Vol 455|23 October 2008 BOOKS & ARTS Deciphering vanished scripts The origins of communication are explored in a landmark compilation that charts the disappearance of systems from ancient to Turkish , explains Andrew Robinson.

The Disappearance of Writing Systems: Perspectives on Literacy and Communication Edited by John Baines, John Bennet and Stephen Houston Equinox: 2008. 384 pp. £65.00

For more than 3,000 years, hieroglyphs were

used to write the of ancient Egypt. IMAGES LIBRARY/GETTY BRIDGEMAN ART Then the script disappeared from use. The latest known hieroglyphic inscription was carved by a priest into the gate of Hadrian on the Egyptian island of Philae at Aswan on 24 August ad 394. Knowledge of how to read the hieroglyphs vanished in late antiquity and had to be recovered in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, deciphered with the help of the newly discovered Rosetta Stone. By opening up the world of ancient Egypt before early Greek and Hebrew records, scholars doubled the time span of accessible history. Archaeologists, epigraphists and linguists have for centuries puzzled over the origins of Hieroglyphs fell into obscurity because of political, religious and language changes in Egypt. written communication, especially the alpha- . Less studied is the disappearance of long- century bc by Alexander the Great and was It is a pioneering, fascinating and authori- established ancient writing systems, such as ruled by the Greek-speaking Ptolemy dynasty, tative book. The 17 contributors cover a , Mesopotamian cunei- which used an — hence the inscrip- surprising range of topics in detail and with form and Mayan , an exception being tion of the on the Rosetta comprehensive bibliographies. They discuss the that continue to flour- Stone in 196 bc along with the hieroglyphs. familiar lost scripts such as cuneiform, and ish after some 3,000 years. Yet, “writing systems However, unlike in , the Egyptian script more obscure examples, including the Kha- that have been lost are often better understood was not abolished. Instead, the hieroglyphs rosthi script of northwest , the Meroitic than those for which we try to establish their were slowly marginalized by a flux of politics, script of Nubia in what is now northern , process of formation”, concludes Egyptologist language, script and religion. After the death of Aztec and Mexican pictography, the knotted- John Baines in The Disappearance of Writing Cleopatra in 30 bc, Egypt became a province cord quipus of the Inca empire and its Andean Systems, a landmark collection of articles by of the Roman Empire, which wrote in Latin successors, and the Manchu script of , scholars. “Their loss may be just as revealing script. The spread of Christianity gave rise to which fell out of favour with the end of the Qing as their first appearance.” the Egyptian Coptic Church, which wrote in dynasty in 1912 but was revived in the 1980s. A modern example is Kemal Atatürk’s 1928 Coptic script, and in the seventh century ad, Inevitably there are omissions, most regrettably abolition of the from the Turkish Egypt was conquered by writing in the the much-debated script of Easter language. replaced it with the Arabic script of . These changes together Island in the southeastern Pacific, a script that as part of his drive to bring Turkey closer to fossilized the hieroglyphs. probably flourished for less than 100 years until European culture. Today, few Turks can read The book came out of the first major confer- its rapid disappearance in the mid-nineteenth in Arabic script, and soon ence to focus on the disappearance of ancient century. the ability will reside only with scholars. In cen- writing systems, held in 2004 in Oxford, UK, David Brown’s accessible essay on the increas- turies to come, Baines imagines, this combina- and organized by the three editors. Baines is ing redundancy of cuneiform in Babylonia tion of script and language may disappear too professor of Egyptology at the University of (now southern ) after the Persian conquest and need to be deciphered. Oxford and well known for his work on literacy of 539 bc offers a good case study of the multi- Although separated widely in time, these in ancient Egypt. John Bennet of the University ple, often interdependent, causes of script obso- Egyptian and Turkish script disappearances of Sheffield, UK, is an expert on the Aegean lescence. Cuneiform, written in wedge-shaped share a common element: a seismic shift in scripts, notably Linear A and B, and Stephen signs on clay with a reed stylus, was used for political power and cultural prestige that Houston of Brown University in Rhode Island three millennia before the first century ad caused the adoption of a new writing . has been instrumental in the Maya decipher- to write many of the Middle East: Pharaonic Egypt was conquered in the fourth ment revolution since the 1980s. Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Old Persian

