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[One]
"Speaking to the Eyes": Beginnings
In the early 1840s, William Bacon Stevens, a young historian and devout Christian in Savannah, Georgia, beheld with awe a manuscript roughly a thousand years old. A ninth-century copy of Moralia in Job, which Pope Gregory i wrote in the sixth century, it was the oldest of the exceedingly rare treasures that plantation and slave owner Alexander Augustus Smets kept among the five thousand books in the library at his brick mansion in the city.
Worms had chewed the volume's thick covers, but the brass clasps and studs were in good shape. The double columns of Latin words on vellum pages were remarkably neat and highly legible, and Stevens marvelled "that the hand which traced those lines in all their beauty has a thousand years since moulded into dust – that the mighty waves of more than thirty generations have risen, rolled onward, and died upon the writer's grave. . . . The little characters inscribed on that parchment . . . have enclosed for ten centuries, the thoughts of the illustrious dead, speaking to the eye now, as [they] did a thousand years back, the same sentiments of piety and truth; while the name, the habitation, the tomb even of the writer have, for ages, been buried in oblivion! How wonderful is the power of letters! We enjoy hourly their benefit, we seldom reflect upon their worth. Their origin is lost in the remotest antiquity. . . ."
Stevens then presented verse by a writer he identified only as Breboeuf:
Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise,
Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes?
That we, by tracing magic lines, are taught
How both to colour and embody THOUGHT?
In 1803, thirty-seven years before Stevens thus praised the miracle of handwriting – already so routine among the literate they thought about it little more than about breathing – Thomas Astle, keeper of records in the Tower of London, declared, "The noblest acquisition of mankind is speech, and the most useful art is writing. The first eminently distinguishes man from the brute creation; the second from uncivilized savages." After quoting those same lines by "Monsieur Breboeuf," Astle took a 240-page stab at explaining whence the mystic art arose and how it was that, over thousands of years, it had reached a state of such excellence that, with goose quill in hand and inkpot at the ready, he could race his linked and slanted letters across paper made from boiled shreds of rags. That paper, he enthused, "surpasses all other materials for ease and convenience of writing upon."
But it was upon stone that humans left the earliest known evidence of their compulsion to express themselves – and to do so in ways that would one day speak to the eyes of those who walked on the moon, performed open-heart surgery, defeated computers at chess, and gossiped on cellphones. On shadowy walls roughly thirty thousand years ago, cave dwellers engraved and painted graceful images of lions, bears, bulls, bison, wild oxen, reindeer, horses, and fuzzy rhinoceroses. No one knows for sure why they did this, but in 1970 handwriting historian Alfred J. Fairbank declared, "The beginnings of writing are in simple pictures. . . . Picture-writing was used to help memory or identify possessions or to make records of transactions, but its link with language was the key to civilization."
For the Indians, Mexicans, Phoenicians, Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians, Ethiopians, Etruscans, and, indeed, virtually all the ancient civilizations, hieroglyphic scripts – in which pictures of people, animals, birds, tools, and other familiar things each stood for the sound of a word or syllable – were the pioneers of written language. Roughly nine thousand years ago, when the population of the world was no more than five million, the Middle East and Far East knew so little about each other they might as well have been in different galaxies. Yet the peoples of the Tigris and Euphrates basins and those of the Peiligang culture in what is now Henan province in northern China were both raising farm animals, growing grain, making pottery, and relying on their own systems of visual symbols, usually carved or scratched into hard surfaces, to record and convey information they could not trust their memories to preserve.
Among the human remains in twenty-four of the graves that archaeologists recently unearthed in Henan were tortoise shells that bore sixteen different inscriptions. These are anywhere from 8,200 to 8,600 years old. Since they include markings that resemble the characters of "eye," "sun," "day," "window," and numbers in certain Chinese writing of more than five thousand years later, some scholars see them as proof that, eons before any other civilization, the Chinese invented writing. Others argue that the inscriptions are little more than a bunch of prehistoric pictures.
No expert will ever nail down, to every other expert's satisfaction, exactly when the sophistication of real writing emerged from the crudeness of prehistoric proto-writing, but Encyclopedia Britannica identifies T'sang Chieh as the "legendary inventor" of Chinese writing, and it was in the mid-2500s BC that he served the Yellow Emperor as official recorder.
