The first writings

We may assume that the deeper we go into the past, the simpler the languages, vocabularies, and concepts become, at least the written ones. The first languages had very few words, only the essential to everyday life. For the sake of linguistic comparisons, linguists have produced lists of as few as 100 concepts, or less, for which names can be safely presumed to have universally existed from the dawn of culture (Swadesh 1955; Starostin 1991; List, Cysouw, and Forkel 2016). These lists usually include parts of the human body, generic foods (meat, fish, leaf, root, etc.), common environmental elements (day, night, stone, water, etc.), some everyday actions (to eat, drink, die, walk, etc.), and some more abstract but universal concepts such as negation, deixis, time, or family relations. But the writing systems were complicated. People writing in the cuneiform script (Fig. 3.1.1), for example, initially used about 1500 graphemes, later reduced to about six hundred. Today, the Unicode Consortium has standardized more than nine hundred cuneiform signs (Unicode 2020a), presumably attested with reasonable confidence in the archeological record.

Figure 1. A large trilingual cuneiform inscription found on Van Castle hill, near the lake Van, in the ancient Achaemenid province of Armenia, today in eastern Turkey, with detail is inserted. The text is attributed to the Persian king Xerxes I (486 to 465 BC). Artwork by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen. Creative Commons license.

Figure 2. Some o the earliest writings from Mesopotamia. Cretan hieroglyphs and Linear A signs are shown on the margins for comparison. A: Uruk pre-cuneiform tags with a drawing of goat or sheep and a number; Al-Hasakah, Sumer, Iraq, circa 3300–3100 BC, on display at British Museum, London. Artwork by Paul Hudson. Creative Commons license. By flipping the token upside down, we obtain the Linear A sign A355 found on the PH10 tablet from Phaistos, Crete, dating from the Neopalatian MMIIB period (1750–1700 BC). The left side token reminds the Greek letter π (Pi). B: The Kish tablet, the oldest known example of early cuneiform, pictographic writing on a limestone tablet from Kish, Iraq, dated to 3500 BC; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Artwork by Locutus Borg. Marked as public domain. C: The Uruk III pre-cuneiform tablet AO19936 rwk P1150884, from the 4th millennium BC (Cunningham, Reich, and Fichner-Rathus 2014); Louvre Museum, Paris. Artwork by Lawrence S. Cunningham, John J. Reich, Lois Fichner-Rathus. Creative Commons license.

In the earliest times of writing, signs were figurative pictograms. Some pre-cuneiform signs from Mesopotamia and adjacent regions and similar Cretan hieroglyphic or Linear A signs are shown in Fig. 2. Most signs meant what they looked like, at least at first glance. A hand figure primarily meant a hand, and whatever a hand evokes. An eye meant an eye, a falcon meant a falcon, a circle meant a circle. Minoans from 2000 BC Crete would likely understand the signs written in Mesopotamia more than a millennium earlier because they used the same. There were probably as many pictograms as there were concepts that merited communication. When figurative drawing turned from fine art to utilitarian writing, much detail was no longer needed. A human head silhouette can be interpreted the same way as the head with all its features. The trouble is that different scribes would represent a human head differently, and the number of distinct signs for a concept could be inflated. Would a triangle pointing left be semantically different from a triangle pointing up?

Another problem is with signs representing objects that ceased to exist. Such signs would be challenging to interpret. Furthermore, according to the medium and the tool used for writing, graphemes could change the relative size, curves could become angles, and angular lines could curve. Fig. 3.1.3 shows an example of such evolution. Frankly, nobody would recognize the final form (7) of the SAG sign as a human head, had the intermediate forms – particularly 2 and 3 – were not attested, but the sign still meant the human head.

Figure 3. Evolution of the cuneiform sign SAG, meaning head from a pictogram of a human head, circa 3000 BC (1), through rotation around 2800–2600 BC (2), different abstractions for later monumental (3) or clay (4) writings, and different ductus adopted by Hittites (5) or Assyrians (6) in early 2nd millennium BC, to reach a final simplified form (7) around 1000 BC. Artwork by Tdi K. Creative Commons license.

The symbols were phonetically and semantically polyvalent and could read in many ways (Finkel 2019). Transliteration requires individual reading choices. The reader must decide which of the several possible meanings of each sign the writer intended in the original document and which of the several possible phonetic values a sign had in each context. Each sign should only be interpreted in the light of what precedes and what follows. Usually, three signs in a row begin to make sense. A fourth sign is easier to interpret if we have interpreted the other three.

