The Slow Deaths of Writing
Andrew Lawler
A diverse group of scholars ponders not just why scripts vanish, but why they sometimes survive so long
OXFORD, U.K.--The biblical God punished humanity for its arrogance by creating innumerable languages--nearly 7000 at latest count. Writing systems, however, escaped the curse. During the 5 millennia since writing first emerged on the same Mesopotamian plain as the legendary Tower of Babel, fewer than 100 major scripts have appeared. But once born, they can be surprisingly durable. A handful of researchers are now taking a closer look at how scripts vanish to glean insight into how and why cultures disintegrate. They have found that writing systems show an amazing tenacity, even in the face of invasions, language changes, and religious upheavals. Ironically, the more cumbersome systems often prove the hardiest. "There is so much intense emotion invested in scripts, they tend to live longer than they have any right to do," says Mayan anthropologist Stephen Houston of Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Houston was part of an unusual collection of scholars who met this spring at the University of Oxford* to hash out a wide variety of script deaths and their meanings. Anthropologists and philologists presented case studies of more than a dozen scripts, including Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mayan glyphs, and Sumerian cuneiform, plus some less traditional recording systems (see sidebar, p. 32), in order to discern larger patterns in the scripts' last gasps. "Their decline is as worthy of investigation as their origin," says Oxford Egyptologist John Baines. He and his colleagues believe that the death of scripts can provide new insight into cultural collapse and the relationship between a script and its culture. But they also differ in how far to go in comparing script disappearance.
The 2-day meeting exploded some general assumptions about the way scripts live and die. Although in some cases a script and its culture slowly degraded in tandem, in other instances writing systems were decoupled from cultural crises and persisted in the face of natural or political disasters. Nor did scripts inevitably disappear when people began to speak a new language. "Scripts and language don't correlate in any simple way," notes Baines; in some instances a script kept alive a language not spoken by the general population for 1000 years. And in case after case, scripts survived in pockets long after their culture was all but dead.
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The piece deals mainly with ancient cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the Maya language, but Aramaic, Greek, and other languages come up as well.
My favorite fun fact (or, better, fun theory) in the article is the following:
[UCL philologist David] Brown proposes that a boom in astrology --essentially a niche market for the script--kept cuneiform alive for the last few centuries of its existence. Around 200 B.C.E., he notes, there was a great flowering of astronomical texts. "This was a spinoff product of temple culture," he says, because the Babylonian temples were long famed as centers of astronomical observations. "Elite scholars made money doing astronomy," he suggests. Although the direct evidence for this is lacking, he argues that the prevalence of astrological tablets in these later years hints strongly at an economic basis for the continued existence of cuneiform guilds, or families of scholars. But 2 centuries later, Babylon's monopoly over the astronomy- astrology business weakened, Brown says, as more accessible Greek horoscopes spread through the Roman Empire. That shift, he suggests, pulled the rug out from under cuneiform's economic basis, although the system's existence may have continued for another century or two.
Never underestimate the importance of the astrology column in the newspaper.
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