The Disappearance of Writing Systems: Perspectives on Literacy and Communication, Edited by John Baines, John Bennet, Stephen Houston

Edited by

John Baines [+–]

University of Oxford

John Baines is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford. His principal publications are on Egyptian art, literature, and religion. He has also studied the role of writing in Egyptian society and high-cultural legitimations and concerns of elites. His publications include Visual and Written Culture in Ancient Egypt (2007) and The Disappearance of Writing Systems (co-edited with John Bennet and Stephen Houston, Equinox, 2008).

John Bennet [+–]

University of Sheffield

John Bennet is Director of the British School at Athens and Professor of Aegean Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. His research interests lie in early writing and administrative systems (especially Linear B), and the integration of material and textual data to understand past complex societies. He has employed this approach to the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures of the Bronze Age Aegean, as well as in the context of diachronic regional studies to the Venetian and Ottoman periods of Greece. His recent publications include: A Historical and Economic Geography of Ottoman Greece: The Southwestern Morea in the Early 18th Century (American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2005), ΑΘΥΡΜΑΤΑ: Critical Essays on the Archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean in Honour of E. Susan Sherratt (Archaeopress, 2014), and The Disappearance of Writing Systems: Perspectives on Literacy and Communication (Equinox, 2008), co-edited with John Baines and Stephen Houston.

Stephen Houston [+–]

Brown University

Stephen Houston, a specialist in Maya civilization, is Dupee Family Professor of Social Science and Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. A MacArthur Fellow, he is also co-editor of a dozen monographs on archaeological work in Guatemala, and author or editor of many books, the most recent of which is Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea (with Daniel Finamore, 2010)

PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2010

This volume gathers papers from the first conference ever to be held on the disappearance of writing systems, in Oxford in March 2004. While the invention and decipherment of writing systems have long been focuses of research, their eclipse or replacement have been little studied. Because writing is so important in many cultures and civilizations, its disappearance – followed by a period without it or by replacement with a different writing system – is of almost equal significance to invention as a mark of radical change. Probably more writing systems have disappeared than have survived in the last five thousand years.

Case studies from the Old and New Worlds are presented, ranging over periods from the second millennium BC to the present. To address many types of transmission, the broadest possible definition of ‘writing’ is used, notably including Mexican pictography and the Andean khipu system. One chapter discusses the larger proportion of known human societies which have not possessed complex material codes like writing, offering an alternative perspective on the long-term transmission of socially salient subjects. A concluding essay draws out common themes and offers an initial synthesis of results.

The volume offers a new perspective on approaches to writing that will be significant for the understanding of writing systems and their social functions, literacy, memory, and high-cultural communication systems in general.

Prelims

List of Illustrations xii – xii

John Baines,John Bennet,Stephen Houston FREE

University of Oxford

University of Sheffield

Brown University

List of Tables vii – xi

John Baines,John Bennet,Stephen Houston FREE

University of Oxford

University of Sheffield

Brown University

Notes on contributors xiii – xvi

John Baines,John Bennet,Stephen Houston FREE

University of Oxford

University of Sheffield

Brown University

Preface xvii – xviii

John Baines,John Bennet,Stephen Houston FREE

University of Oxford

University of Sheffield

Brown University

Now You See It; Now You Don’t! The Disappearance of the Linear A Script on Crete [+–] 1 – 29

John Bennet £17.50

University of Sheffield

This chapter explores the disappearance of one of the three scripts in use in the Aegean world (primarily the island of Crete, the southern mainland of Greece, and some of the Aegean islands) in the second millennium BC.

The Disappearance of Writing Systems: Hieroglyphic Luwian [+–] 31 – 43

J. David Hawkins £17.50

University of London

Signs certainly identifiable as hieroglyphs are first found on seals (usually known only from impressions on clay sealings) from the Old and Middle Kingdom periods of Hattusa and in smaller quantities from other sites, also of unknown provenance, c. 1650–1450 BC (Güterbock 1942; Boehmer and Güterbock 1987).

The Obsolescence and Demise of Cuneiform Writing in Elam [+–] 45 – 72

Jeremy Black £17.50

University of Oxford

Jeremy Black† (1951–2004), who died entirely unexpectedly a month after the conference at which he presented his fully composed chapter for this book as a paper, was Lecturer in Akkadian in the University of Oxford. His primary research was on Sumerian literature, in which he published Reading Sumerian Poetry (1998) while developing the major collaborative project, the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk). That project also yielded a volume of translations, The Literature of Ancient Sumer (2004), by Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson, and Gábor Zólyomi. Until 1988 Jeremy Black was the director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. He was the author of works on Sumerian grammar and editions of cuneiform texts. The present volume is dedicated to his memory.

Elam is the historical name for the region of south-western Iran closest to Iraq, covering both the mountainous area and the plain. It was anciently the region of the Elamite civilization, with its own language, which was written in cuneiform script for almost 2000 years. Uniquely, three distinct cuneiform writing systems were used in south-western Iran in ancient times: Mesopotamian cuneiform, writing various phases of Akkadian language; the adaptation derived from that used to write Elamite; and Old Persian cuneiform, invented to write this early Indo-European language.

