Two Recent Books on Ancient Scripts Author(s): John G. Younger The Shape of Script: How and Why Writing Systems Change by Stephen D. Houston; Agency in Ancient Writing by Joshua Englehardt Source: American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 118, No. 3 (July 2014), pp. 521-525 Published by: Archaeological Institute of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3764/aja.118.3.0521 . Accessed: 06/11/2014 10:54 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Archaeological Institute of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Journal of Archaeology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 129.237.35.237 on Thu, 6 Nov 2014 10:54:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REVIEW ARTICLE Two Recent Books on Ancient Scripts JOHN G. YOUNGER The Shape of Script: How and Why Writing spoken language” (4). By 2700 B.C.E., syllabic signs Systems Change, edited by Stephen D. Houston transcribed full sentences. Soon, scribes in northern (School for Advanced Research Advanced Semi- Mesopotamia began writing Akkadian in cuneiform. nar Series). Pp. xxiii + 317, figs. 54, tables 5. School Often, the Sumerian sign for a word was used for for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe 2012. the Akkadian translation; for instance, the Sumerian $34.95. ISBN 978-1-934691-42-7 (paper). sign saĝ (head) was used to write the Akkadian word for “head,” re¯šu (transcribed as “SAĜ”). In the Old Agency in Ancient Writing, edited by Joshua Engle- Babylonian period (ca. 1900–1600), new genres in hardt. Pp. xviii + 299, figs. 76, tables 7. University Akkadian emerged, including “new ways to increase Press of Colorado, Boulder 2012. $75. ISBN 978- the complexity of the system” (23; cf. Johnson and 1-60732-199-6 (cloth). Johnson in Englehardt’s Agency in Ancient Writing). Baines’ study, “Scripts, High Culture, and Admin- Both Houston’s The Shape of Script and Englehardt’s istration in Middle Kingdom Egypt,” outlines the his- Agency in Ancient Writing take up early scripts, some- tory of Egyptian writing: invented in the late fourth times the same scripts, and try to explain their origins, millennium, it could notate full syntax within 1,000 development, and occasionally either their demise years. There are three types of Egyptian writing: for- (e.g., Mayan) or their survival to the present day (e.g., mal hieroglyphic, cursive hieratic, and, in the seventh Arabic, Latin). Houston’s book is mostly presentation- century B.C.E., a more cursive script, demotic. Hiero- al, giving basic information on these early scripts (in- glyphic was used for high culture and sacred texts at cluding numerals) and their development over time. a time when only the king and the central elite were The reasons for change are usually ascribed to his- literate. Throughout its long history, Egyptian writing torical factors, such as the adaptation of Arabic to the (scripts and literatures) changed slowly, if at all, ex- various languages brought under Islam. Englehardt’s cept in the First Intermediate period, which saw new book is much more theory driven: human agency cre- genres (e.g., biography, fiction), reformed script styles, ates “things,” which, as “material agency,” work with a standardized orthography, and a standardized seal people in creating a total society (a reflexive process form, the scarab, that became popular throughout the called “structuration”1). eastern Mediterranean. This review takes Houston’s book first, which con- In the third contribution, “Paragrams, Punctuation, sists of 10 studies of how scripts change. The preface, and System in Ancient Roman Script,” Bodel outlines “The Shape of Script—Views from the Middle,” defines a history of the Latin script. The Etruscan alphabet script as reflecting “an auditory world” but notes that “in derives from Euboic Greek, and from Etruscan almost expression it is palpably a thing” (xviii [emphasis origi- all Italian scripts derive. After Rome had shuffled off nal]). The common topics in this book include cursiv- the Etruscan monarchy at the end of the sixth century ization (rapid writing), the changes that occur when a B.C.E., it “spread both the Latin language and the Ro- script is adapted to another language, and aesthetics. man alphabet throughout the peninsula” (70). By the Veldhuis contributes the first study, “Cuneiform: end of the fifth century, Latin had deliberately and Changes and Developments.” Archaic cuneiform (late pointedly departed from Etruscan; for instance, it read fourth to early third millennium) was a Sumerian “ad- left to right instead of right to left, and it took the top ministrative system and does not directly represent a halves of the Etruscan fifth letter “X” for “5” (V) and 1 Giddens 1984. 