Paul Chambiras – Freelance Writer

Writing Has Advanced Through History Despite Ancient Anxiety Around the New Technology

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Firsts can be murky.

For instance, there’s some doubt over whether Thomas Edison really came up with the idea of the motion picture camera — or whether he pinched it

There’s also a question mark over whether “ignored” Australian inventor Henry Sutton should be credited with the first televisions.

And there are shadows of uncertainty in another major technological development — writing.

“Writing could’ve been invented many times in many different places,” says Louise Pryke, an ancient history specialist at the University of Sydney.

But she says history points to one place above others, and — though it’s rarely recognised — to one incredible woman.

It also reveals a common thread from ancient history to today: a fear of the new.

From signs to an alphabet

Pictograms kick off the history of writing. They’re representations of things — for example, an image of an ox to depict that animal.

The earliest evidence of this comes from ancient Mesopotamia, roughly equivalent to modern day Iraq, Dr Pryke explains.

These started appearing somewhere around the archaic period, 3500 BCE. Then, around 2900 BCE, they evolved into signs.

“That’s where we start seeing the cuneiform script, which is the oldest known form of writing,” Dr Pryke says.

“Cuneiform is basically the major language of communication in the ancient near east for about 3000 years.”

It’s a transition from recognisable images to something more closely aligned to an alphabet, and it involves “signs which can represent multiple things”, Dr Pryke says.

“You need to have some understanding of the writing in order to be able to decipher them [and] there’s hundreds and hundreds of [signs and symbols], so it’s incredibly difficult to learn.”

 

Close-up of a square piece of pale rock with a series of lines, circles and other shapes and symbols inscribed in it.
Cuneiform writing, seen here on a stone from c3100–2900 BC, Mesopotamia, was incredibly complicated.()

 

This doesn’t stop the early scribes. Cuneiform writing turns up in Sumerian sources and other ancient languages such as Akkadian, Babylonian and Hittite.

Writing along with handicrafts, weaving and making beer were each considered “a precise intellectual skill” and a type of wisdom, and they were all originally associated with women in ancient Mesopotamia.

“Scribal traditions in Western culture are often very much focused on male writers, people like Hesiod and so forth. But in ancient Mesopotamia scribal traditions, there’s a lot of influence from royal women [and] royal religious practitioners,” Dr Pryke says.

Enheduanna wrote hymns to the goddess of love and war, Inanna, and possibly a myth called Inanna and Ebih, as well as a collection of 42 temple hymns.

“So she has all these amazing things. And what’s really cool about Enheduanna is — this is the earliest writer we have written evidence for — but she talked about writing in a way that that is really understandable to modern writers.

“She talked about spending long nights labouring over her creations, how difficult the creative process can be, and her sense of inadequacy in trying to encapsulate complex divine qualities with the written word.”

Even history’s first-known writer had a critic on her shoulder.

‘There are too many printed texts’

From cuneiform, the Old Canaanite script emerged in what we now call the Middle East, around 3,500 years ago. Then, around 10th century BCE, the Phoenician alphabet emerged, to which it’s thought that all known modern alphabets are related.

These developments were happening in parallel to other big changes in how people were living, for example moving towards urban centres.

“The early development of [modern] writing is thought to be powered by economic developments, like people needing to write down more complicated economic transactions as trade is developing,” Dr Pryke says.

But not everyone was excited about the explosion of this new technology.

The proliferation of writing, and of books, concerned ancient Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger. He complained that, “In the reading of many books, there is only distraction”, says US-based researcher and writer Joe Stadolnik, who has written about the history of writing

And 12th century Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi worried that people would “read sloppily, because there are too many printed texts”, he tells ABC RN’s Counterpoint.

Dr Stadolnik says 14th century poet Petrarch also weighed in claiming that too much literature was “not nourishing the mind … but killing and burying it with the weight of things”.

And in a story reported in Plato’s Phaedrus, the ancient inventor of writing, an Egyptian god named Theuth, proclaims writing as “an elixir of memory and wisdom”.

But, as Dr Stadolnik explains, in Plato’s telling, Thamus, the Egyptian king of the Gods, is not so sure.

Thamus says: “This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it because they will not practise their memory … You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding. And you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction.”

Dr Pryke says the anxiety Plato wrote about demonstrates that there are “universal anxieties that turn up around new technology”.

But she says this concern of writing belonged to a minority.

“In earlier ancient writing, there seems to be more of an appreciation of how writing skills are a reflection of high status and increased wisdom; [that] the ability to write things down is a way of enhancing our ability to think rather than diminishing it.”

Ancient scribes were “constantly talking about their own status and their own wisdom and the high cultural value of what their writing brings to history”, she says.

That includes ancient writers everywhere from China to Mesoamerica to the Indus River Valley, where early forms of writing existed.

“Writing is one thing that just pops up all over the place,” Dr Pryke says.

It’s all part of its happily murky history.

History’s first named writer

At around 2300 BCE the earliest known writer emerged; an author named Enheduanna.

Her name means “ornament of heaven” and she was a princess and a priestess of the moon god in ancient Mesopotamia, Dr Pryke says.

She’s the first-known recorded writer, but if you haven’t heard of her, you’re not alone.

And Dr Pryke would like to see that change.

“Why don’t we know this? It just drives me nuts,” she says.