Abstract

A time will come, O Babe of Tegumai, when we shall make letters… when we shall be able to read as well as to write, and then we shall always say exactly what we mean without any mistakes.

Rudyard Kipling, The Just So Stories

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 11 December 2008

Writing

Various gods across the world have been credited with inventing writing—Brahma, Nebo, Thoth, Isis, Hermes, etc. If talking distinguishes humanity from animals, then writing is an even higher criterion, for every child who is not handicapped will speak, but whole nations never learnt how to write. Only around a hundred languages have ever been set down in writing, and given rise to an extended body of literature.

Perhaps writing began as a secret way of communicating. The word “runes”, for example, meaning the alphabet of Old Teutonic, means “secret”. A written message was a mystery to its illiterate bearer. Its meaning was concealed from him. It was a secret to him. A written message has to be seen, but seeing it does not reveal its meaning unless the viewer knows the script it is written in. Mere inspection does not reveal the message. Knowledge of the script is necessary too.

Indeed, it is not obvious to the untutored eye when a series of markings is a writing. To the westerner ignorant of the Arabic script, the quotations from the Quran that decorate mosques is just that—decoration. The Taj Mahal has rows of floral motifs interspaced with Arabic quotations from the Quran, yet where the pure decoration ends and the script begins is not obvious unless Arabic script is familiar. Similarly, the cuneiform script was once thought to have been an architectural decoration. Some even thought they were the footprints of birds that had walked over wet clay!

Yet, once the Greeks had adopted the Canaanite alphabet, and then Romans adapted it to Latin, writing in the Canaanite alphabet became the basis of knowledge and learning throughout Europe, then much of the world:

It put agreements, laws, commandments on record. It made the growth of states larger than the old city states possible. It made a continuous historical consciousness possible. The command of the priest or king, and his seal could go far beyond his sight and voice, and could survive his death.

H G Wells, A Short History of the World, 1946

The highly uneven distribution of wealth in the world equates with the distribution of literacy—how late in history different peoples became literate, if they ever did. The writing revolution was the first of the great technological communication revolutions in human history. Printing followed, thousands of years later, then telegraphy and telephony after a few hundred more years, and finally the modern explosion of technological communication. Writing offered a fundamental distinction between advanced and primitive cultures, being the basis of published law, public education, and the recording of history and literature—these naturally led to countless improvements in social organization. It even led to a change in the way people thought and reasoned, changing human mental processes—the changes noticed by Jaynes.

Writing was not to Record Speech!

Yet the origin of writing is still obscure, partly because of a lack of evidence, it being in the distant past of civilization, but also because of the misapprehensions of scholars. They took writing to be a simple and deliberate attempt to record speech. After all, that is what it does now, but much evolution has to be sorted out between the initiation of writing as graphical marks, and its use for recording speech. And, technically, writing is a type of drawing. Though it may seem obvious that writing must have been conceived as a way of recording spoken words, as many authorities from Plato and Aristotle onwards have assumed, there is no evidence for it, and it is therefore far from certain. It took a long time for the alphabet to emerge after some men had started to scratch marks on flat surfaces, but the consensus was for long that writing was invented as recorded speech. Some advanced civilizations, compared with primitive existence, used writing for centuries, and even millennia, without ever developing an alphabet:

There is no evidence anywhere in the world writing began with the alphabet, and plenty of evidence that it did not.

Roy Harris, The Origin of Writing, 1986

It is hard for we people living in a literate society to set aside its assumptions and see how writing began with its preliterate inventors. It is certain it was not for them what it has become for us. Now, all authorities agree that the development of writing was not alphabetic.

The etymology of the word “writing” is that it denotes the making of a shape of some kind on a surface. Writing therefore covered drawing, painting, silhouettes and perhaps low relief. Ancient Egypt had just the one word for writing and drawing, and, in Greek, the word for writing (graphein) meant “to scratch” in Homer:

That writing, in the earliest ages of the world, was a delineation of the outlines of those things man wanted to remember, rudely graven either upon shells, or stones, or marked upon the leaves or bark of trees, and that this simple representation of forms was next succeeded by symbolic figures, will generally be allowed.

