Ante Litteram
I’m in fifth grade and my teacher makes a few strange marks on the chalkboard, signs I’ve never seen before. It’s spring 1986 and, at ten years old, I can barely read. I’m a little behind for my age: learning to write was a long and laborious undertaking.
But in that moment my teacher writes something on the board—and without knowing it, she inscribes my future. She was dressed in white, I remember, like the chalk marks on the blackboard. Alpha beta gamma. I tried to decode them. There are only so many moments like this in a life, moments in which some gesture vacuums up the space around you and carries it off into time. The years pass, and your memory warps and skews and often flattens the details—but those few scrawlings slashed like the blade of a knife. Thirty years later, I can still hear the chalk’s staccato sizzle. The Greek alphabet tattooed itself onto my skin. I could never have known that I’d spend my life trying to make sense of the world’s illegible signs, why they look the way they do, what they might possibly mean. I could never have known that I’d forge a life from trying to decipher.
This is not a book on Ancient Greek, or on the alphabet. Nor is it a history lesson. This book is almost a story about invention, the greatest invention in the world. And I say almost because it has a beginning, and it carries us on a journey around the world, filled with adventure, but the end remains to be written.
The greatest invention in the world. Without it, we would be only voice, suspended in a continual present. The most solid and profound part of our being is forged in memory, in the desire to anchor ourselves to something stable, to persist, knowing well that our time is limited. This book speaks of that urgent need to remain, of the bond we share with others, the dialogue we hold with ourselves. This book recounts the invention of writing.
The protagonists of our tale, however, are not the scripts alone, nor those who discovered or deciphered them. We ourselves are the protagonists—our brains, our ability to communicate and interact with the life that surrounds us. Writing is an entire world to be discovered, but it is also a filter through which to observe our own, our world: language, art, biology, geometry, psychology, intuition, logic. It has things to say about who we are, as human beings capable of feeling, of experiencing and inspiring emotions. This book recounts an uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and the faint, fleeting echo of writing’s future.
FICTION
We human beings love to invent stories. Baboons, though no less fascinating than us, spend only 10 percent of their time interpreting, adopting, and imitating others’ actions. The rest of their time they dedicate to finding food and nourishment. Our percentages are the complete opposite.
We spend an astonishing amount of time trying to understand others—putting ourselves in their shoes, empathizing, acting as a mirror for their emotions and intentions. This tendency has been a major force in the development of our social intelligence. Other factors, of course, have played a role, but we are the only species that uses imagination. Every day we create real, probable, possible, impossible, and absurd scenarios. An infinity of fictions, one layered atop the other.
We create things that don’t exist in nature, such as symbols. Along with histories, laws, institutions, governments. All of this is made up. And all of it hinges on the exchange of information: storytelling, forging alliances, establishing and disrupting social equilibriums, gossip.
And yet there’s an order to it. Studies of modern hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari Desert or in the Philippines reveal stark differences in the ways they communicate. In the daytime, their discussions revolve around practical matters, location, food—along with a certain amount of chatter about one’s position within the group, climbing the social ladder, competition. Highly personal and logistical matters, nothing fanciful. When they gather in the evening, however, after the hunt, their interactions grow more relaxed. They lower their guard. Seated around the fire, under the light of the moon, they tell stories, they sing, they dance. Their bond grows tighter and stronger.
That’s how it always goes: when we relax, it’s as if we give voice to our imagination. Don’t the best ideas come the moment you stop racking your brain? Think about when you’re standing around the office kitchen with your colleagues, or when you call your wife/husband to discuss what/where to eat for dinner, or when you trash-talk your boss. Now think about your evenings, when you coax your children to sleep with a fairy tale, or glue yourself to Netflix, or let it all go at the club or a concert. Think about how, deep down, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, our communication, and all the structures we’ve developed to facilitate it, has hardly changed at all.
To prove it, I’m going to tell you two overarching stories. Two stories that are very different from each other—each, in turn, containing many smaller stories within it, threads that never intersect. These smaller threads are very similar, they share many ingredients, even if they’re not connected, but the overarching stories are decidedly different. One is filled with detectives, pursuit, aspiration, reward; the other with calmness, time, growth, patience, control. One speaks of unresolved enigmas, the other of inventions. One speaks of attempts and sudden disappearances, the other of plots with happy endings. You’ll have little trouble figuring out which is which. At the end of the day, in any case, they’re only stories.
SPARK
Before we wade deeper into these stories, however, we’ll need to address a few preliminary questions. First of all, it will help to have at least a provisional answer to the question “How is a script born?” For this, we’ll need to jump back to the beginning beginning, the start of it all. Back, that is, to the moment when symbols were born, when the depiction of a thing became the specific name for that thing. I draw a horse and, if I’m able to articulate language (as was Homo sapiens, and perhaps even the Neanderthals, thousands of years ago), I call it “horse.” Prehistoric art is exquisite, fascinating, highly refined even, but it is enigmatic: the drawing of a horse may very well mean something else. Perhaps it isn’t your basic Paleolithic nag, but some creature of the imagination: a hornless unicorn, a wingless Pegasus. Whatever it truly is, we’ll never know. The same enigma that lures us in very happily boots us out.