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and others, rather like today’s use of the Latin in Michael Macdonald’s essay. The association longevity of Chinese characters, a subject that script to write European languages. Brown of the Arabic script with the prestige of Islam is somewhat neglected by the book. The classi- advances economic, linguistic and administra- and the Koran was the determining factor in cal Chinese script enjoys high respect because tive arguments for the gradual disappearance of its triumph. of its antiquity — it is descended from the cuneiform from its former heartland around In , by contrast, a unifying script recognizable characters inscribed on ‘oracle Babylon, the capital of Babylonia. has not been important. Most modern Indian bones’ of the Shang civilization from 1200 bc Economically, Babylon declined in impor- scripts derive from one ancestor, Brahmi, first — and because of its imperial and artistic tance when Alexander’s alleged plan to make attested in the third century bc in the rock associations. When the former Chinese leader the city the capital of Asia failed to transpire edicts of Ashoka at various sites in Mao Zedong, himself a calligrapher, proposed after his death in 323 bc. The city was also and northern India. Yet , the language to romanize the Chinese script in the 1950s bypassed to the north by new desert trade of the Hindu scriptures, has been written in to educate the masses, he was forced by the routes from Asia to the Med- many Indian scripts, literati to compromise with the introduction iterranean, which opened including south Indian of a simplified character script and a parallel up with the domestication Grantha and Devana- romanized phonetic system known as Pinyin. of the camel as a pack ani- gari. Similarly, the Pali In Japan, several thousand Chinese characters mal. The use of Babylon’s language of Buddhist were integrated with two sets of indigenous cuneiform script there- scriptures is written syllabic signs during the first five centuries fore diminished in com- in the Sinhala, Thai, ad to make one prestigious . mercial transactions. Burmese and Khmer Despite the difficulties of writing Chinese and Linguistically, Babylo- scripts, among oth- Japanese, neither script looks likely to disap- TRUSTEES OF THE TRUSTEES nian cuneiform was dis- ers. This availability of pear any time soon under the onslaught of advantaged in comparison alternatives, says Rich- alphabetic triumphalism. with alphabetic scripts. It ard Salomon in his The Disappearance of Writing Systems was cumbersome, requir- essay, explains why the reveals that commerce, culture, language, ing hundreds of signs — a Cuneiform from 3000 bc records the beer early script medium, power, prestige and religion, in mixture of syllables and rations given to workers in . — probably an Indian varying combinations, are all implicated in word symbols known as derivative of Aramaic the disappearance of scripts. Each language– — and used a clay medium. Unlike — could be abandoned with the decline of script combination raises issues that cannot the used to write Greek, Phoenician the Kushan empire that used it, despite its be understood from linguistic considerations and Aramaic, Babylonian cuneiform could not use in Sanskrit and Buddhist texts between alone. We know more about script death than be written rapidly, cursively or conveniently the third century bc and the third century ad. script birth, but no single theory can encom- with a brush on or other lightweight Perhaps because of the country’s pluralistic pass why scripts flourish or vanish. ■ materials. Nevertheless, cuneiform was some- traditions, India has chosen not to define its Andrew Robinson is a visiting fellow of Wolfson times adapted to write alphabets. Such was its culture by a single script, unlike China and College, Cambridge CB3 9BB, UK, and author prestige that the Persian conquerors of Babylon the . of The Story of Writing and Lost Languages: The invented a new cuneiform alphabet for their One wonders whether China’s enduring Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts. own language, now known as Old Persian. political unity may partly account for the e-mail: [email protected] Administratively, however, the Persian empire preferred the Aramaic script to any kind of cuneiform. Originally a Semitic lan- guage of ancient , Aramaic had become the lingua franca of the Middle East by the New look at cancer drugs sixth century bc. Later, it was the vernacular language of Jesus Christ and the Apostles and is exhibition called Durchleuchtet, starting this Durchleuchtet used in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Aramaic eventu- week at Artpoint 222 in Vienna. Each image Artpoint 222, Vienna, Austria ally displaced cuneiform, which found its last explores a cancer drug — such as tamoxifen, 25 October until 27 November 2008 refuge in astrology. Brown tells how scribes oxaliplatin, herceptin and others — that working in the collapsing temples of Babylon Oechsli handles in her day job as a clinical still, as late as the first century ad, “exploit[ed] Margaret Oechsli goes on extraordinary research coordinator in the Heart and Lung a shrinking market for old-fashioned Babylon- journeys with her microscope. Peering at a Institute at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, ian astrology in cuneiform”, even though they smudge of a dried chemical, such as crystal- Kentucky. no longer wrote in an elegant hand. lized glutamic acid, she probes the refracted The medical theme complements the The Aramaic script was itself extinguished light looking for artistic inspiration. “I have fund-raising goal of Durchleuchtet — which in the seventh century ad by the Arabic script, no control over what I see in the microscope,” in German means both ‘illuminated with which developed from Aramaic via the script she says in a rich Polish accent. But what she light’ and ‘X-rayed’. Oechsli’s photos will of the , who ruled from in finds and photographs is stunning. She has be auctioned alongside artistically ren- . Arabic eliminated many pre-exist- created more than 3,000 images, shimmering dered radiographs of Austrian athletes, ing South Semitic alphabets that had been geometries and colourful landscapes that look and the proceeds will benefit the charity invented by literate but bored desert nomads more like paintings than photos. Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without in the Arabian peninsula before the arrival of Oechsli’s abstract studies of microscopic Borders). Islam — a subtle process that is well explained chemical structures will be shown in a new Although her background in science has

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