Charles Davy, 1772

Schmandt-Besserat’s Theory

A variety of ideas about the origin of writing have been proposed but none is free of serious criticism. There is no certainty that writing arose only once. It seems more likely to have arisen several times. A convincing theory of the origin of writing in the ANE[†]ANE. Ancient Near East. Greece, Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean to Iran is that of D Schmandt-Besserat (Scientific American, 1978), which is based on evidence—the primitive accounting system used in Iran and Iraq from about 9000 BC.

Clay tokens of various shapes were used to account for agricultural products—the size of herds and flocks or the volume of grain, wine and olive oil. Each shape perhaps stood for a cow or sheep, a basket grain or an amphora of oil or wine. The earliest of these tokens come from Tepe-Asiab and Ganj-i-Dareh Tepe in Persia—modern Iran. About 20 distinct types of token seemed to suffice originally. A later site at Tepe Sarab dated to 6500 BC has more varieties, about 28, a small enough increase in sophistication over about 2 millennia but illustrating how conservative these ancient societies were. The system, and evidently the economy, did not alter significantly over this period.

The situation began to change more rapidly in the fourth millennium with the increase in the number of cities—urbanization—requiring production for trade, the shipping of produce from country to town, therefore bigger herds and volumes of produce to feed the growing urban population, and the need for better accounting methods. In fourth millennium sites in Iran, Iraq and Syria, many more shapes have appeared, including ones with incised lines, or added pellets of clay.

More significant is that clay “wallets” or bullae appear, to keep the tokens inside them. They seem ideally suited to trading, the bullae containing the record of the transaction by the tokens they contain. The significance is that they begin to have scratched on the outside they type and number of tokens they contained! Significant also is that at this stage about 30 of the 1500 symbols found in the later Sumerian script were being used in these tokenized records. This seems to be the transition point from tokenization to writing. Symbols constituting two dimensional representations of the tokens were being used to show how many of the tokens ought to be in the bulla, making the tokens redundant, so here was the first true symbolic writing—only the inscribed bullae were needed. The clay bulla, marked with the number and kind of the items delivered, sufficed to record the delivery. They were the first clay tablets, and the first delivery notes.

The subsequent multiplication of signs suggests that once the method was appreciated, it was applied to many new objects, giving rise to the first vocabulary. Many seem undoubtedly pictographic—simplified pictures of the object—whereas before they had seemed to be abstract or arbitrary shapes. Pictography was the basis of several earlier ideas for the origin of language, but this shows why they began to conceive of marks to represent objects, a gestalt moment that had not previously been explained, but just assumed. From this initial use of symbols to represent objects in a primitive accounting system came two main kinds of writing—syllabaries and hieroglyphics, and from these came the alphabet, so the alphabet only emerged at the end of a long evolution.

The Alphabet

At the outset, then, writing had nothing at all to do with sounds or speaking. Writing began independently of the spoken word. The puzzle now is to see how they came together. Ancient tribes had a totem, often but not necessarily an animal. The totem was often the mythical founder of the tribe whose members identified with it and revered it as their founding ancestor or father. If the totem was a leopard, the the tribe were leopards, and so on. Before writing, the emblem of a clan or tribe was a picture of the totem animal, so the emblem symbolized the tribe called the people of the leopard. Here then a graphical symbol is associated with a word, the name of the totem animal and the tribe. The totem as the tribal ancestor or father eventually became its god, so each people had a god with a name and an emblem. Emblems were important to people before writing, and they remain important today. National flags, heraldic devices and coats of arms, company, religious and political logos are still important and derive from the emblem of the tribe.

