Summoning the ancestors
On the British Library exhibition on the history of writing: Writing: Making Your Mark
This article first appeared in autumn 2019 issue of The Author
For a writer, it is a strangely vertiginous experience to stand at the entrance to an exhibition space and see laid out before you the 5,000-year-old history of your trade. In devising its 2019 summer show, it’s as if the British Library has summoned all your ancestors for some Universal Exhibition of the writer’s craft.
A 1,400-year-old stela inscribed with symbols from Mesoamerica greets you at the entrance to ‘Writing, Making Your Mark’ (till Aug 27), and the vertigo sets in right away. From Mesopotamia, there’s a 4,000-year-old-tablet covered in cuneiform inscriptions – the first language ever to find a written form. There’s a 3,000-year-old oracle bone from China; a hymn to Osiris in 3,600-year-old hieroglyphs on a limestone stela from Egypt; and the stumbling efforts of a student of Greek on 3rd-century tablets of wax.
Telescoping time, the show traces innovations in the technique of writing right through to the emoticon. There are showstoppers – Caxton’s first edition of The Canterbury Tales, Mozart’s annotated catalogue, Joyce’s handwritten notes for Ulysses – but the ancient artefacts are the show’s true superstars.
The oldest works are indecipherable to the non-specialist, but behind each of them lies a culture that grappled with the same immensities: how to represent a spoken language in symbols, how to pin down the complexity of thought. Writing was so hard to invent that throughout history, most scholars concur, human beings managed it only four times.
And yet the Sumerians of the Euphrates River and the Olmecs of present-day southern Mexico both did so independently – before 3000 BC, and in about 600 BC, respectively. In ancient Egypt, in 3000 BC, and in 1300 BC in China, writing also seems to have arisen independently, though some suspect Egypt acquired the idea from its Sumerian partners in trade.
Pretty much all other variations – from Indian palm-leaf manuscripts to the texts of the Rapa Nui Polynesians – are likely to have been borrowed, adapted or inspired by existing forms.
Hunter-gatherers, it must be noted, didn’t bother with writing at all. They had no need of the bureaucracies that required it and, as Jared Diamond drily puts it in Guns Germs and Steel, lacked ‘the food surpluses required to feed scribes’.
Writing’s four main origins, and some 40 different writing systems that stemmed from them, are all represented in the British Library show.
On display are items like an ostracon, or recycled pottery shard, inscribed in Greek in the 1st century AD with what must be one of the first work permits ever devised. It authorises a woman called Thinabdella to work for a day as a sex worker in Elephantine in Egypt – raising the question of whether writers pre-date sex workers in the ranks of the oldest professions.
Then there is the Ravenna papyrus, a 572 AD Roman deed for the sale of a property in Rimini. And at last we see a by-line: the Latin inscription ‘scribsi ego Johannis’ (I wrote this, John), at the top.
But few of these inventions could even have been imagined had the Sumerians of Mesopotamia not revolutionised the art of writing with a linguistically decisive leap.
Frustrated, one assumes, by the limitations of logograms and numbers, they hit upon the idea of the phonetic sign. In what linguists now call the rebus principle, they found they could represent an abstract word – one that could not otherwise be depicted – by taking a noun they could depict that sounded the same. (By way of analogy, word ‘belief’ might be written with symbols for a bee and a leaf.) For clarity they added a silent sign, or determinative, to indicate what type of word was meant.
Armed with this innovation, a writing system previously limited to agricultural lists could now expand its repertoire to include myths, propaganda, and the earliest surviving literary work: the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The ancient Egyptians, meanwhile, established linguistic principles and letter forms of their own. In addition to pictograms and determinatives, they devised 24 signs for consonants, and extra signs for consonant trios and pairs.
But it was the Semitic people of Syria and the Sinai who, familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphs, took the next critical step. Alphabets are believed to have arisen only once in human history – among these Semitic peoples in the 2nd millennium BC – thanks to their experiments in adding vowels. Scholars maintain that all other alphabets that exist today stem from an ancestral Semitic set.
As a case in point, the exhibition traces the evolution of the letter A. It began as an ancient Egyptian logogram of an ox head, illustrated by an inscription on a statuette of a sphinx that came from the Sinai in roughly 1800 BC. The symbol was turned on its side by the Phoenicians, then revolved 90 degrees by the Greeks, as demonstrated by the name on a ceramic flask. Adopted by the Etruscans, the letter was then incorporated into the Latin alphabet by the Romans, who also switched to writing from left to right.
The show then plunges you deeper into the technology of writing. A replica of Caxton’s printing press is followed by a miraculous Chinese typewriter and a musty-looking Apple Mac II. Any writer who has ever struggled with technology may feel a stab of empathy for Tennyson, one of whose broken-nibbed quills made it into the show.
And any writer ever stung by an unfair review will appreciate the display for the telegram: a missive sent to a theatre critic by a furious John Osborne: ‘…CREATION IS SOMETHING YOU DO NOT RECOGNISE OF COURSE STOP… FROM NOW ON ITS OPEN WAR…’
The show’s most poignant item, however, must surely be the journal in which Scott of the Antarctic pencilled his final words. ‘For God’s sake look after our people,’ he wrote, with frostbitten hands in March 1912, on behalf of the families of his doomed expedition.
It’s a far cry from the cuneiform tablets of old Sumeria. But the fact that Scott, like us, could transmit his thoughts in a lasting way through writing must surely be these ancient peoples’ greatest gift.