
4 Decipherment and undeciphered scripts 52
5 How writing systems work 74
6 Alphabets 92
7 Chinese and Japanese writing 110
8 Scribes and materials 123
9 Writing goes electronic 135
Chronology 145
Further reading 149
Index 153
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Acknowledgements
This is the fourth book I have written on writing and scripts. The
first was a highly illustrated survey of the subject, the second was
on undeciphered scripts, and the third was a biography of Michael
Ventris, who deciphered Europe’s earliest readable writing,
Linear B. I have also written a biography of the polymath Thomas
Young, a key figure in the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone and
Egyptian hieroglyphic.
On the way, I have accumulated many debts to current specialists
in the various scripts, who freely gave me advice. Some of their
expert knowledge has found its way into this small book. Although
they had nothing directly to do with it, I would particularly like to
recall the help of John Baines, John Bennet, Larissa Bonfante, the
late John Chadwick, Michael Coe, Robert Englund, Jacques Guy,
Stephen Houston, Kim Juwon, Oliver Moore, Tom Palaima, Asko
Parpola, and J. Marshall Unger.
It is a pleasure to thank Andrea Keegan, Latha Menon, and Keira
Dickinson of Oxford University Press.
This page intentionally left blank
List of illustrations
1 Ice Age symbols 4
Drawing after Henri Breuil
2 Early Mesopotamian
pictograms 10
Drawing after C. B. F. Walker,
Cuneiform (1987)
3 A cuneiform tablet from
Uruk 12
Courtesy of Robert Englund/The
Schoyen Collection (MS 1717)
4 Bone tags from Egyptian
tomb U-j 14
# Deutsches Archa¨ologisches
Institut, Cairo
5 The origins of writing 19
After Andrew Robinson, The Story
of Writing (2007)
6 An Indus Valley seal stone 21
# Angelo Hornak/Alamy
7 A Chinese oracle bone
inscription 32
Courtesy of Academia Sinica
8 The evolution of Chinese
characters 33
Courtesy of John DeFrancis, The
Chinese Language (1984)
9 One of theDead Sea Scrolls 39
Courtesy of Israel Antiquities
Authority
10 The Behistun cuneiform rock
inscription 42
Lithograph after HenryRawlinson,
The Persian Cuneiform Inscription
at Behistun (1846)
11 Tabula Cortonensis, Etruscan
tablet 47
# Rabatti-Domingie/akg-images
12 An inscription in
Rongorongo 50
Drawing after Steven Roger Fischer,
Rongorongo (1997)
13 The major undeciphered
scripts 54
14 Michael Ventris, 1953 56
# Tom Blau/Camera Press, London
15 Diego de Landa’s Mayan
‘alphabet’ 59
16 A Mayan cacao pot 60
Courtesy of George Stuart
17 The Rosetta Stone 63
# The Trustees of the British
Museum
18 Jean-Franc¸ois Champollion,
c. 1823 67
Courtesy of Muse´e Champollion/
photo: D. Vinc¸on/Conseil ge´ne´ral de
l’Ise`re
19 Phoneticism and logography
in different scripts 75
Courtesy of J. Marshall Unger,
Ideogram (2004)
20 The classification of writing
systems 79
After Andrew Robinson, The Story
of Writing (2007)
21 A Linear B tablet from
Knossos 80
Drawing from A. J. Evans, The
Palace of Minos at Knossos (1935)
22 A Linear B tablet from
Pylos 81
Photo: Courtesy of University of
Cincinnati
Drawing after Michael Ventris,
‘King Nestor’s four-handled cups’,
Archaeology (1954)
23 The Egyptian hieroglyphic
‘alphabet’ 83
After Penelope Wilson, Hieroglyphs
(2003)
24 The Coptic alphabet 85
25 A cartouche of
Tutankhamun 91
# Griffith Institute, University of
Oxford
26 The evolution of European
alphabets 101
After Andrew Robinson, The Story
of Writing (2007)
27 A Bengali magazine cover 102
Courtesy of Sandip Ray/Satyajit Ray,
A Vision of Cinema (2005)
28 The Phoenician and Greek
letters 104
29 A detail from the Book of
Kells 108
# The Board of Trinity College
Dublin
30 A Chinese calligrapher 116
Museum Rietberg, Zurich.
