Reading the writings of the past

It was over five thousand years ago that writing was invented in the world. To mark this invention, to celebrate it and to cerebrate on it, an international meeting was held about six months ago. It is so appropriate that this conference was held in the city of Baghdad, a city with the hoary past that is bracketed by the legendary river twins Euphrates and Tigris in the fabled Babylonia of the Fertile Crescent. It was in Babylonia that agriculture was invented in the western world, large- scale settlement of people occurred, the first city of the world Ur was established and writing is thought to have been invented and developed.

It was this last issue that the conference debated. The major question there was: "Where was writing invented first?" The answer was not unanimous or unequivocal. Three places claim this honour, and these are: 1) Uruk on the Euphrates, Babylonia which developed the cuneiform over 5000 years ago; 2) Abydos, off the Nile in ancient Egypt, where the fore-runners of the hieroglyphs dating back to 3100 B.C. were unearthed by archaeologists, and 3) Harappa, the city off the river Iravati (now called Ravi) and Mohenjo Daro on the river Sindhu (Indus) of the Indus Valley Civilization dated to at least 2500 B.C. And it occurs to me that there must be more candidates - in China, in Mesoamerica and in the Pacific islands, and perhaps even in the yet-to-be fully explored African continent, which gave rise to mankind.

The Baghdad conference debated the long-held view that there was one single place where writing was invented, namely Uruk in Babylonia in the Mesopotamian heartland. There was also the debate on whether this was the mother of all writing (to paraphrase the famous words of Babylonia's current ruler), or whether the literacy of Egypt triggered it, or neither. Reporting on the conference in the 29 June 2001 issue of Science, Andrew Lawler points out that more recent findings show that the Indus Valley script was evolving around 3300 BC, at about the same time as its Near East counterparts began to coalesce. He writes that some researchers, pondering the near-simultaneous appearance of seemingly separate protowriting systems in three distinct civilizations, suggest that they may have developed independently in response to similar circumstances.

Note the use of the term proto-writing above. It highlights the point that these systems of writing, with their symbols, pictures and curlicules were forerunners, ancestors, `mothers' of the scripts that much of the world uses today. Indeed, the Cambridge archaeologist Dr. Joan Oates pointed out at the meeting that the prehistoric communication revolution began some 9000 years ago. Her thesis, which makes much biological sense, is "writing appears as the last step in the long line of evolution of communication systems".

Much of what we use as evidence comes from inscriptions, stone carvings, graffiti, portable items such as balls, pots and jugs with symbols on them each of which has been dated by scientists to at least five millennia or more. Invariably, they were either bookkeeping items of trade, or "propaganda" items that declare matters of history with embellishment, such as "Darius, the great king, king of kings, king of countries{hellip} built this palace" (from an old Persian Cuneiform), or "An offering which the king gives to Osiris, Lord of Eternity". No wonder Socrates remarked pithily when he wrote on the story of when the Egyptian god Thoth, the inventor of writing, approached the king for approval of his invention. "The king told Thoth {frac12} you have invented an elixir not of memory but of reminding. Your students will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant".

Cuneiform

Writing in Mesopotamia involved lettering that was shaped triangular or pyramid{frac12}like, all identical except in position and in arrangement. Thomas Hyde of Oxford was among the earliest to attempt to decipher the script which he called were wedge-like in shape or cuneiforms (the Latin word cuneus means wedge). The Danish traveller Carsten Niebuhr (1733- 1815) was able to discern three, and not just one, scripts in the cuneiform inscriptions. But it was the German schoolteacher George Grotefend (1775-1853) who could first successfully decipher the script. A fascinating account of the decipherment of the cuneiform, hieroglyphics and some other scripts is given in the book "The Story of Writing" by Andrew Robinson (Thames and Hudson, London, 1995; paperback 2000). Grotefend noticed single slanting wedges occurring often in the inscriptions, and decided that these must be word dividers. Since there were too many signs between word dividers, he concluded that the writing cannot be syllable-based but more likely to be alphabet-based. He next made the assumption that a royal formula is most likely to be embedded in the inscriptions, such as "X, great king, king of kings{hellip}.", and also that they may contain his lineage, i.e. "X, {hellip}., son of Y" and so forth. Next, he felt that the kings in the inscriptions must be famous, oft-cited and revered ones {frac12} "Xerxes, son of Darius {hellip}.". Based on such educated guesses, by reading more inscriptions and thereby bringing about a self-consistent system, he could decipher the individual shapes and deduce the alphabets in the Persian cuneiform script.