Increasingly Redundant: The Growing Obsolescence of the Cuneiform Script in Babylonia from 539 BC1 [+–] 73 – 108

David Brown £17.50

Freie Universität Berlin

In 539 BC Cyrus conquered Mesopotamia. No subsequent ruler of the land claimed to be Mesopotamian, or claimed a common heritage with the populace, though being ‘king of Babylon’ continued to hold great significance throughout the Achaemenid period and well into the Hellenistic (Sherwin-White 1987: 8–9).3 Between 334 and 331 BC, Alexander the Great swept across Asia, initiating Macedonian/Greek rule in Mesopotamia until c. 143 BC.4 After a period of uncertainty Mesopotamia fell under stable Parthian rule from 125 BC. Following Roman involvement from AD 115–199, Mesopotamia came to be controlled by the Sassanians from AD 226 until AD 642, when the Arab caliphs came to power.

Script Obsolescence in Ancient Italy: From Pre-Roman to Roman Writing [+–] 109 – 138

Kathryn Lomas £17.50

University College London

The disappearance of the indigenous writing systems of pre-Roman Italy is inextricably bound up with the Roman conquest of the peninsula in the fourth and third centuries BC, and the so-called ‘Romanization’ of Italy—the postconquest process of acculturation.2 Their demise cannot, however, be explained as a process of collapse resulting from the active suppression of indigenous cultures, but was the result of a far more complex and long-term interaction between competing cultures of writing, and of evolution within those cultures. It must also be examined in terms of the socio-political power relations between Rome and the rest of Italy and the ways in which these changed and developed between the third century BC and early first century AD. The disappearance of indigenous scripts and associated changes in the wider culture of writing is a valuable indicator of changes in elite culture and perceptions of group identity.

Whatever Happened to Kharoṣṭhī? The Fate of a Forgotten Indic Script [+–] 139 – 155

Richard Solomon £17.50

University of Washington

The Kharoṣṭhī script tends to be viewed as a minor node on the family tree of Indian scripts; a sort of stepsister to the much better known and more influential complex of scripts that are conventionally grouped under the name ‘Brāhmī’.

On the Demise of Egyptian Writing: Working with a Problematic Source Basis [+–] 157 – 181

Martin Andreas Stadler £17.50

University of Würzburg

For the study of the end of Egyptian writing systems, demotic is of special relevance, because Egyptian texts continued to be notated in demotic long after other Egyptian scripts were abandoned (‘Demotic’ refers to the Egyptian language of 650 BC onwards and ‘demotic’ to the script). The demotic Philae graffiti are the latest of all Egyptian inscriptions.

The Last Traces of Meroitic? A Tentative Scenario for the Disappearance of the Meroitic Script [+–] 183 – 205

Claude Rilly £17.50

CNRS-LLACAN

Meroitic was the language of the successive kingdoms of Kush, the Ancient Sudan, along the Middle Nile, roughly from the first Cataract upstream to the Khartoum Reach (see Fig. 8.1). Although this language was not written with a script of its own before its latest stage, in the Kingdom of Meroe (c. 300 BC–AD 350), I have presented evidence for its having appeared altogether earlier in the Nile Valley (Rilly 2001).

The Phoenix of Phoinikēia: Alphabetic Reincarnation in Arabia [+–] 207 – 229

Michael Macdonald £17.50

Oxford University

Shortly after its invention in the second millennium BC, the alphabet split into two traditions. One of these—the Phoenico Aramaic—spread both west to the Greeks1 and beyond, and east, across Asia as far as Manchuria (Stary, in this volume), becoming the ancestor of all but one of the traditional alphabets in use today. By contrast, the other—South Semitic—alphabetic tradition was used almost exclusively within the Arabian Peninsula3 in antiquity, and only one of its descendants has survived into the modern world.

The Small Deaths of Maya Writing [+–] 231 – 252

Stephen Houston £17.50

Brown University

Death happens once to any organism, which lives and expires, not to be reborn unless by miracle. Whether writing systems ‘die’, finally so, was the question posed from various angles in a recent paper by the author and two colleagues, John Baines and Jerrold Cooper (Houston et al. 2003). The topic had seemed overlooked, so our essay probed the twisting fate of writing systems in extremis. We came to the conclusion that diminished functions of script, linkages to obsolete knowledge with which a script had become identified, and the physical expiration of script-users from the effects of war or disease led systematically to the obsolescence of certain writing systems. Most defunct scripts were replaced by writing systems regarde —at least at the time—as facilitators of a wider variety of uses. Histories differed: a few scripts, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, enjoyed long ‘lives’, decrepit only after three millennia; others, such as Rongorongo, travelled along much shorter paths.

The Death of Mexican Pictography [+–] 253 – 284

Elizabeth Hill Boone £17.50

Tulane University

Mexican pictography—the graphic system of communication used by the Aztecs, Mixtecs, and their neighbours in central and southern Mexico c. AD 1300–1600—is not usually embraced within the term ‘writing’ by specialists in writing systems. This is because, as Houston et al. (2003: 430) have recently noted, Mexican pictography does not have as its goal the recording of speech or ‘meaningful sound’ and thus ‘depart[s] from the linguistic underpinnings that characterize the writing systems of the world’. These scholars further assert that the study of Mexican pictography ‘is not very helpful in understanding heavily phonic systems’. As a specialist in Mexican pictography, I am compelled to argue to the contrary.