Photo: # Wettstein & Kauf
31 Kojiki, Japanese
inscription 118
32 Hiragana and katakana 120
33 Assyrian scribes 126
# The Trustees of the British
Museum
34 Tutankhamun’s writing
implements 128
# Griffith Institute, University of
Oxford
35 How to write in
cuneiform 130
Courtesy of Marvin A. Powell/
Thames & Hudson
36 Texting Shakespeare 137
# Ed McLachlan
37 International transportation
symbols 139
# Fotolia
Writing and Script
xii
Chapter 1
Writing and its emergence
Civilization cannot exist without spoken language, but it can
without written communication. The Greek poetry of Homer was
at first transmitted orally, stored in the memory, as were the Vedas,
the Sanskrit hymns of the ancient Hindus, which were unwritten
for centuries. The South American empire of the Incas managed its
administration without writing. Yet eventually, almost every
complex society – ancient and modern – has required a script or
scripts. Writing, though not obligatory, is a defining marker of
civilization. Without writing, there can be no accumulation of
knowledge, no historical record, no science (though simple
technology may exist), and of course no books, newspapers, emails,
or World Wide Web.
The creation of writing in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) and
Egypt in the late 4th millennium BC permitted the command and
seal of a ruler like the Babylonian Hammurabi, the Roman Julius
Caesar, or the Mongol Kublai Khan, to extend far beyond his
sight and voice and even to survive his death. If the Rosetta Stone
had never been inscribed, for example, the world would be virtually
unaware of the nondescript Graeco-Egyptian king Ptolemy V
Epiphanes, whose priests promulgated his decree upon the Rosetta
Stone in 196 BC written in three scripts: sacred hieroglyphic,
administrative demotic, and Greek alphabetic.
1
Writing and literacy are generally seen as forces for good. All
modern parents want their children to be able to read and write.
But there is a negative side to the spread of writing that is present
throughout its more than 5,000-year history, if somewhat less
obvious. In the 5th century BC, the Greek philosopher Socrates
(who famously never published a word) pinpointed our
ambivalence towards ‘visible speech’ in his story of the Egyptian
god Thoth, the mythical inventor of writing. Thoth came to see the
king seeking royal blessing on his enlightening invention. But
instead of praising it, the king told Thoth:
You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and
you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom,
for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore
seem to know many things, when they are for the most part
ignorant.
In a 21st-century world saturated with written information and
surrounded by information technologies of astonishing speed,
convenience, and power, these words of Socrates recorded by his
disciple Plato have a distinctly contemporary ring.
This book introduces the origins of writing; the routes via which
writing spread and developed into hundreds of scripts for some of
the world’s thousands of spoken languages; the ways in which
different writing systems convey meaning through phonetic signs
for consonants, vowels, and syllables, combined with logograms –
non-phonetic signs standing for words (for instance, @, $, &, ¼, ?);
the tools and materials that scribes and others have used for
writing; the purposes to which writing has been put by societies
over five millennia; and the extinction and decipherment of scripts.
Naturally, not every script can be included: a recent academic
reference book, The World’s Writing Systems, runs to almost a
thousand substantial pages. However, every significant script is
mentioned. For all the enormous variety of scripts, past and
2
Writing and Script
present, it turns out that extinct ancient scripts such as Egyptian
hieroglyphs, Mesopotamian cuneiform, and Mayan glyphs have
much in common in both their structure and function with our
modern scripts and our specialized communication systems –
whether these be alphabets, Chinese characters, mobile phone text
messages, or airport signage. The signs of these scripts and systems
may differ vastly from each other, but the linguistic principles
behind the signs are similar. The ancient scripts are not dead
letters, not just esoteric curiosities. Fundamentally, the way that
writers write at the start of the 3rd millennium AD is not different
from the way that the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians
wrote.
