Text and Writing -- Symbols of Thought

Author: Georges Jean
Translator: Cao Jinqing, Ma Zhencheng
Country: France
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2001-06-01
Features: Despite the trend toward continuous simplification of writing, only a few people understand how to use knowledge, which seems to be destined as a privilege from the beginning. For the ancient Mesopotamians, reading and writing cuneiform was not an easy task. It was a special skill, and only those who knew how to carve symbols and had the ability to understand the various meanings of these symbols based on context could truly possess this technology. In Babylon or the Assyrian city of Nineveh, cuneiform writing formed a privileged class. At times, they had more power than illiterate courtiers, even the king himself. The vast number of surviving documents and Mesopotamian students' practice tablets prove that, at that time, training in elite writing schools was quite rigorous. Learning to write could bring power, and later, learning this writing skill and related knowledge even became a privilege—in other words, not everyone had the opportunity to learn. Compared to Sumerian script, the Egyptian script could clearly express various things. Mesopotamian pictograms, at first, were only a tool for memory aid, gradually evolving into a simplified writing system. Egyptian hieroglyphs, however, could be said to be fully developed writing script from the beginning: First, it could record almost all spoken language (this ancient spoken language can still be glimpsed in later Coptic (lanze-copte) documents written with Greek letters); second, it could represent concrete objects as well as fully express abstract concepts, and could write documents on agriculture, medicine, law, education, and other aspects, as well as religious prayers and legends. The originality and complexity of Egyptian hieroglyphs were largely due to the fact that they were composed of three types of symbols: The first are pictographic symbols, which are stylized symbols that directly simulate objects, and various combinations of these symbols can also represent various concepts. The second are phonetic symbols, which borrow various hieroglyphs to represent sounds, so they can also be called "loan characters," where a hieroglyph with the same pronunciation is used to express another concept entirely unrelated to it (the Egyptian picture puzzle system was similar to that used by early Sumerians. For information on picture puzzles, refer to the explanation in this chapter). The third are determinatives (or ideograms or logograms), which are used to indicate the type or attribute of the object being expressed. Over the centuries, Arabic calligraphy has produced many styles of exquisite art. The writing and reading of Arabic are also from right to left, and vowels do not need to be recorded. Arabic has 18 letters, and if all the vowel symbols are included, there are 29 letters. In cursive script, letters are written in a continuous manner. However, the true feature of Arabic script lies in its infinite variations in writing form. Islam strictly prohibits depicting the form of Allah or the Prophet Muhammad, especially their faces, and some sects even prohibit depicting the faces of ordinary people. Therefore, Arabic calligraphy has become a fundamental decorative element on mosques and all other monuments, evolving into the foundation of the exquisite, imaginative, and elegant decorative art of Arabic. At the same time, from the ancient Kufic script to the modern calligraphy of Hassan Massoudy, Arabic script has developed a variety of calligraphic styles. It is now known that in the south of Arabia, in Ethiopia, and even in parts of the Sahara, various forms of writing have emerged. And undoubtedly, these writing forms also evolved from Phoenician script. However, most of them have become extinct, with only the Ethiopian script and the Tifinagh script used by the Tuareg people remaining. The Tifinagh script has two unusual features: First, the script is highly geometricized; second, it is limited to use by women. This is a very special case in the history of writing. In fact, the Tuareg society is matriarchal, and as in other places, literacy also represents the possession of power.
Proofreading of manuscripts
According to the research of John Dreyfus, a historian of book production, the apprentice rules established by guild organizations strictly required apprentices to maintain stable hand movements while learning to copy, for which they had to diet, reduce contact with women, and avoid heavy labor. Obviously, a scribe had to know various scripts and be able to copy any text. But because he had to know everything, he could not avoid making mistakes. The workshop often assigned one person as a proofreader, who was responsible for finding errors in the manuscripts, marking them on the margins, and making necessary corrections. If the mistake was minor, the scribe would gently erase it and rewrite it. If a whole word was omitted and could not be inserted into the sentence, then the word had to be written on the margin and a finger drawn to indicate where it should have been in the text. If a line or a paragraph was omitted, the line or paragraph was written at the bottom of the same page, and the illustrator was asked to add a box and draw a figure to indicate the position of the text within the main body.
Although the production of books continued to increase, despite the guilds' insistence on meticulous writing and illustration, and despite some of their products being indeed exquisite, the artists and craftsmen engaged in this profession had no social status. Their labor barely sufficed to sustain them. Sometimes, talented artists and scribes chose religious life, entering monasteries—to continue their work in the church without worrying about food and clothing.
The three scripts of Crete continue to puzzle scholars
In 1900, British archaeologist Arthur John Evans discovered some tablet fragments with various symbols in the ruins of the ancient palace of Knossos on Crete, which clearly belonged to some form of writing. The ancient and incomplete Cretan tablet script dates back to 2000 BCE to 650 BCE. Later tablet scripts appeared between 1750 BCE and 1450 BCE, which Evans called "Linear A." Another, undated Linear script had replaced "Linear A," which Evans called "Linear B." A large number of tablets inscribed with Linear B have been found. To decipher Linear B, Evans proposed many theories and hypotheses before his death (1941). Five years before his death, a student vowed to continue the unfinished work of his predecessors.
