An almost impossible combination of rare events.Īnother point is statistical.
#Chocolate milk font glyphs onthespot series#
I don’t expect that to have been achieved by the work of one great thinker, but rather a series of small steps and lucky repurposings. This goes to show that invention of writing was something very rare that took very special circumstances. Whether there were two, three or four independent inventions of writing, they were very few and far between. I like the image of the inspired genius “pondering the strange signs on imported objects” does anybody know how widely accepted the sequence of events described here is?ĪJP: It seems ridiculous that writing might have come from a single source. 1443) provides a more recent parallel, and there are few other entirely convincing explanations for the sudden appearance of fully fledged hieroglyphic writing. This may seem far-fetched, but the invention of the Korean script (by King Sejong and his advisers in A.D.
We may imagine an inspired genius at the court of one of Egypt’s predynastic rulers pondering the strange signs on imported objects from Mesopotamia-pondering them and their evident use as encoders of information, and devising a corresponding system for the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphics are so perfectly suited to the ancient Egyptian language, and the individual signs so obviously reflected the Egyptians’ particular environment, that they must represent an indigenous development. It is likely that the idea of writing came to Egypt along with a raft of other Mesopotamian influences in the centuries before unification-the concept, but not the writing system itself. Archaeologists dispute whether Egypt or Mesopotamia should take the credit for inventing the very idea of writing, but Mesopotamia, especially the southern city of Uruk (modern Warka), seems to have the better claim. These short inscriptions already used fully formed signs, and the writing system itself showed the complexity that would characterize hieroglyphics for the next three and a half thousand years. The earliest Egyptian writing discovered to date is on bone labels from a predynastic tomb at Abdju, the burial of a ruler who lived around 150 years before Narmer. We are unlikely ever to know exactly how, when, and where hieroglyphics were first developed, but the evidence increasingly points toward a deliberate act of invention. For ancient Egypt, it must have been a revelation. Today, it is virtually impossible to imagine a world without written communication.
Its transformative power-in the transmission of knowledge, the exercise of power, and the recording of history itself-cannot be overstated. I’m reading Toby Wilkinson’s excellent The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, and I was struck by this paragraph on the origin of Egyptian writing:Īmong the great inventions of human history, writing has a special place.