"At night, hearing the ghosts wail for the creation of writing, T'sang Chieh looked up with his four eyes at the pointed rays of the star Wen Chang, Lord of Literature," a Chinese historian wrote in AD 847. "Inspired, T'sang Chieh looked down to see the footprints of the birds and animals. He watched the shadows cast by trees and vegetation. . . . Observing the forms of nature, T'sang Chieh copied them by scratching onto sticks of smoothed bamboo. These were the first Chinese pictograms."
And Lo! There Came unto the World the Alphabet
"Sumerian was the first language to be written, and it is largely monosyllabic," Fairbank said. "The writing began as simple pictures and some can be traced to about 3100 bc." Sumer lay in that small "cradle of civilization" between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq, and by 2500 BC its ingenious people had a complete system of writing that contained as many as a thousand symbols. Nowhere, however, were hieroglyphics more beautiful and enduring than in Egypt. More than five thousand years ago, Egyptian priests used them to carve sacred inscriptions into stone and to paint them on temple walls. In hieratic writing, ashortening of hieroglyphics, scribes joined letter to letter. Around 1000 BC there finally emerged in Egypt the demotic script, a more colloquial and popular descendant of hieroglyphics.
But how wonderful is the power of letters! The alphabet, in which each letter represents its own sound within a word, remains one of civilization's foremost innovations. Its origins, however, are obscure. Experts on the ancient world long believed that, between 1730 and 1580 bc, the first alphabet arose among Semitic peoples in their homelands in Syria and Palestine. Egyptologists, however, recently discovered evidence that, centuries earlier, Semites who lived deep inside Egypt were already using an ancestor of our alphabet. West of the Nile, on the track of a desert road that soldiers, merchants, and traders used some 3,800 years ago, the scholars found inscriptions carved into limestone cliffs. The writing was Semitic, with Egyptian influences – and it was alphabetic.
Masters of hieroglyphics were professionals who had to know hundreds of pictographs; the alphabet, with fewer than thirty symbols, emerged as a kind of shorthand. The discoveries at the cliffs, the New York Times reported in 1999, supported "the idea of the alphabet as an invention by workaday people that simplified and democratized writing, freeing it from the elite hands of official scribes." Thus, alphabetic writing was "revolutionary in a sense comparable to the invention of the printing press much later." While becoming the mightiest trading and naval power on the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians improved the alphabet, and roughly three thousand years ago passed it on to the Greeks. The Greeks further improved it, and then the idea of the alphabet spread to the Etruscans, the Romans, and throughout Western culture.
First Baked Muck, Then Papyrus
Writing was so important to the ancients that they painted, inked, scratched, or engraved it on stone, bronze, brass, bark, linen, silk, camel bones, tortoise shells, pottery shards, limestone fragments, bare wood, plaster-coated and wax-coated wood, parchment, and vellum. The Sumerians wrote on clots of muck and baked them in the Middle Eastern sun. Much of their land was marshy, flood-prone, irrigated, and rich in alluvial silt. Pressing the triangularshaped cut end of a reed into a cushion of damp clay, the writer produced wedge-shaped strokes in patterns that added up to strings of words. Later, the Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, and Persians also wrote in cuneiform(from the Latin cuneus, for wedge), and thousands of their inscribed tablets remain legible to this day.
The earliest surviving cuneiform writings of the Sumerians are financial accounts and supply lists of priests. Among other ancient peoples as well, the first known writings were not imaginative. They were official, ceremonial, and religious, or simply asserted ownership, preserved legal settlements, and recorded transactions. Around 2000 bc, however, certain scribes offered a series of myths and poems that evolved into The Epic of Gilgamesh. In all likelihood, Gilgamesh was a real king who, between 2700 and 2500 BC, ruled from one of the world's first walled cities, Uruk. Over centuries, as Sumerian, Hittite, Babylonian, and Assyrian scribes immortalized him on clay, he emerged in a long epic poem as a demigod with superhuman powers. He kills a gigantic ogre, crosses the Waters of Death, overcomes monstrous hardships, tan...