In 1936, Evans held an academic conference in London on the theme of the "long-forgotten ancient Cretan civilization and its mysterious writing system." Among the attendees was a 14-year-old boy with a deep interest in ancient languages and scripts. As he listened to the academic presentations, he silently vowed to uncover the mystery of Cretan script. This boy was Michael Ventris. He began by corresponding with scholars and seeking their advice, eventually succeeding where his predecessors had failed. Ventris's achievement lay not only in deciphering Linear B but also in irrefutably proving that this script was the writing system used by the people of mainland Greece, Mycenae, during the era of the heroes of Homer's epics. Before reaching this conclusion, he had endured great hardships, carefully studying a vast amount of seemingly insignificant and contradictory archaeological evidence. His friend and colleague John Chadwick once succinctly pointed out his unique talent: "Ventris was good at seeing a fundamental pattern in the bewildering forms of ancient script symbols and accurately identifying the constant elements, thereby revealing the hidden structure behind all the symbols. In summary, his talent lay in his ability to discover order in the apparent chaos."
In fact, this talent of Ventris is a common trait among all great paleographers.
Cities or texts, like books that evoke the heart and are marked with annotations and marginalia, are filled with words and drawings by users. The graffiti on the walls are all annotations, entertaining passersby with their amusing content. When it comes to graffiti, it can be text or pictures, but sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the two, or both. Such drawings are connected to the origins of writing. Drawing and speaking have been two basic modes of expression since ancient times, but drawing came much earlier. At first, people recorded fleeting spoken words, giving rise to the first form of writing—pictographic writing. After a long process, humans invented ideograms, and then the phonetic symbols we still use today. Graffiti ignores this progress, adapting its methods to current needs and constraints. It has no class distinctions, straddling between symbolic representation, conventional graphics, and formal writing. We might say that the impression graffiti gives of being out of touch with the times stems from their fundamental rejection of any change, rather than from their clumsy drawing techniques. Paul Klee's argument is validated in them: "Writing and drawing are ultimately the same." The information conveyed in this way by graffiti contains the entire cultural heritage; the memory of different stages of a civilization holds the same position in this information. Reading a text and looking at an image are very different things. When reading, the eyes must follow the prescribed progression of the symbols, but when viewing an image, the eyes can fix on a sign to discover unexpected meanings or roam freely from one symbol to another. It is perfectly natural for the eyes to wander. This visual freedom is also transmitted to the whole body, often evoking a desire to reach out and feel the texture of the image. Therefore, museums often have to explicitly remind visitors not to touch the exhibits.
Poets have never abandoned this pleasure: introducing language into visual space, playing with the arrangement of symbols in this space. The tradition of concrete poetry (calligramme) bears witness to this. Since the publication of Mallarmé's famous poem "The Dice Game" and his name, modern writers have been preoccupied with the freedom of including images in their works, while painters often incorporate text, fragments of articles, and mysterious symbols that lie between text and pure game-like spelling into their paintings. Exhibitions on the relationship between painting and text are now numerous. As for graffiti, it still retains this inherent consistency between image and text in a naive and innocent way. This is crucial in a field that ultimately leads to the exhaustion of vitality due to extreme specialization.
At this time, D. Riout, D. Guedjan, and J. P. Leroux's Book of Graffiti
Europe was in the dawn of the Renaissance. The inscriptions carved on Trajan's Column in the ruins of ancient Rome provided examples of scripts. Later, Elzevir standardized the form of Arabic numerals. Did he draw inspiration from the proportions of the capital letters on Trajan's Column? If so, why was it not decided to match the proportions of the lowercase letters? Moreover, the letterforms inspired by stone inscriptions are still a distance from the shapes of Arabic numerals. True, the letters carved in stone are upright, even hard, perfectly suited to the proportions they had long sought and which we still use today. However, this explanation is problematic in two respects: First, the Romans wrote Roman numerals; second, Elzevir also considered the proportions of lowercase letters when measuring the uniformity of the numerals. We mention this to illustrate that keeping the numerals and capital letters aligned is both absurd and impossible.
Among those ugly scripts, only 7 and 9 extend beyond the baseline. Now, in addition to 1, 2, and 0, all the other numerals refuse to be constrained by the framework formed by the proportions of the capital letters. The numerals 3, 5, 7, and 9 are truly Elzevir's script, unconstrained by this baseline, which is considered the foundation, while 6 extends upward. Although it is generally believed that 4 and 8 follow the proportions of the capital letters, they are also out of place. Strangely enough, from their proportions, these interlocking lines in the text make the numerals closer to lowercase letters. This is because numerals, like handwritten text, are always fluid, and 6 and 9 also cross the line. The overall effect of these lines makes these numerals seem as if they were created by Garamond. Garamond was a typefounder, rewarded by Francis I. He was undoubtedly one of the earliest and greatest creators of printed fonts. We do not intend to elaborate on his history here, but merely want to point out that his "Greek font" is now stored in the vault of the National Printing Office, an invaluable work of art. As for the numerals he created, they better preserve their inherent characteristics while also harmonizing with the letters.
Since then, the proportions of the numerals have been between those of the capital and lowercase letters. We entered a wonderful period of freedom. Humanism advocated a return to classicism but did not hinder the liberation of sensibility. Despite the cumbersome nature of typesetting equipment, the typesetters knew how to keep the letters warm like handwritten text while also achieving the delicate transparency that only exquisite craftsmanship could achieve.
Jérome Peignot
Chapter 1: Humble Beginnings
Chapter 2: The Invention of the Gods
Chapter 3: The Revolution of the Alphabet
Chapter 4: From Scribe to Printer
Chapter 5: The Printing of Books
Chapter 6: Paleographers as Witnesses and Documents
Map of the Geographical Distribution of Ancient Scripts
Illustration List and Publishing Index