There was a quiet patch there, because I was too busy working on several almost-complete books that I have started to pitch. Here's a bit from one of them, working title Founding Principles.
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If science is to grow, if knowledge is to be spread, it needs to be shared. Stone engravings are all very well, but in the long run, we need paper and ink, we need writing, and we need printing, but it began on clay and stone, and I have just finished Margalit Fox's The Riddle of the Labyrinth, about how Linear B was decrypted.
above, the Rosetta Stone which let us decipher hieroglyphics; below, Egyptian hieroglyphics from Abu Simbel
The Rosetta stone was carved in 196 BCE, and it carries
three inscriptions, saying the same thing in Greek, in Egyptian demotic script,
and in hieroglyphics. The content is fairly boring, a list of taxes repealed by
Ptolemy V, but the use of three languages made the stone very exciting when it
was found in 1799 by French forces fighting in the Napoleonic Wars in Egypt.
When the French lost a major battle, the stone became a prize of war, handed
over to the victors, and placed on display in the British Museum in 1802, where
it remains.
A few things were needed before writing could catch
on. As a rule, nomads would have no interest in making records or carrying
records around, especially if they were on clay. So people probably needed
something to write on, something to write with, and some useful place where the
written records could be kept. Inscribed stones might be set up here and there,
but unless there were other uses for writing, the whole recording thing might
be a bit of a flash in the pan. As well, there needed to be an agreed alphabet
or script that readers and writers could understand.
The Sumerians explained the invention of writing with
a tale of a messenger who was so tired when he reached the court of a distant ruler
that he could not remember his message from the king of Uruk (between Baghdad
and Basrah). Hearing this, the distant ruler took a piece of clay, flattened
it, and wrote a message on it for the messenger to take back.
That story has a few sizable holes in it. Just for
starters, how would somebody back at Uruk know what the symbols meant? Still,
what can we expect in a tale about events that happened so long ago, when it
was probably never written down?
The Egyptians said the scribe and historian of the
gods, the god Thoth, invented hieroglyphs; the Sumerians either credited the
unnamed king, or the god Enlil. The Assyrians and Babylonians said the god Nabu
was the inventor. The Maya said they owed their writing system to the supreme
deity Itzamna who was a shaman, a sorcerer, and creator of the world. More
believably, Chinese tradition says writing was invented by a sage called Ts’ang
Chieh, a minister to the legendary Huang Ti (the Yellow Emperor).
Some forms of writing used characters for syllables
(Linear B is a good example), other writing systems used a symbol just to mean
a letter-sound (as in English), while still others used a symbol to mean a word
or idea, as happens in Chinese.
These full-word symbols are called ideograms or
logograms (which just means that each symbol writes an idea or a word), and
they can mean the same in different languages, rather like the numeral 5 or the
signs in airports all over the world. Just to confuse things, some of those
airport signs are also called pictograms, because they are pictures of what
they represent.
Then again, Egyptian hieroglyphs are a mixture of
alphabetic characters and ideograms, with a few extra symbols to clarify the
meaning. Few writing systems were designed from scratch: they just grew, a bit
like English spelling! The Sumerians lived in what is now southern Iraq.
Ignoring the myth of the Uruk messenger, their writing
probably started with marks on clay that Sumerian accountants used around 3300
or 3200 BCE to note down numbers of livestock and stores of grain, the sorts of
records societies need, once they start farming. Over about 500 years, the
symbols became more abstract, allowing ideas to be written down.
Egyptian hieroglyphs (literally “priestly writing”)
are unlike Sumerian cuneiform. They probably developed separately, but maybe
the Egyptians got the basic idea of marks to represent language from other
people. The Harappan script from the Indus valley in what is now Pakistan and
western India, seems to be another independent growth, though nobody has
learned to read it yet. The civilization which established the script collapsed
in about 1900 BCE, so their writing did not develop further.
The oldest alphabets that we understand seem to have
emerged in Egypt around 1800 BCE. They were developed by people speaking a
Semitic language, and only had consonants. These alphabets later gave rise to
several other systems: a Proto-Canaanite alphabet at around 1400 BCE and a
South Arabian alphabet, some 200 years later. There were others, but we will stay
with this short list.
The Phoenicians adopted the Proto-Canaanite alphabet
which later became both Aramaic and Greek, then through Greek, inspired other
alphabets used in Anatolia and Italy, and so gave us the Latin alphabet, which
became our modern alphabet. Aramaic may have inspired some Indian scripts, and
certainly it became the Hebrew and Arabic scripts. Greek and Latin alphabets
later inspired Norse runes and also the Gothic and Cyrillic alphabets.
The way was open for poetry, literature, history,
philosophy, mathematics, recipes, racing form guides, technical information, comic
books, tax, weather and astronomical records, religious teachings and more to
be written down and passed from one generation to another.
All of a sudden, people didn’t need to remember so
much, and all of the playing pieces that scientists would need were in place.
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