These principles hold in today’s alphabetic writing systems to a certain extent. The meaning of the letter I, for example, is modulated by the following symbols. When followed by a space, the I signifies the personal pronoun I in English. If it is followed by an S and a space (is), it is pronounced differently and makes up an auxiliary verb. When followed by a T and a space, it signifies a different personal pronoun (it). When followed by an F and a space, the I gives the if conjunction. Replacement of the space at the third position with another letter modulates and specifies the meaning of the initial digraphs is-, it-, if-, etc., still further. The notorious English pair though/thought shows how the seventh letter of a series changes the sound and the meaning of the previous six. If there is any, the meaning of a sign also depends on the preceding signs. We may affirm either that English letters are polyvalent like were the cuneiform signs or that the cuneiform signs were meaningless on their own like English letters are thought to be today.

The cuneiform system was developed by Sumerians in Mesopotamia around 3500-3000 BC. The first signs were isolated pictorial tags drawn on pottery (Walker 1987). The first sequences of pictographic signs that could be considered as writing appear in the city of Uruk (Sumer, Babylonia, now Iraq) only by the end of the 4th millennium, i.e., 3000 BC (Hallo and Simpson 1971). At the same time, the hieroglyphics appeared in Egypt, at first, as isolated imprints on pottery from Abydos, radiocarbon dated to 3400 BC (Mitchell 1999), then as short sequences of readable hieroglyphic text by the 2nd Dynasty, around 2700 BC (Bard 2000). Indeed, the precise time when an isolated image of a corn ear found on a piece of pottery ceases to be purely decorative and begins to signify the content of the vessel is difficult to tell.

The Egyptians used at least 800 hieroglyphs. The number of signs decreased for a few centuries but increased to about 5000 by the Greco-Roman times. About 1120 Egyptian hieroglyphic signs are represented in Unicode today (Unicode 2020b). Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner (1879 –1963), an English linguist, philologist, and premier Egyptologist, did a formidable work to classify and describe the function of more than 700 of them in what is still considered the standard reference in the study of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (Gardiner 1957).

Figure 4. A rebus-style escort card from around 1865, read as ‘May I see you home my dear?’. Artwork by anonymous. Marked as public domain.

In ancient Egypt, writing is said to have been based on the rebus principle (Fig. 4). Incidentally, Jean-François Champollion (1790 –1832) – a French scholar, philologist, orientalist, and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology – interpreted the Egyptian hieroglyphs as rebus at a place and time interpreted the Egyptian hieroglyphs as rebus at a place and time when this kind of puzzle had reached extreme popularity.

To write down a phoneme or a syllable, the first writers drew a symbolic glyph that evoked an object, a concept, or an associated sound. The glyphs represent real or imaginary elements, some well recognizable in form. However, like cuneiform, Egyptian writing was redundant. Frequently, several glyphs conveyed the same meaning, but each glyph could be used for different purposes. The same sign could have different meanings and phonetic values according to context. It could be a logogram (pictorial interpretation), an ideogram (semantic interpretation; ‘determinative’), a syllable (syllabic interpretation), or a phoneme (phonetic interpretation). Transposed to Modern English, a phonetic sign would be the image of an eye for the letter I. A few hieroglyphs represented single consonants, but most signs functioned as logograms; they meant what they depicted. Some glyphs represented the first phoneme of the object’s name they depicted. The determinatives were signs with no phonetic but semantic value. These were to facilitate understanding by differentiating a word from its homophones. For example, the plural was represented at the end of a term by a symbol, e.g., three strokes, meaning multiple occurrences, like our modern ellipsis sign ‘...’. A glyph depicting, say, a house could be used for the sememe of the house (pictogram), for the sememe of safety because a house is safe (ideogram), as well as for the syllable /sa/ (syllabary) or the phoneme /s/ (alphabetic) because safe starts with those sounds. Roughly, this is how specialists interpret hieroglyphics today. In one of his inspiring lectures, Wesley Cecil expresses his amazement pointing out that Ancient Egyptian is the only known language where various writing systems coexist (Cecil 2012).

I do not know how close this theory is to the reality of several millennia before us and how much it is a mere projection of modern ideas about the sound and meaning of the ancient signs. Rebus communication requires phonetic and semantic reading proficiency, advanced reasoning capabilities, and resonance of mind between the writer and the reader. The theory is that modern words consist of elementary semantic elements conveyed by alphabetic letters. The Chinese writing system is based on a similar pattern of thinking. Early and modern Chinese characters are complexes of superimposed elementary pictographic signs, each conveying a simple concept (K and Lee 2019). In contrast, ancient cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphic systems agglutinate elementary concepts in a linear arrangement to form words. In either case, as the eye scans the pile or string of characters, the reader can associate the elementary semantic elements into a specific signified object.

It will, hopefully, become clear from this analysis that post-Egyptian writing systems such as Greek, Latin, or English are just as heterogeneous, if not more complicated, except that the elementary signs have changed. I argue that the Greek and Latin letters are made of elementary strokes and have recognizable forms. They were primarily used as pictograms, conveying their form, or ideograms, to convey concepts intuitively associated with their form. Additionally, each letter was assigned a phonetic value which was accurately or inaccurately transmitted from person to person and from population to population. The phones correspond to instinctive sounds that humans produce in association with the concept evoked by the letterform. For example, [mmm…] is instinctively uttered for effort or pain; [eee…] for jubilation; [sss…] for silence, [zzz…] for sleep, frication for friction, etc. Sometimes the phonation representing the meaning of a letter is more elaborate and indirect, through mouth-configurations evoking the letterform or the concept behind, e.g., [o] for roundness.

