The write side of history

A book that takes readers on a guided tour of some of the world's oldest and most mysterious scripts

The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

Author: Silvia Ferrara (Translated by Todd Portnowitz)

Publisher:  Picador Pan Macmillan

Pages: 304

Price: Rs 599

Cats “meow” (English), “miao” (Italian), “meo” (Vietnamese), and “myao” (Russian). In Greek, they “ma”. This similarity played a role in the deciphering of Crete’s Linear B script. A stylised cat “as sketched by Walt Disney” represents the ma sound in this 3,000-year-old Bronze Age script, which records an equally ancient dialect of Greek. The consonance is unusual, incidentally, since other animal noises are usually represented differently in different languages — dogs bark, guk, and bhok, for example.

Using engaging examples such as this, Silvia Ferrara combines erudition, charm, and wry humour as she takes readers on a guided tour of some of the world’s oldest and most mysterious scripts. The author is a classical philologist at the University of Bologna. She researches ancient scripts with a focus on Bronze Age Aegean civilisations. While she ventures into plenty of technical detail about what it entails to decipher a script, she has deliberately written this in dinner-table conversational style in her native Italian.

There’s plenty of illustrations, and the book’s been beautifully translated to convey her whimsical speech patterns. (Dr Ferrara is also a very fluent English speaker as evident from her public lectures. That’s not surprising given she did her PhD in Oxford and subsequently taught at Oxford and University College, London.)  

The book moves between the Aegean islands to China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Crete, Easter Island, Cyprus, the Indus Valley and Mesoamerica. It looks at various scripts and examines their origins as images, icons, and logograms. It asks (and sometimes answers) intriguing questions, offers speculations (usually stated upfront as such), and describes breakthroughs and discoveries.

It also does some proselytising for collaborative research (look up the INSCRIBE Programme, for instance) and offers advice about the mistakes to avoid in doing something as “perverse” as deciphering ancient scripts. It’s very funny and acerbic when it comes to imploring readers to avoid sending her amateur attempts at decipherment.

Linear B is the only example of a script deciphered purely by statistical analysis (three other Cretan scripts remain undeciphered). In most cases, breakthroughs have arisen from bilingual inscriptions such as in the Rosetta Stone, which had Egyptian hieroglyphics and Greek, and the Persepolis inscriptions (Babylonian and Persian).

Decryption of old scripts is difficult even if the base language (or a descendant) is known, or guessed at, or even if bilingual content exists, as in Etruscan. Scripts can vary from iconic pictography, to signs representing sounds or syllables, to rebuses, to logograms and various things in-between.

“Codebreakers” must make educated guesses at all this and academics can be blindsided by their own cultural assumptions. In the case of Mayan, researchers assumed for years that the script was an alphabet, whereas it turned out to be hundreds of symbolic icons. In some cases, the cultural divides are so massive as to be insurmountable. Consider the Inca quipu knots system where the number of knots, colour, their distance from each other, and so on, play a part. The author compares this multi-dimensional notation system to a spreadsheet.

Interestingly, many scripts have seemingly pared down over time from very large sets of stylised complicated icons that only the learned could recall, to streamlined modern alphabets with a few symbols most people learn quickly. China is unusual in that its ideographs have been in continuous use for over 3,000 years. But as the author remarks semi-seriously, as an increasing number of people resort to emojis, a future global civilisation may well end up reverting to pictographic scripts.

Apart from examining un-deciphered and deciphered writing of various types, the book also describes curiosities like the Voynich Manuscript and amazing achievements such as one individual’s invention of a script for the Cherokee language. She’s very funny again, when she describes how researchers have argued for decades about the Indus Valley Script (which may not even be a script) while also making a fervent appeal that politics be kept out of philology (which is of course, impossible in this and many other instances).

The desire to write arose from many different impulses. Bureaucratic bean counters need to keep track of goods, salaries and land measurements. Fortune tellers needed to manipulate symbols in China. Storytellers had to keep aide-memoires. Priests had to record incantations. So, imagination, creativity and accounting went hand in hand in the invention of scripts.

Given the force multiplier that writing is, it is reasonable to make the apparently sweeping claim that it is indeed the greatest invention. Working on scripts and ancient languages requires a fascinating meld of multiple disciplines ranging across the arts and sciences. It is like code-breaking but even more complex in some ways since the language itself is often unknown, as well as the script.

Researchers use mathematical and statistical analysis, guesswork, archaeology, carbon-dating, machine learning and other types of computer analysis, as well as their imaginations and intuition to try to open the black box of an unknown script, which represents writing in an unknown language. 

The book offers a fascinating set of historical accounts, observations and speculations, and it is delightful in its fluid movements from topic to topic. The author comes through as an interesting combination of scientist and romantic as she bakes together a rock-solid description of a very complicated subject and seasons it with a sprinkling of delightful examples of the oddities of written language.