521 American Journal of Archaeology 118 (2014) 521–25 This content downloaded from 129.237.35.237 on Thu, 6 Nov 2014 10:54:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 522 JOHN G. YOUNGER [AJA 118 10th letter zen—“↕”—for “50” (↑) because Etruscan and the majority of words . are monomorphemic, so had taken the lower halves for these numbers (“Λ” and characters often correspond to syllables and in many “↓,” respectively). Bodel ends by discussing other, odd cases to words” (162). In literary Chinese, there is little Latin signs (“paragrams”), such as the retained five- inflection; syntax is governed by grammatical particles; bar “M” that abbreviated “Manius” (“ꟿ,” eventually and word order is like that in English (Verb-Object). abbreviated “M' ”) and the S bracket that abbreviated Japanese is polysyllabic; verbs and adjectives are highly a seventh-century C.E. list of replacement consuls, or inflected; affixes mark the language as agglutinative; suffecti (whence comes our scroll bracket [ }]). and word order is fundamentally Object-Verb. Mak- In “Stability and Change in Arabic Script,” Gru- ing Chinese characters fit the Japanese language ne- endler focuses on Arabic’s ability to adapt to new lan- cessitated accommodation strategies, notably kundoku guages. The script is an abjad, mainly consonantal. (reading by gloss) (169), which allows an oral inter- Gruendler attributes its stability to “its unifying role pretation in Japanese of a Chinese visual text. In fact, in Islamic scripture and the shared Arabic lexicon” Lurie notes that “correctly literary Chinese prose and (92). The earliest major text is the Qur’an, compiled even poetry [could] be produced by people who did ca. 650 C.E. and mostly memorized since. By 700, not speak Chinese” (171). classical Arabic (ʽarabiyya) had developed as a formal In “Maya Writing: Modified, Transformed,” Houston idiom “used by people with different levels of compe- presents a detailed table of five major periods in Maya tence” (100). Supralinear signs (strokes or dots) were writing from before 250 B.C.E. to 1600 C.E. He then therefore adapted from Syriac to help readers iden- focuses on variation, warning that a scholarly obsession tify short vowels, case markers, and novel consonants; with normalized glyphs may be “intellectually dubious handbooks and manuals were also plentiful. and perhaps unethical” (208 n. 1). Several factors in- In the fifth chapter, “Some Principles and Patterns fluenced variety in glyph forms, including the aestheti- of Script Change,” Salomon focuses on how scripts cism of the Mayan court. Houston outlines what he calls undergo changes, often for technological reasons “domains of change”—that is, where and how change or to adapt to new languages. When scripts are writ- is likely to occur (196–207). The earliest glyph forms ten with pen and ink, onset and final marks typically (ca. 25 B.C.E.) are small: “only a small group gathered take “the form of a short horizontal line” (124), such around [a stele] could make out the characters” (198). as the serif at the bottom of “t.” Modern technology Late Classic glyphs are rounded—they could be seen by also forces change, such as the new single-stroke let- a larger number of viewers using “shifting light during terforms for computers (e.g., the “A” in the Kia logo, the day and at night by lambent torch” (199). KIΛ). The greatest changes occur when a script is ad- In the ninth chapter, “The Shape of Script in a opted for a different language. For instance, the Egyp- Colonial Context: Alphabetic and Pictorial Registers tian “house” logogram, pr, became the Semitic “B” in Mixtec Texts,” Monaghan focuses on lienzos, indig- for bet (house) (127–28). enous, scroll-like codices that survived into the Early In “Script Change in Bronze Age China,” Steinke Colonial period. These pictorial books contain he- analyzes several approaches to understanding the roic histories, royal genealogies, and calendrical and history of Chinese writing. For Boltz, Chinese writing divinatory information. In the immediate postcontact developed in a unidirectional fashion, developing period, there was an immense loss of indigenous pop- rebus-like characters. For Qiu Xigui, graphs lost their ulation as a result of imported disease. Being able to “iconicity” because the desire to write more quickly re- demonstrate that one’s family owned such-and-such sulted in linearization (thick strokes became thin) and property was crucial, and lienzos, which contain this streamlining (disconnected lines conjoined).2 Aesthet- information, therefore also became important docu- ics also played a role in the development of Chinese ments in settling property disputes.