The argument is as complex as writing itself. To interpret A, we need to know the potential meanings of all the other letters A combines. My hypotheses were developed over many observation, prediction, and validation cycles. Still, I have no reason to believe that this process has an end or that my suggestions are anywhere near perfection. I, therefore, rely upon the reader’s indulgence and patience. A couple of tables summarize the letter meanings that I have deduced from observations presented later in the book. I have tried to keep cross-referencing to a minimum for the sake of readability. A linear reading should be easier, but the reader should, sometimes, just take my word for what I claim and read on until the evidence is presented. Also, I occasionally opt to repeat an argument instead of inserting a cross-reference. The examples are so many that, by the end, the meanings of the letters will hopefully have been fixed in mind, and interpretation of letter sequences will become intuitive.

The debate of Egyptologists and Assyriologists about who wrote first, Sumerians or Egyptians, is beyond our immediate interests. The origin and potential meaning of classical and modern alphabetic letters are more relevant to literal semantics. The hypothesis is the following. If our letters were derived by gradual abstraction from Egyptian or other pictograms, they likely retained the semantic value of their ancestral pictograms, at least for some time when the first roots were made up. We have the example of the cuneiform sign SAG evolving from an icon of a human head and retaining the semantic value of the original pictogram (Fig. 3.1.3). A letter that abstracts an icon of a fish may still mean fish no matter how it is pronounced in various languages. Some cultures may borrow a sign for its meaning and change its sound. Others may borrow a sign for its sound and change or forget its meaning. If alphabetic letters were de novo inventions unrelated to older figurative signs, then the hypothesis of iconicity would have no archaeological support. In my search to establish evolutionary links between our alphabets and previous pictographic systems, I will examine individual letters case by case. But we also need to consider the history of linear writing systems that succeeded the Egyptian hieroglyphic and Mesopotamian cuneiform scripts in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The so-called Phoenician script was first documented by the German orientalist Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius (1786 – 1842), who interpreted the glyphs as pictograms, i.e., images with simple meaning (Robinson 1843; Peters 1901). In the 19th century, scholars believed that those glyphs derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, either directly (De-Rougé 1859) – let us draw a fish differently – or through simplifications and standardizations of more ancient Proto-Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite, or other early West Semitic scripts (Lidzbarski 1901; Gardiner 1916; Krahmalkov 2002). The prevailing theory is that Semitic-speaking peoples from northern Egypt, influenced by Egyptian culture, borrowed some 30 hieroglyphs to write their language (Goldwasser 2010; 2011) – or to create a new language, I would say. Those characters, still pictographic but somewhat abstracted, were used in Canaan by 1400 BC (Howard 2014). The reason proposed for this simplification and standardization was that older scripts, the cuneiform system, and the Egyptian hieroglyphs had too many complex characters and required long professional training to achieve proficiency (Hock and Joseph 2009). However, this reasoning does not hold for the Chinese writing system, which has survived millennia without comparable simplification.

The hypothesis of an Egyptian-Sinaitic-Canaanite-Phoenician line of evolution for the origin of the first alphabet did not pass without objection. In addition to the Assyrian versus Egyptian origin of writing, a second debate built up with archaeologists working in various regions defending the importance of their findings and suggesting that the development of the first alphabet must have passed from their territory of interest. Peters reviewed all those early alternative hypotheses and remarked the absence of intermediate glyph forms between Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Phoenician signs, as well as the enormous time gaps between archaeological specimens that would potentially connect the Phoenician to the Egyptian endpoints (Peters 1901). He argued that the names of the Phoenician letters could provide more reliable information than their forms. On these grounds, he believed that the Phoenician script derived from the Babylonian. His argument was fair, given the poor archaeological evidence of his time. A few years later, the discoverer of the Minoan civilization Sir Arthur Evans affirmed that alphabetic writing did derive from Egyptian hieroglyphs but the path of this evolution passed through Crete (Evans 1909).  More than 120 years later, the theories must be re-evaluated in light of the accumulated epigraphical material. In the following sections I will examine today's evidence and try to re-evaluate those early hypotheses as to where the so-called Phoenician alphabet came from, and how.

References

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———. 2011. “The Advantage of Cultural Periphery: The Invention of the Alphabet in Sinai (circa 1840 BCE).” In Culture Contacts and the Making of Cultures: Papers in Homage to Itamar Even-Zohar, edited by Rakefet Sela-Sheffy and Gideon Toury, 255–321. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviuv University.

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