And even then, a drawing is just a drawing—it’s charged with potential, but ultimately wordless. It remains mute. As have millions of drawings, over thousands of years, in hundreds of different places around the world. The Sumerians, too, five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, drew objects and numbers on clay tablets.
On these tablets, they recorded small economic transactions related to the Mesopotamian temples. Think of it like a grocery list, where the symbols are placed in a scattered (dis)order. A kind of protohistoric stenography, with (nonphonetic) symbols linked to numbers.
If I were to ask you if this is writing, you’d say no. And I’d agree. But here the stage is being set for a daring, dazzling intuition that will render its invention possible. And not only in Mesopotamia, 3,100 years before the birth of Christ, but in China, Egypt, and Central America, too—in different periods, but always in the same way, following the same brilliant flash of intuition. Four magical moments, separate and independent, where a spark was lit and the wheels of invention began to turn. And for all we know, in the history of our world, there may well have been other such inventions.
And if you think it’s tough to reimagine that moment, buried as it is beneath centuries and centuries, beneath layers and layers of reconstruction, you’re wrong. What’s amazing is that we can nearly capture the scene, as in a film: our little Mesopotamian fellow, working his clay, taking his stylus in hand. We can see him sitting there on his stool, forging a tablet. The tablet is small and he carves little boxes, to group the objects he wants to count. He counts them. Marks down their number. They’re things that must be reimbursed to the temple. In the upper right-hand corner he draws a cane (as in a reed): cane, in Sumerian, is gi, but gi can also mean something else, the verb “to reimburse.”
Magic. Or better yet, surprise. The sound is the same, but the meaning is completely different. All at once he realizes that he can use the symbol of a cane to say something else, something he clearly doesn’t know how to write. And this is what he does—he takes the logogram and changes its meaning, without altering the sound at all. Unintentionally, almost instinctually, his Sumerian neurons start to fire. He has made—he has recorded—a play on words. We call this principle homophony, and it’s very simple, intuitive, natural. As we’ll see, we still use it today—it comes to us spontaneously, and sometimes it even makes us laugh. Brushing away the dust of centuries past, I can imagine our Mesopotamian man, writing away and smiling at his sudden discovery. It’s the same face I make when I get a text with a homophonic emoji. Now, whether or not this man knew what he was getting himself into is another matter—and it’s highly unlikely he did.
ARMCHAIR INVENTORS
We must be careful when we talk about the invention of writing. Inventing writing is not a mechanical process. It’s not a matter of precisely and intentionally choosing signs to represent sounds, to create a perfectly functional and efficient system.
Nor should we be picturing the priestly and ethereal scribe, alone and intent, bent over his work on a rainy or muggy afternoon, drawing little squiggles that give shape to proto-cuneiform or Old Chinese in the matter of a day.
Which is not to say that there aren’t cases where a script was invented ad hoc by a lone individual. We’ll encounter a few in this book—like the script invented by Sequoyah, who in 1821 took the Latin and Greek alphabets by the scruff and wrangled them into a writing system for the Cherokee language. The achievement would make him a national hero. Or else the alphabet invented by Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth-century Benedictine abbess. Or there’s the Cameroonian king Njoya, who toward the end of the nineteenth century created a semi-syllabary for the Bamum people. But these creations are derivative, artificial, and, particularly in the case of the Bamum, imposed from on high, by those who govern.
Writing wasn’t invented in an armchair.
The invention of writing—especially when we mean writing invented from nothing, from scratch—came about as a process, a series of coordinated, cumulative, and gradual actions.
Writing as a complete system, structured and organized, was the work of many. By communicating, exchanging opinions, arguing it out, and eventually coming to an agreement, this multitude built a common, approved, standardized repertoire of signs.
Writing is therefore a social invention, where alignment, coordination, and feedback play essential roles. All of which we’ll see ample evidence of in the chapters to come.
In the same regard, writing was not invented in the blink of an eye, but in stages. It is a machine with thousands of gears, and in many cases it took several generations to develop. As we’ll see, the road to writing’s invention was filled with experiments, attempts, adjustments. It is therefore also a gradual process, a process of reiteration and transmission.
Now let’s look at the letters, the ones you’re reading on this page, or those from any other system—Arabic, Hebrew, Georgian, Chinese. Look at how the signs are drawn. What makes them the shape they are and not some other shape; why are there this many signs and not more; who determined which sounds to write down and which to leave out? These are the ingredients of true invention. The long process of negotiation, the shared effort, the building of an ordered and complete system. Finished, polished.
All of which leads us to see writing as a cultural product, not something inherent. As a kind of technology, an object, an artifact. And yet its shapes are the shapes we find in the world around us, and in all its contours. They follow the anatomy of our visual perception; they adapt to the things that surround us and that capture our attention. And the sounds behind these signs lend themselves to spontaneous wordplay; they engage our innate capacity to manipulate meanings, to lose ourselves in abstraction, to create far-fetched associations, to see symbols. Writing is a thing we’ve created, yes, but it is also deeply ingrained in our versatile ability to see with our own eyes while—at the same time, in the same moment, and almost by magic—seeing the world through the very different eyes of others. It’s all right there, crammed into our endlessly surprising human nature, even when we’re busy creating such a stubborn and static material object.