The History of Writing
from Ideogram to Multimedia
by Anne-Marie Christine,
Paris , 2001
(translated into Arabic)
This magnificent volume deals with all the systems of writing all over the world from ancient to modern times.
Each chapter contains a peculiar region of the world and sheds favorable lights on the various elements which played roles in the creation of its culture and writing. Among such elements are the customs and traditions of the native populations, the surviving antiquities of the era in question, and the intellectual activities of the time. The work as a whole highlights the process of the creation and evolution of the various languages and writing-systems, explaining how the sentences were formed in each language together with the rules of grammar that make sense of such sentences. It also traces the steps of the decipherment of some of the ancient languages that remained obscure and enigmatic for a long time. It contains a lot of interesting information about the huge efforts of the scholars who did their best to decipher such languages and scripts.
In the course of the book a lot of cultural themes have been dealt with in some detail. Also a considerable light has been thrown on the materials on which writing was inscribed like the various monuments, papyri, parchments, stones, metals … etc.
The book “History of writing” is divided into 3 main chapters:
- Origins and reinventions.
- Alphabets and derived script.
- The image in western writing.
The first chapter starts with The Cuneiform Script. Writing is one of the basic characteristics of the culture of the ancient Near East. It first emerged in southern Mesopotamia at the end of the fourth millennium BCE in the form of the “pictographic” tablets of Uruk. The discoverers of the script gave it the name ‘Cuneiform’ from the Latin Cuneus (wedge), on account of its wedge-shaped marks. Using calamus or reed pen to make 3 dimensional marks, created this effect, mostly on wet clay although other surfaces were used. Cuneiform writing spread throughout the Near East, reaching its apogee in the thirteenth century BCE when it was even adopted in Egypt. The types of documents written in cuneiform range from the sophisticated literature (myths, religious texts, and scholarly writings), to a range of practical records (contracts, wills, law reports, invoices and receipts). In this part, one can read the origins and the description of the systems and how the Cuneiform script was deciphered.
After this we come to know about The scripts of ancient Egypt. We can read here about the birth of the hieroglyphics and a few details about this script which emerged in the Nile Valley shortly before the birth of the Pharonic state. The emergence of this new state in around 3000 BC was marked by the union of Upper and Lower Egypt under the rule of Menes, founder of the 1st dynasty. This part sheds light on Hieroglyphics in the Pharaonic civilization, its survival and disappearance in Greek and Roman times, the rediscovery of hieroglyphics and its fundamental principles, the mechanics of the hieroglyphic system including the ideograms-the determinatives-and the phonetic and additional graphics, and finally it discussed the expressiveness of hieroglyphics.
Another interesting subject is about The adaptation of script to monuments. Where it discuss various ways in which hieroglyphics could be adapted to the particular monument on which they were inscribed.
One of the most important subjects in the first chapter is the “Writing in China”, where it deals with the genesis and the characteristics of Chinese ideography and the first writing systems. In fact, Chinese writing is ideographic, which means that it is a script in which the characters don’t present purely phonetic units that in sequence, express words at the level of the physical production of the voice. Chinese ideography first appeared in texts recording the procedures of divination ceremonies. Here we can get considerable information about the Chinese art of calligraphy and the art of ink painting in the culture of the Chinese literati. Nevertheless, the art of calligraphy , in the true sense of word, only began in China at the end of the Han period, fifteen centuries after the invention of ideography. And the Chinese calligrapher transformed himself into a painter. In Chinese this is called shuimohua (water and ink painting) and in Japanese it becomes sumie.
One comes also across the Vietnamese script and society, and its types. As there have been two scripts in the history of writing Vietnamese, the nôm, which is no longer used and the quô’cngô, which is in current usage. The characters of nôm were modeled on Chinese around the twelfth century and may be divided into two types simple and complex.
Among the topics of significance in this chapter is the article entitled: The scripts of continental India , The Indian world abounds in written documents, in the form of inscriptions and manuscripts, printed editions of which fill today’s libraries. The inscriptions were engraved on stone (rough/polished), metal (copper/bronze). The basic material for manuscripts was mainly palm leaves, as well as bark of the birch and the sap wood of the aloe. Books were made from other materials (wood panels, paper leaves). Here we can read about the presence of written texts and the rejection of writing, the scripts of the north and the south, the common system of ancient Indian scripts, pre history and problems concerning originality or borrowing. Finally it demonstrates an interesting account of the symbolism and esthetics of the Indian scripts.
The Mayan script and society from the 2nd through the 10th centuries: Mayan script is one of the greatest artistic and cultural achievements of the society that created it. It is also one of the most complex scripts of Pre-Columbian America, resembling Egyptian Hieroglyphics. This chapter explains which languages did the Mayan scripts speak?, the logo- syllabic script, its principles and deciphering the names of gods.
The second chapter Alphabets and derived script included different subjects about various alphabets such as the >Arabic script. As we all know that the history of the Arabic script is a fascinating one. Arabic is the baby sister of the Semitic Alphabet systems of writing, in which only consonants and long vowels are annotated. It first emerged in the ever-changing desert, at the gates of the sedentary world of the Fertile Crescent. One can here also get a fair idea about Writings in the margins of Arabic manuscripts.
The Greek Alphabets is a specialized subject in Greek. The alphabet was not the first system of writing used for transcribing the Greek language. The syllabic system that preceded it was used in the Mycenaean palaces seems to have disappeared with the Mycenaeans themselves. Yet in Cyprus, another syllabary emerged which was rather different from the Mycenaean system. It was in use from at least the 11th century BCE and for most of the first millennium BCE. It was used to write the local Greek dialect and another language that has not yet been identified and is known as “Eteo-Cypriot”. The island was a real language laboratory for the eastern Mediterranean.
Cypriot syllabic writing existed in parallel with the Phoenician script (which was used to transcribe the Phoenician script) and from the sixth century BCE, with the Greek alphabet, which was used to transcribe the form of the Greek language known as koinè. This Greek alphabet was simply the Phoenician alphabet with some adjustments (made a few centuries earlier) to the phonetic requirements of Greek.
Then comes the last phase of the chronological order about The rise of printing in the west as an interesting subject in chapter three of our current book. In western Europe, printing stemmed from a technological advance that soon outstripped its initial goals and transformed an entire civilization. The use of writing had been growing since the eleventh century in response to the increase in economic and intellectual activity, along with the revitalization of towns and cities, all of which required even greater quantities of books and practical documents. Here we can read about the early printers versus and handwritten models, the triumph of the roman type in western Europe, the emergence of model text presentation and finally printing and its relation with the society.
The book ends with one of its important subjects which is writing and multimedia where one can read about the technological change and the economy of written signs, screening concepts and the conceptual screen, the reading and writing process, instrumentalizing the contract of communication, interesting rhetoric, and finally the poetics of multimedia writing.