Hieroglyphs

Decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs (hiero in Greek meaning sacred, priestly and glyph meaning carving) became possible after the discovery of a big slab of inscriptions built into a wall that a demolition squad rescued in 1799 in the village Rashid near where the Nile flows into the Mediterranean sea. The name of the village got corrupted by the Europeans to Rosetta and the slab came to be called the Rosetta stone. It was the British physicist Thomas Young (of the wave theory of light, and the elastic modulus fame) who first took a crack at deciphering them in 1814. He noted a `striking resemblance' between the symbols of the script (called demotic script) and `the corresponding hieroglyphs', and concluded that the demotic script was a mixture of alphabetic signs and other, hieroglyphic signs. Using an approach similar to that of Grotefend, he chose to interpret a tablet or cartouche that contained an obvious non-Egyptian name, the reason being that it had to be spelt out alphabetically and not non-phonetically, as a native Egyptian name would be. This allowed him to decipher possible alphabets and signs with phonetic and syllabic letters. Young's work was carried on further by the Frenchman Jean Francois Champollion (1790-1832). He noted that the two famous names Ptolemy and Cleopatra share the letters and sounds l,e,o,p,t, and using this he could deduce their symbols.

Indus Script

The stone tablets of the kind shown in Picture 3 above have been excavated from Harappa, and are contemporaneous (3300 BC) to the cuneiforms and hieroglyphs. These have proved hard to decipher so far; we have not had a Grotefend, Young or Champollin to give the breakthroughs, though scholars like Sir John Marshall and Dr. S. R. Rao have spent years wrestling with the problem. Many of these slabs and seals contain, in addition to the signs, pictures of animals such as the Brahma bull, rhinoceros, elephant and the mythical unicorn {frac12} and probably served as property markers and signatures. It is worth noting here that there is no commonality or resemblance between the signs of the Indus script and those of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Cypriots, Persians or Sumerians. Curiously enough, there is apparently a remarkable similarity with signs form Easter Island in the South Pacific {frac12} almost 9000 miles away! Who got the script from whom {frac12} or did they evolve independently but coincidentally? Here is one of the more challenging puzzles to be unravelled in the areas of culture, geography and history of mankind.

Simultaneously and independently?

The Baghdad conference debated the problem of the origin of writing and the prevailing view appears to be that writing systems developed independently in (at least) three distinct civilizations, in response to similar circumstances. These three are the Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Indus River cultures. There might have been some travel and traffic between them, but records on this issue dating back to 5000 years are not unequivocal. But it is becoming increasingly clear that each of these was not developed overnight or in one shot (like some of the computer languages are claimed to) {frac12} but evolved over a period of time from symbols and protoscripts. Dr. Denise Schmandt-Besserat of the University of Texas at Austin believes that the precursors were clay tokens, sealed pots containing inscriptions and seals, which were used as records of sales, invoices and receipts. These had symbols in them that led, over a period of 1000 years or more, to the Uruk cuneiform. Others have quibbled over this theory. There is a similar un-meeting of minds about the origins of the hieroglyphs. While there was traffic between Babylonia and Egypt even those days, the idea that writing was imported into the Nile is disputed. Dr. Gunther Dreyer of the German Archeological Institute at Cairo has excavated Egyptian inscriptions dating to 3500 BC, placing them earlier than cuneiform.

And, as we mentioned earlier, what about the writings of the Orient- China, Easter Islands, Southeast Asia? While scholars have been concentrating on the antiquity of Indus and Near East scripts, the Far East has been given less attention than due. Then again what about the Africa beneath Egypt and Ethiopia? Mankind evolved in Central Africa and radiated out of this area over 150,000 years ago. While there is but little in terms of archeological artifacts unearthed out of this area, I am certain that the tribes there {frac12} Zulu, Hotentots, Tutsi or others{frac12} must have used scripts, symbols and alphabets that await discovery and decipherment. Also, it is now generally agreed that out there in the Americas, writing arose independently in the Mayan civilization of Mexico and Mesoamerica.

Why only in some places?

In his Pulitzer-winner book "Guns, Germs and Steel", the biologist Dr. Jared Diamond addresses the question of why, when people all over the world started with the same advantages and handicrafts 11000 years ago, some societies advanced remarkably while others are yet underdeveloped in the quality of life. He summarizes the answer thus: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves". A key factor for the advancement of a society is the ability to produce food and keep it in reserve. This stabilizes the daily lives and settlement of people and allows them other avenues to explore. Culture flows freely once agriculture is in good shape. Hunter-gatherer societies are too stressed to practise any other luxury. Writing could never have developed or even adopted by hunter-gatherers. "They lacked both the institutional uses of early writing and the social and agricultural mechanisms for generating the food surpluses required to feed scribes{hellip}{hellip}. The history of writing illustrates strikingly the similar ways in which geography and ecology influenced the spread of human inventions". This would then mean that writing could not have been earlier than agriculture and pastoral life {frac12} which puts it no earlier than 10,000 years ago.

D. Balasubramanian

L V Prasad Eye Institute

Hyderabad - 500 034

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