The big question is why do we write and where did writing come from? [MUSIC] Writing, the need or the urge to write, the urge to hold and capture the fleeting moment of speech and thought, is something that is inherent in all of humanity. And that in different parts of the world, people over a long, long period of time have found different ways, and different technologies, and different means of addressing this issue of holding and capturing thought and speech. So, on my very first visit to Egypt many years ago, I was fascinated by the walls of these large monuments, of these temples that are covered in writing. Images and writing, columns, walls, everything. And it struck me that if only one were able to read the writing on the wall, the ancient Egyptians would actually talk to me. This now brings us to the question of where and when writing began, and where do we have the earliest evidence for writing. The first evidence takes us to the area of modern day Iraq, which is Mesopotamia, the area between the two great rivers the Euphrates and the Tigris. There, in the city sites of Uruk and Susa and archaeologists have found in the layers that date to around 3500 to 2900 BCE. Archaeologists have found clay tablets containing writing. Interestingly, at around the same time thousands of kilometers further west in the Nile Valley, we also have earliest evidence for writing. There's a gap of around another 600 years until writing is found in the Indus Valley. So that's on the Indian subcontinent. Then back around 1400 to 1200 BCE, we find around the Mediterranean, around Greece, and in the Hittite and Anatolian highland, there is evidence of other forms of writing, other languages now starting to be written. And then, evidence in China, early writing there dates back to around 1200 BCE. Other earlier forms of writing from middle America, like the Mayan hieroglyphs or other forms of write like Etruscan, or of Phoenician writing around the Mediterranean, again date to around 900 BCE, 900 to 500, so that is much, much younger. Or runic writing up in northern Scandinavia, or in Japan. Early writing in Japan dates to, well the early centuries of the common era. So what one can see with the emergence of writing, is that probably fairly independently of each other across the world, over a long, long span of time, writing has developed. Now, why did people start writing? I think that from the earliest evidence that we have from Mesopotamia and from Egypt, it is clear that these are labels. And they are all examples of texts that have to do with administration in the widest sense. So it has to do with inventorizing things. It has to do with wages of workmen, with lists of items of grain, of textile, of goods. So it's administrative in the largest sense. In China the earliest forms of writing come more from a religious context, divination, and oracles. With the Mayan hieroglyphs, which is of course, much, much younger, a lot of their signs and the texts, or the inscriptions that are preserved for us today, have to do with the calendar and timekeeping and things like that. The early forms of writing on the clay tablets found in Mesopotamia are pictographic, but they develop very quickly into something more complex and abstract. Egyptian hieroglyphs in it's fully developed form is not a pictographic language. After the 4th century AD of our era, the knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs was lost. The 19th century is the age of the great decipherments. So on the one instance in 1822, Jean-Francois Champollion reached this decisive breakthrough with hieroglyphs. And the breakthrough came when Jean-Francois Champollion discovered, and worked out that it is in fundamentally a phonographic language. So that individual signs, although they might represent something specific like a water ripple, or an owl, or a reed. That they actually represent a sound, like an e, an m, or an n, and that the script is to be read phonetically. The key monument that helped him achieve this breakthrough was the Rosetta Stone, which is a decree from the Late Period in Egypt. That is interestingly, written in three languages, in Egyptian, in Demotic, and in Greek. And the assumption was that all these three texts would have the same contents. In the hieroglyphic section of this document, there are a number of sections, words, that are surrounded by what we now know is a name ring. And this ring, this cartouche, surrounds the names of the kings. And so by matching the signs in the hieroglyph with known names in the Greek, this correspondence of the individual signs with the sounds they represent could finally be made. So if writing is the means by which we can make the intangible tangible, the fleeting moment of speech and thought. And that writing, depending on what materials we use, can last for a very long time. One might think about today and the technologies we have today, how do they sit with this? And I think one great achievement over the last decades has been, through the development of means by which we can, in fact, record the spoken word. Just think of the telephone, or other computer-based electronic possibilities. Like me talking to you here is a recording of voice without writing, without this medium. So, where do we go from here? What is? I don't know. I think it is all open. How will this recording last? How will it be accessible? I don't know. What technologies are out there that haven't yet been invented? That might revolutionize the way we communicate. We make decisions about keeping and discarding all the time. And some, of course It depends on the writing materials, now happy birthday written on a birthday cake, is writing that will not last very long, beyond the blowing out of the candles. The sky writing with a plane that emits paraffin oil, will not last for longer than about 10, 15 minutes. So we make decisions about the materials we use, about the purpose that the writing is for. And some writing materials will last for a long, long time. Like the hieroglyphs on the monuments in Egypt, they are carved in stone. A lot of effort was taken, and resources applied to put the writing on the wall. And they have achieved something that the Egyptians were aiming for, namely, for their writing, and their thoughts, and their ideas about the gods and the world, and to last for eternity. And so far, I think they've done quite a good job. [MUSIC]
