The Beginnings of Writing on Crete: Theory and Context

Ferrara, Silvia

doi:10.1017/s0068245415000088

Cited by 8 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…Consider, for example, the richness of Christian illuminated manuscripts, Islamic calligraphy, the Maya codices, or the monumental temple inscriptions of Egypt. These kinds of texts are not designed primarily to be read so much as displayed for the admiration literate and non-literate alike (Olivier 1981, Houston 2004a, Ferrara 2015, Guillaume-Pey 2016. By contrast, mundane or secular genres of writing often take a more simplified form, as witnessed in the bureaucratic handwriting of the hieratic and demotic scripts, or the Simplified Characters of modern China first promoted by the ultra-secularist May Fourth Movement.…”

Section: Domains and Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Media enquiries: mar @ uchicago.edu 29 by named inventors does not invalidate it as an historical heuristic. As many paleographers now claim, the first writing systems are also likely to have been developed by small groups of individual specialists in the space of single generation (Boltz 1986, 28, DeFrancis 1989, 216, Michalowski 1994, Glassner 2003, Houston 2004b, Ferrara 2015, Handel 2016, but for a contrary view see Bottéro 1995). There is, after all, no such thing as a natural writing system in the same sense that we understand natural languages.…”

Section: Relevance Of Findings To Other Writing Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The predictable evolution of letter shapes: An emergent script of West Africa recapitulates historical change in writing systems

Kelly¹,

Winters²,

Miton³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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A familiar story about the evolution of alphabets is that individual letters originated in iconic representations of real things. Over time, these naturalistic pictures became simplified into abstract forms. Thus the iconic ox’s head of Egyptian hieroglyphics transformed into the Phoenician and eventually the Roman letter A. In this vein, attempts to theorize the evolution of writing have tended to propose variations on a model of unilinear and unidirectional progression. According to this progressivist formula, pictorial scripts will tend to become more schematic while their systems will target smaller linguistic units. Objections to this theory point to absent, fragmentary or contrary paleographic evidence, especially for predicted transitions in the underlying grammatical systems of writing. However, the forms of individual signs, such as the letter A, are nonetheless observed to change incrementally over time. We claim that such changes are predictable and that scripts will, in fact, become visually simpler in the course of their use, a hypothesis regularly confirmed in transmission chain experiments that use graphic stimuli. To test the wider validity of this finding we turn to the Vai script of Liberia, a syllabic writing system invented in relative isolation by non-literates in ca. 1833. Unlike the earliest systems of the ancient world, Vai has the advantage of having been systematically documented from its earliest beginnings until the present day. Using established methods for quantifying visual complexity we find that the Vai script has become increasingly compressed over the first 171 years of its history, complementing earlier claims and partial evidence that similar processes were at work in early writing systems. As predicted, letters simplified to a greater extent when their initial complexity was higher.

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Section: Domains and Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Relevance Of Findings To Other Writing Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The predictable evolution of letter shapes: An emergent script of West Africa recapitulates historical change in writing systems

Kelly¹,

Winters²,

Miton³

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…283; cf. Ferrara ) presents a mirror, rather than true, image of faces a – c of the seal. Conversely, the otherwise excellent recent Heraklion museum publication (Flouda ) has faces a – c as they appear in real life, but all other sides mirrored (see also the non‐corresponding positions of the a – c drawings and photographs).…”

Section: Redefining the Archanes Scriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…comm., in Weingarten , 137, n. 51; cf. Weingarten , 296; Jasink , 132, n. 9; Webb and Weingarten , 94, n. 72; Ferrara , 35, n. 12). Weingarten (, 137) cites Sbonias’ MM IA late to MM IB dating of the ‘Archanes Script‐Group’ in support of a possible Protopalatial date.…”

Section: Diachronic Change and Archanes Script Subgroupsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The First ‘European’ Writing: Redefining the Archanes Script

Decorte

2018

Oxford J Archaeology

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Summary This paper investigates a series of glyptic inscriptions attested on Crete at the end of the third and beginning of the second millennium BC, collectively referred to as the ‘Archanes Script’. These minute engravings are considered to represent the earliest appearance of writing west of Egypt, and the first ‘true’ writing in the Aegean. Though mentioned in passing in almost every study of Bronze Age Aegean writing, few scholars have ever offered a definition of what exactly they consider the ‘Archanes Script’ to be. No work or scholarly consensus exists delineating which signs constitute its signary, or even which documents comprise its corpus. Study of the seals as objects in their own right, examining script signs alongside associated iconography, material qualities and form, has been rare. This paper offers the first complete overview and redefinition of the Archanes Script since its discovery in the 1960s and initial definition by Paul Yule in 1980.

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“…a dedicated comparison of parameters that go beyond system type, including such things as glyphic inventory and orientation, as well as the phonotactic structure of the languages in question. 3 Candidates for possible additional sites of primary invention include Crete(Ferrara 2015), the Indus Valley(Salomon 1995), and Easter Island(Fischer 1997). …”

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confidence: 99%

The invention, transmission and evolution of writing: Insights from the new scripts of West Africa

Kelly

2017

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West Africa is a fertile zone for the invention of new scripts. As many as 20 have been devised since the 1830s (Dalby 1967, 1968, 1969, inter alia) including one created as recently as 2002 (Mbaye 2011). Talented individuals with no formal literacy are likely to have invented at least three of these scripts, suggesting that they had reverse-engineered the ‘idea of writing’ on the same pattern as the Cherokee script, i.e. with minimal external input. Influential scholars like Edward Tylor, A. L. Kroeber and I. J. Gelb were to approach West African scripts as naturalistic experiments in which the variable of explicit literacy instruction was eliminated. Thus, writing systems such as Vai and Bamum were invoked as productive models for theorising the dynamics of cultural evolution (Tylor [1865] 1878, Gelb [1952] 1963), the diffusion of novel technologies (Kroeber 1940), the acquisition of literacy (Forbes 1850, Migeod 1911, Scribner and Cole 1981) the cognitive processing of language (Kroeber 1940, Gelb [1952] 1963), and the evolution of writing itself (Gelb [1952] 1963; Dalby 1967, 2). This paper revisits the three West African scripts that are known to have been devised by non-literates. By comparing the linguistic, semiotic and sociohistorical contexts of each known case I suggest various circumstances that may have favoured their invention, transmission and diffusion. I argue that while the originators of scripts drew inspiration from known systems such as Roman and Arabic, they are likely to have drawn on indigenous pictorial culture and annotation systems to develop their own scripts. Once established, their creations were used to circumscribe an alternative politico-religious discourse in direct opposition to the discourses of colonial administrations. The appeal of these scripts were thus tied more to their relative indexical power than their apparent technological or cognitive advantages. Just as earlier theorists imagined, I contend that West African scripts do have the potential to illuminate historical processes of creativity, transmission and evolution, but only when local particularities are given due consideration.

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The Beginnings of Writing on Crete: Theory and Context

Cited by 8 publications

References 50 publications

The predictable evolution of letter shapes: An emergent script of West Africa recapitulates historical change in writing systems

The predictable evolution of letter shapes: An emergent script of West Africa recapitulates historical change in writing systems

The First ‘European’ Writing: Redefining the Archanes Script

The invention, transmission and evolution of writing: Insights from the new scripts of West Africa

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