Professional Documents
Culture Documents
<http://cdli.ucla.edu/pubs/cdlj/2006/cdlj2006_001.html>
Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
ISSN 1540-8779
Version: 28 January 2006
1. The perspective of historical epistemology the lexicon of the languages which have been written in
1.1. A spate of scholarly work on the origins of writ- systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs or Near Eastern
ing has been pursued in the last decades at different cuneiform.
places and in different disciplines and with varying suc-
cess. In this paper, I would like to pose some questions 1.3. The enormous success of the work that has been
that represent challenges resulting from this research. done under the inuence of such a philological perspec-
Let us start with the basic questions: tive cannot and should not be ignored. Nevertheless,
When was writing invented? it must also be admitted that this perspective, in spite
Where was writing invented? of its success, has serious shortcomings. Its deciencies
Why was writing invented? become obvious especially when one focuses on the
How was writing invented? contribution of philology to the clarication of the
origins of writing. It is now a well established fact that
1.2. In the following, I will approach these ques- the inuence of the structures of language on a system
tions from a particular point of view, that is, from of writing becomes weaker the further one goes back in
the viewpoint of historical epistemology. Let me rst its history. I will call in the following such incipient sys-
briey explain this perspective. It is now some 200 years tems of writing with weak connections to oral language
ago that, in the aftermath of Napoleons campaign in proto-writing.
Egypt, early writing systems and their historical origins
aroused the curiosity of European scholars for the rst 1.4. As might be expected, methods of philology are
time. They soon became a focus of never-ending at- less effective if the relationship between writing and
tempts to decipher them and to disclose the hidden language is weak. It is possibly due to this fact that
treasures of authentic information about cultures that major corpora of early writing systems that do not
perished long ago. Understanding these texts primarily adequately represent an ancient language have, for a
meant retranslating them into the oral languages they long time, been widely neglected by philologists. Proto-
represent. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that work writing does not provide sufcient information about
on early writing systems was widely inuenced by what the grammar of the language of the scribe to make it a
can be called a philological perspective. From this point valuable source for philological research. In some cases,
of view, a writing system is essentially conceived of as it is not even possible to identify the language spoken
a representation of a particular language. Deciphering by the people who invented and used such systems of
such a system means identifying the underlying lan- proto-writing.
guage and reconstructing the way it is coded in the writ-
ten symbols. If this language was not a familiar one that 1.5. The lack of attention that proto-writing has re-
had survived, scholars felt challenged to reconstruct its ceived is, nevertheless, puzzling, because precisely these
grammar and its lexicon. It is an encouraging fact that texts are exceptionally important in any attempt to
this endeavor has in most cases been successful, where a solve the exciting riddles of the origins of writing. The
sufcient number of texts has been handed down to us. difculties of understanding texts written in a proto-
We therefore know today quite well the grammar and writing system result primarily from the fact that the
Proto-Elamite
Minoan Chinese Archaic
Hieroglyphic Indus Script
Proto-Cuneiform
Egyptian
Hieroglyphic
3000 BC Mesoamerican
Iconographic
2000 BC
1000 BC
north in the regions of Anatolia. The oldest attestations an assumption. Likewise, proto-writing was considered
of writing in China date back to the Shang period at essentially the same as writing, only that the intention
the end of the 2nd millennium, and it is only in the 1st of representing oral language appeared to be as yet in-
millennium BC that we nd writing in Mesoamerica sufciently realized.
(see gure 1). This distribution of earliest attestations
of writing in time and space shows the typical pattern 3.2. This anachronistic projection of modern func-
of a spreading technology, although in some cases there tions of writing onto its early use had the consequence
appears to be no connection at all between the systems that the multiple origins of writing were widely neglect-
of writing that subsequently emerged. ed. The early development of writing was interpreted as
a universal process leading from a crude representation
3. The philological perspective of the origins of writing of words by pictures to the more efcient representation
3.1. Why was writing invented? For a long time, a of words decomposed into phonemes by syllabic signs
straightforward answer to this question seemed to be and, nally, to alphabetic writing. As is well known,
beyond any doubt. According to the prevailing philo- Paul Sethe (1939) and later Ignaz Gelb (1952) have
logical perspective, writing was essentially considered developed inuential theories of the origins of writing
as a representation of language in a way that allows for based essentially on such assumptions.
an indirect communication and transmission of knowl-
edge. Thus, it was plausible to assume that to represent 3.3. It is an irony of history that it was precisely Gelb
oral language in a persistent medium must also have in his Study of Writing who argued forcefully that, for
been the intention of the people who invented writing, systematic reasons, the Mesoamerican writing systems
although no direct evidence could be provided for such cannot have been based on any kind of phonetic coding,
4.2. Let me rst list briey these characteristics before 5.1. There may be exceptions. I am thinking in par-
I go into details. ticular of the so-called Tribute List, attested by nearly
The structures of proto-cuneiform are far from sixty textual witnesses, which exhibits structures resem-
matching the syntax of a language. bling epic iterations and has, therefore, been interpreted
Contrary to oral language, proto-cuneiform writing by Bob Englund and Hans Nissen as the earliest exam-
implies only simple patterns of semantic categories. ple of real literature (Englund & Nissen 1993: 25-29).
In proto-cuneiform, phonetic coding plays only a Unfortunately, this text is still so badly understood that
minor role, if any. no conclusion can be derived about the technique of
Proto-cuneiform is not uniformly conventional- coding language that might have been used to create it.
ized.
Contrary to oral language, proto-cuneiform is used 5.2. A number of questions that concern not only
in an extremely restricted context of application. proto-cuneiform but proto-writing in general can be
Proto-cuneiform had precursors in symbolic systems derived from the observation that, with this exception,
used, at least in part, for the same purposes. the texts written in proto-cuneiform do not show any
The later adaptation to language changed the struc- direct relation to oral language. Such questions are:
ture of proto-cuneiform writing considerably. What kind of non-linguistic structures can be iden-
tied in other early writing systems?
(I would mention one further point without going
What kind of use can explain such non-linguistic
into details here: There was a co-evolution of proto-
structures?
cuneiform with certain arithmetical notions.)
What happens to non-linguistic structures of a sys-
tem of proto-writing when it is later developed into
4.3. None of these characteristics are in and of them-
a real writing system?
selves sufcient to prove or disprove a particular hy-
6. Semantic categories
6.1. Another discrepancy between proto-cuneiform
writing and oral language becomes apparent when the Fig. 3. Beveled-rim bowls (left) used for the disbursement of ra-
conceptual structure of the meanings represented by its tions represented by the sign GAR (middle, left column) which
could be used to designate a ration of a certain size or, in a
signs and sign combinations is investigated. Such signs semantically dened sign combination, an institution (middle,
or sign combinations represent predominantly quanti- right column). In combination with a mans head it formed
ties, or registered and sometimes further qualied ob- the sign combination GU7 (right), which later meant to eat
jects, or persons, institutions, and locations involved, or, more generally, to consume. In proto-cuneiform writing,
or they designate somehow the type of administrative however, this sign combination was exclusively used to represent
activity that is documented (see gure 3). This simple a certain type of administrative activity related to the disburse-
ment of rations.