"The Talking Art": The World's Earliest Writing

Jacket image © Reaktion Books Ltd/ University of Chicago Press

Never before in world history have so many people been engaged in the act of writing on a daily basis as we are now. And writing tools and surfaces are still evolving, from our screen-based writing, with speech-to-text, cut-and-paste, auto-correct, and emoticon functions as well as the introduction of smart pens, e-markers, and digital notebooks, and instantaneously AI-generated and ChatGPT  "writing." 

Writing reaches beyond "writing." I've come across countless references to writer-like gestures within mid-20th century American and European abstract painting -- terms like "ideograms" "mark-making," "calligraphic strokes," "cursives," "pictographic," "asemic writing."  I've been overdue  learning about writing’s origins and evolution, as well as its often overlooked plasticity as a very human, embodied medium.

For an accessible starter, I found A History of Writing (Reaktion Books 2001) by Steven Roger Fischer (now in its third edition). Per his publisher's page, Fischer is the "former director of the Institute of Polynesian Languages and Literatures in Auckland, New Zealand." 
 
Ignorant about linguistics and anthropology, I'm relieved that Fischer's account is free of specialized jargon. His prose is consistently direct and clear even when teasing out the many complicated nuances . 
 
I’m looking forward to getting to the book’s many other chapters (on “Speaking Systems,” on European alphabets, on the East Asian ‘Regenesis,”  “The Parchment Keyboard” and "Scripting the Future").
 
For now, this post is a quick and likely reductive take on ancient cultural developments and leaps in and across early writing systems covered by Fischer, such as the pivotal introduction of the “rebus principle.”
 
According to The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics “the rebus principle” is the process “by which, in some systems of writing, symbols representing one or more words are combined to represent another word which is similar in sound. Suppose that English eye [ʌɪ] were represented by a single character <eye>, and deer [dɪə] by a single character <deer>; then, by the rebus principle, idea [ʌɪdɪə] might be represented by the combination <eye><deer>.”

That said, Fischer argues that writing did not “evolve” in any direct or even linear manner. He notes that many writing practices inexplicably vanished after centuries of cultural use. Often writing practices from disparate regions overlapped and adopted or absorbed elements from one to the other.

​Crucially, he distinguishes pictorial forms of "proto-writing" from ancient "complete writing" systems which would, many centuries later, lead to the global alphabets we have today. 

According to Fischer’s definition, a "complete writing" must "have as its purpose communication [...] must consist of artificial graphic marks on a durable or electronic surface [... ] [and] must use marks that relate conventionally to articulate speech (the systematic arrangement of significant  vocal sounds) or electronic programming in such a way that communication is achieved" (12).

After covering proto-writing forms – like knot records, notches, pictography, tallies, mnemonics, signal messages, and tokens, Fischer dives into "The Talking Art" namely, the "complete writing" systems developed in Egyptian and Sumerian regions.

Below are some photographs I've collated to illustrate some of the ancient writings examined early on in The History of Writing.

[All images are captioned and credited to original sources.] 

Pebble from the Grotte du Mas d'Azil - c. 10,000-8000 BC © Wikimedia / Didier Descouens "some regard the coloured pebbles of southern France's Azilian culture [...] to be the world's first pictographic writing" but Fischer believes they are probably "indexical symbols."

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Tartaria clay tablets c. 5300-4300 BC, or possibly later c. 2700 BC [Central Balkans] , writing that is a 'graphic symbol inventory'

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"A five-day ration list. Each line of proto-cuneiform text mentions rations for one day. The sign for 'day' and the numbers 1-5 are easily identifiable." - via Wikipedia/ British Museum. Per Fischer, it's probably from Jemdet-Nasr, Iraq, circa 3000, BC. Housed in The British Museum.

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Sumerian pictographic limestone tablet from Kish, an ancient Mesopotamian city-state [modern Iran], Late Utrak period c 3500 BC. – via Ashmolean Museum, England.

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per Fischer: "The Rosetta Stone (196 BC) [currently housed in The British Museum] memorializes Ptolemy V in three different scripts: (top) Egyptian hieroglyphs, (center) Egyptian demotic; (bottom) Greece."