Proto-writing and full writing
In a cave at Peche Merle, in Lot, in southern France, there is a
boulder with some mysterious signs on it: a stencilled hand – with
four splayed fingers and a thumb clearly visible – in red dye, and
next to it a random pattern of some eleven red dots. What makes
these signs significant is that they are probably 20,000 years old,
belonging to the last Ice Age, like many other graffiti from
southern France, which often include animal images with signs
written over or around them. An example from a different cave
shows an engraved figure of a horse, over-engraved with a series of
‘P’ signs (one of them reversed); in an adjoining cave a horse figure
is surrounded by more than 80 ‘P’ signs, many of which clearly
were made with different tools.
Are the hand-with-dots and the ‘P’ signs to be regarded as writing?
It is tempting to imagine that the former signs are the palaeolithic
equivalent of ‘I was here, with my animals’ (one dot per animal),
and that the latter were made by an Ice Age individual as part
of some continuing act of worship. No one knows for sure.
Undoubtedly, though, the signs were meant to communicate
something.
3
Writing and its emergence
We can call them ‘proto-writing’: permanent visible marks capable
of partial/specialized communication. Some scholars limit protowriting
to the earliest forms of writing, but in this book the term is
applied much more widely. Thus there are endless varieties of
proto-writing. It includes prehistoric petroglyphs from around
the world, Pictish symbol stones from Scotland, Amerindian
pictograms, notched and inscribed wooden tally sticks (used until
1834 by the British Treasury), and the fascinating knotted-rope
quipus used to keep track of the movement of goods in the Inca
empire. Equally valid as proto-writing are contemporary sign
systems like international transportation symbols, computer icons,
electronic circuit diagrams, mathematical notation, and the staff
notation of musical scores.
In other words, the ‘proto’ prefix refers here not to historical but to
functional development. Although proto-writing long preceded the
emergence of ‘full writing’, such as the English alphabet or the
Chinese characters, in time, it will always exist alongside full
writing. Proto-writing did not disappear as a result of the
appearance of full writing – swept away as primitive in some
1. This engraved horse, over-engraved with a series of signs, from
the cave Les Trois Fre`res in southern France, dates from the last Ice
Age. It is one of many such examples of proto-writing
4
Writing and Script
supposed evolutionary progress towards our current superior form
of writing – but has continued to be used for specialized purposes.
Scientific journals, for instance, contain a mixture of full writing
(text generally in alphabetic script) and proto-writing
(mathematics and visual diagrams). Theoretically, the
mathematics could be expressed in words, as early natural
philosophers like Newton often did, but the converse does not
hold: the words could not be written in mathematical symbols.
Full writing has been concisely defined as a ‘system of graphic
symbols that can be used to convey any and all thought’ by John
DeFrancis, a distinguished American student of Chinese, in his
book Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. Not
all scholars of writing agree with this. A small minority do not draw
a distinction between proto-writing and full writing; they regard
both of these as ‘writing’, though capable of differing degrees of
expressiveness. Others take issue with the idea that all thought can
be expressed in spoken language, and would prefer ‘any and all
language’ in the above definition. The most thought-provoking
moments in cinema, for example, are often wordless; and
mathematicians apparently think more in visual images than in
words. Nevertheless, almost all thoughts can be verbalized with
sufficient training. ‘To know how to write well is to know how to
think well’, said the mathematician, physicist, and philosopher
Blaise Pascal. And so the DeFrancis definition is useful, both in
itself and in the way that it implicitly distinguishes full writing
from proto-writing.
Clay ‘tokens’
One kind of proto-writing that has attracted much attention –
because it may provide evidence for the origin of full writing – is
the so-called clay ‘token’. Archaeological excavations in the Middle
East over the past century or so have yielded, besides clay tablets,
large numbers of small, unimpressive clay objects. Excavators had
5
Writing and its emergence
no idea what they were, and generally discarded them as worthless.
According to the stratigraphy of their excavations, the objects
date from 8000 BC – the beginnings of agriculture – to as late as
1500 BC, although the number of finds dated after 3000 BC tails
off. The earlier objects are undecorated and geometrically shaped –
spheres, cones, and so on, while the later ones are often incised and
