WRITING

It has long been accepted that the Sumerians were the first society in the history of the world to develop a permanent system of recording ideas, narrative, speech and quantities. The medium of such records was, first, a pictographic form of epigraphy where symbols, drawn mainly from life, were used to represent both the object depicted and a subjective idea drawn from it, either alone or in combination with another symbol. Gradually, the script was refined, going through a series of adaptations until it was finally synthesized into the form known as ‘cuneiform’, the wedge-shaped characters which provided the script for Sumerian scribes and their Akkadian and Old Babylonian successors.

It was always believed that the earliest examples of Egyptian epigraphy were to be found painted or incised on pottery vessels of the late predynastic period, thus dating from several hundred years after the earliest pictographic texts of southern Mesopotamia. Examples of what are clearly early hieroglyphs, dating to c,3300BC, have been found at Abydos,42 thus closing the gap appreciably between the Mesopotamian and Nile Valley forms of writing. The discovery of these early Egyptian hieroglyphs which has brought about at least the partial revision of the chronology of the history of writing will be considered in the next chapter.

Many of the characters which made up the Egyptian hieroglyphs of the dynastic periods had their origins far back into predynastic times. Some of the symbols which the Egyptians adopted may have been in use as early as the beginning of the fourth millennium.43 Egyptian epigraphy is much connected with the welling-up of deep-seated images and forms from the unconscious itself, cloaked in symbolic form. But the impulse to formulate these profound symbols into a system which could express concepts or sounds and hence provide the basis of a system of written records is a step which probably did require external stimulus. Such stimulus, it must at present be assumed, came from some sort of contact with, or awareness of, the development of systems of writing in Mesopotamia.

Writing in Mesopotamia began as a process of recording the treasure, represented by herds, goods and slaves, of the temples which in the fourth millennium were the dominant institutions in the polity of Sumer. In Egypt the earliest of what may be called ‘documents’ since they carry texts or inscriptions, are ceremonial or votive objects associated with the kings, palettes or large mace-heads for example or ivory labels which seem to record the important events of a reign or devices which identify royal property. However, in predynastic times the large pots which were used to store grain, oil, or wine, were marked with signs which may be ancestral to more developed later forms of writing. As in Sumer much of the impetus for Egyptian writing came from the demands of accountancy and the need to maintain accurate and immediately reliable records.

By the beginning of the Early Dynastic period the distinctive Egyptian script was in full and confident use and as with their borrowings of Sumerian architectural forms, the Egyptians quickly transmuted the idea of writing into their own distinctive epigraphy. It would surely be stretching coincidence too far to postulate independent invention of so complex a concept in such close historical and geographical proximity, at the same time in two such substantially different environments.

Structurally there are similarities between some aspects of Sumerian and Egyptian epigraphy. Most of these similarities are to do with the relationship of sounds to the form of the signs: but some authorities have postulated that some Egyptian words are in fact of Sumerian origin. These include the words for hoe, spade, plough, corn, beer, and carpenter; significantly, these all seem to be related to crafts, to the making of things. Other authorities would take a much more cautious view and would doubt whether there was any actual borrowing; in the case of the word for ‘plough’ however, which in Egyptian is mr, there seems to be little doubt that the word was taken from the Sumerian vocabulary.44 Both peoples also employed determinatives in their writing, to indicate the meaning of a sign which might have several applications or meanings in different contexts.

Of special interest, particularly in the light of subsequent history when the Sumerians’ cuneiform became the common form of writing throughout the Middle East for more than two thousand years, is the question why, assuming always that they did in fact know them, the Egyptians so rapidly decided that the Sumerian pictographs (the form from which cuneiform developed) were unsuited or inappropriate to their needs. Seemingly, having grasped the idea of writing in principle, they immediately returned to Egypt and began to set down what they wanted to say through the medium of what later generations have come to call hieroglyphs, a term which reveals the sacred character with which they were invested. However pictographs, in the sense of the representation of an object which signify what it represented, were retained as determinatives, which elucidate the meaning of a hieroglyphic group.

The Sumerians themselves early discarded their pictographs as inadequate and successive stages of the cuneiform script evolved, until it reached its final development towards the middle of the second millennium by which time the Sumerians themselves had disappeared. The Egyptians, who firmly believed that nothing of theirs could ever really be improved upon, never abandoned their hieroglyphs, though they adapted and refined them over the centuries. In later periods they did produce two forms of what, by comparison with the monumental hieroglyphs, was cursive: these were respectively hieratic and, later, demotic, which were generally used in other than monumental or ritual inscriptions, though a notable use of demotic appears in the inscriptions of the Rosetta stone. But to the very end of Egypt’s history the people of the Valley kept loyally to their hieroglyphs. The Greeks’ astonishment at the extraordinary repertory of characters, symbols and pictures which they saw, gleaming and redolent of mystery, on the temple walls at the very end of the long course of Egypt’s history, is perpetuated in the word which they employed to describe what they believed must be ‘sacred signs’, as they gazed with wonder at the remains of Egypt’s greatness.