In preliterate society, emblems such as those of the sun, moon, animals, plants, rivers, mountains, and so on, were glyphs which led towards literacy by being associated with sounds, the name or word describing the object the graphical symbol stood for. So emblems from early on meant a word, but how did they come to represent words which had no emblems? The first step was the form of accounting—counting! Symbols for numbers preceded letters. Humans were numerate before they were literate. People who never discovered how to count beyond three, remained illiterate because they were innumerate. They counted one, two, many! Anything more than two was simply many. And counting involved tokens, as we saw. Counting is magical, for numbers are abstract concepts—they somehow exist but cannot be touched or seen or heard of themselves, but only when applied to some objects. And they shift from one object to another with utter ease. The magical nature of numbers to primitive people led to the pseudo science of prophecy by numerology, even among more sophisticated ones. Some societies considered it unlucky to count things. They failed to advance. The Israelites refused to be counted whether by David, or supposedly, a thousand years later when they were Jews, by the emperor Augustus.

For advancement, numbers cannot remain sacred, they have to lose their magic and mystery and become practical and utilitarian. Recording numbers of a known item, counting need only consist of a scratch for each one. It is writing in the Homeric sense of graphein. Such counting began as finger counting, becoming notches on wood or antler when fingers were inadequate in number. The four fingers and a thumb gave a way of counting in groups, four scratches and then a thumb scratched across the four signified a hand or five. A bone marked with notches from Zaire dated around 9000 BC shows that notch counting was being used even in “darkest” Africa when the Iranians were using tokens. Each notch in such a system was an animal, a day in the calendar, and amphora, or whatever, and so the object being counted had to be noted too. Some symbol was needed for it, the symbol of the token in Mesopotamia or an emblem like the emblems used for the tribe. Again, the breaking of taboos might have been needed, previously emblems having a sacred significance. The abstract symbols used initially in Iran and Iraq rarely seem to be representations of anything, and they might have been chosen so as not to be seen as having any sacred associations as emblems.

Anyway, the invention of writing corresponded to the move from “token counting” to what Roy Harris calls “emblem slotting”—the association of count marks and emblems, where the emblem denotes the kind, and initially marks, then a mark denoted the number of that kind. The progression then is from an emblem for, say, a sheep followed by sixty scratces, notches or clay pellets, to the same followed by ordered groups of scratches, usually fives, then finally to a symbol standing for the number, giving us what we have today, a pair of symbols—sixty sheep—where each word is the symbol. Today we typically separate objects and their properties, indicating each by separate signs—“sixty sheep” but also “black sheep”.

The pivotal move was from token counting to emblem slotting for recording quantitative data. The stroke of genius added to this was the quick realization that this graphical system was sui generis useful—its use could be extended with great ease and benefits. In particular, it could be extended to the recording of speech, and thus set writing on the path to developing the alphabet. Its extension also to musical notation and mathematical notation is evidence that writing did not start confined to speech.

It took a relatively long time after its general value was appreciated to erase the mystical aspect of it which kept it confined to the special purpose of recording what was considered important. Writing remained the specialized job of scribes who recorded only important transactions, and few people were literate in the earliest “literate” societies. The essential information that scribes covered in their job, gradually expanded until it covered hymns, myths and eventually literature, but this latter extension came only about 3000 years ago, if we accept it corresponds to the breaking of the bicameral mind of J Jaynes. The realization that it could be used for recording thoughts, emotions, and even mundane happenings was the stimulus to the emergence of modern thinking:

It took a conceptual revolution in prehistoric times to realize that graphical signs can show what is invisible as clearly and as fully as they show what is visible.

R Harris, The Origin of Writing

F de Saussure misled us to suggest that writing was invented to represent speech, but he was right to say speech itself was just one maifestation of the curious human ability to create and use signs which he described as the ultimate linguistic faculty.

Further Reading

• Julian Jaynes and the Bicameral Mind
• The Origin of Culture and Religion
• The Origin of Religion
• Myths

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History