Late Khipu Use [+–] 285 – 310

Frank Solomon £17.50

University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Quechua khipu (pl. khipukuna) and Aymara chinu (pl. chinunaka), both mean ‘knot’, and both denote objects of cord used in the Andes to store and share information. Peruvian schoolbooks and popular media locate the khipu in a triangle together with Inka rule and Quechua speech. But all three sides of the triangle crumble under research pressure. Dialectology and diachronic linguistics (Cerrón-Palomino 1987: 79–217; Parker 1963; Torero 1974) have shown that the ‘Quechua II’ dialect which served as an administrative language of the Inka state is only one of a family of Quechuas spoken before, during, and after Inka rule. Likewise archaeology and ethnography show that the Inka khipu (Urton 2003), though by far the most common kind of khipu, belonged to a family of fibre-based media originating long before Inka rule (Conklin 2003; Splitstoser et al. 2003) and outlasting it, as we shall see, by over 400 years.

Disappearance of Writing Systems: The Manchu Case [+–] 311 – 321

Giovanni Stary £17.50

University of Venice

The Manchu language has been called the ‘guoyu’ in Chinese and ‘gurun-i bithe’ in Manchu, that is, the ‘state’ or ‘dynasty language’—a definition which seems unequivocally to connect the destiny of the dynasty to that of its language and script. This definition, however, is true only in part and shows three substantial exceptions: they are the result of the unique development which the Manchu people and its culture—and the script is part of it—have undergone in the course of their extraordinary history.

Revelatory Scripts, ‘the Unlettered Genius’, and the Appearance and Disappearance of Writing [+–] 323 – 334

John Monaghan £17.50

University of Illinois

This chapter builds on the work of those who have linked writing and revelation and consider these scripts as a class of writing systems that develops with some frequency among peoples who are being colonized by expanding nations and empires. It suggests that scripts this sort are not uncommon, and that although they sometimes enter into conventional usage, it is more likely they disappear without leaving much of a trace.

History without Text [+–] 335 – 346

Chris Gosden £17.50

University of Oxford

In what follows I shall look first at oral histories and how such histories might be rooted in the landscape, before looking at unconscious forms of history (flirting with oxymoron here for those who think history is always conscious) deriving from working in an old human landscape, the past shaping of which affects present actions.

Writing and its Multiple Disappearances [+–] 347 – 362

John Baines £17.50

University of Oxford

In the Preface to this book we present briefly the gap in scholarship that we have sought to address, describing the conference at which we brought scholars together with the intention of addressing that gap and going as far as we could beyond the article in which Stephen Houston, John Baines, and Jerrold Cooper (2003) had made an initial exploration of relevant issues and given short case studies. Probably the vast majority of the writing systems that have existed in the world have fallen out of use and, if now known at all, either are no longer intelligible or have been deciphered in the last couple of centuries. Yet the process of loss of writing systems has hardly been studied, even though such systems constitute the most developed mode of visual–verbal communication in material form that many societies have created, as well as generally, but not always, having profound meaning for those societies.

Index

Index [+–] 365 – 378

John Bennet,John Bennet,John Bennet FREE

University of Sheffield

index

Reviews

The editors can be congratulated for their efforts that yielded a most valuable and highly informative overview of a largely neglected field of writing system research.
Martin Neef, TU Braunschweig, Written Language and Literacy 14:1 (2011)

It is a pioneering, fascinating and authoritative book. The 17 contributors cover a surprising range of topics in detail and with comprehensive bibliographies. …A landmark collection of articles by scholars.
Andrew Robinson, Wolfson College, Cambridge, in Nature, vol. 455 (October 2008)

While the book is heavily slanted towards Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern systems, which make up the bulk of the case studies, we are, nevertheless, provided with a battery of instructive and impressive discussions of the decline of scripts. Important and indispensible contributions to the still-fledgling study of writing and can be highly recommended to all.
Gordon Whittaker, Universität Göttingen, in Antiquity, Volume 84, Issue 324 (June 2010)

Each essay is informative and stimulating; the whole collection presents studies that should stimulate further research into a comprehensive analysis into the factors involved in the disappearance of writing systems. Baines and his colleagues deserve gratitude for this significant volume.
American Journal of Archaeology, 113

This is a fascinating book. It is not a final definitive treatment, but a pioneering first step, and a guide to the considerable opportunities for research, both on these writing systems and others which could not be included in this volume. The editors and contributors are to be congratulated for the success with which they have opened the discussion and pointed the way to others.
C.W. Shelmerdine, University of Texas, in Cambridge Archaeological Journal, vol. 20, no. 1, (2010)

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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

The Disappearance of Writing Systems

Perspectives on Literacy and Communication

John Baines [+–]

University of Oxford

John Bennet [+–]

University of Sheffield

Stephen Houston [+–]

Brown University

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