VIEWS took part in this year’s Cambridge Festival, a showcase of research happening across the University of Cambridge. The project team has been together for several months now, and we’ve got our heads round one another’s ideas, specialisms, and plans, so the Festival was a great opportunity to introduce a broader audience to some of the key questions and themes that connect the various strands of VIEWS research.
Two of the postdoctoral Research Associates on the team, Philip Boyes and Jordan Miller, gave a talk titled Writing for display in the ancient world. The word ‘display’ is rather broad and was a good springboard for discussion. It can encompass communication, which most of us would intuit as the main purpose of writing—it’s by far the most common function of writing in the contemporary world. But what about writing that is technically visible, yet can’t really be seen? Philip and Jordan wanted to explore the interplay of visibility, readability, literacy, communication through language, and aesthetic expression.
Philip kicked off discussion with the Behistun inscription, a trilingual decree (Akkadian, Old Persian, Elamite) set up by the Achaemenid king Darius I high on a cliff face. Depending on lighting conditions, the text is hardly detectable—and virtually unreadable—from a vantage point on the ground, and getting high enough up the mountain to examine it more closely would have been quite a feat.
Behistun inscription (centre) in context, with human for scale at bottom left. Photograph by Barghar, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY.
Much closer to the Cambridge home of VIEWS, the Admiralty Arch in London shows how such plays on readability, visibility, and literacy continue to be relevant. Its inscription is high above street level and is best viewed from the middle of the road (not the safest location!). It is written in Latin, a language that the vast majority of the population in this country cannot read. While Latin was more commonly taught when the Arch was built in 1910 (CE!), this would still have been true.
Admiralty Arch, London, with semi-visible inscription at top centre. Photograph by Diliff, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA.
Although the inscription does communicate a message if you know how to read it, that message is arguably secondary to the ideological implications: the inscription, like the architecture, draws on the cultural associations of classical antiquity in the modern Western world. It’s in Latin, and together with its typeface, it evokes the authority and prestige of ancient Rome. The average educated passer-by might be expected to recognise the royal names Edward and Victoria, but even those aren’t really necessary to understand what the monument is ‘actually saying’—that this is an imperial capital in the vein of ancient Rome; that this is a place of political and cultural power. Viewers would recognise this style from countless public buildings all over Europe. They don’t need to be able to read the text to get the message. It has an inscription because having Latin inscriptions like this is part of this visual language of power, not because it needs to be read.
The Behistun inscription and Admiralty Arch raise issues of accessibility, but what about inscriptions that were well-sized and in easy reach of literate audiences, possibly even ‘the public’? How far were they actually read, and what do we mean by ‘reading’ anyway? The Gortyn code from Crete (5th century BCE) is a good example of this.
Gortyn law code. Photograph by Disdero, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA.
The Gortyn code was part of a long tradition of public legal displays going as far back as the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia (18th century BCE) and the royal decrees of Old Kingdom Egypt (24th–21st centuries BCE). Even if these inscriptions were accessible, how many people were actually interested in reading them? The presence of a text can sometimes be more important than its content. Jordan wonders if the text of Hammurabi’s code might really be considered a kind of extended caption to the famous scene at the top of the stela bearing the text, of king Hammurabi interacting with Shamash, the sun-god and dispenser of justice—there are parallels for this kind of setup in ancient Egypt, for example the famous ‘king as sun-priest’ text which in its earliest monumental representations (mid-second millennium BCE) links the figures of the king and sun-god.
Viewers may have been able to recognize common words or phrases—and this need not have depended on actual linguistic ‘reading’ in the sense of deciphering signs and parsing grammar, but on recognizing common graphic clusters. Thoroughgoing readings may not have been the primary expectation. Yet, the impact of display may have depended on the very presence of extensive text, which produced a visual spectacle of diverse sign forms and/or sequences (depending on the character of the script, whether alphabetic, cuneiform, hieroglyphic, or otherwise). Literacy, communication, and display exist in complex relationships.
However, there are many examples of inscriptions that seem to have been deliberately concealed, or at least never intended to be read. Why did the sarcophagus of the Phoenician king Ahiram at Byblos (c. 1000 BCE) feature a curse inscription against grave robbers? To even reach the sarcophagus and read that curse, robbers would already have tunnelled through rock and clay into a cramped, dark, 10m-deep vertical shaft! It’s unlikely they would have given up at that point!
One way of thinking about such inscriptions is as voice, just as images could be bodies. Also part of the Near Eastern traditions of curses are the extensive warnings to potential vandals inscribed on the monuments of Mesopotamian kings, who refer to their inscriptions and images as if they were extensions of their physical selves, enduring into eternity. Destruction of text and image will be met by the extermination of lineages, legacies, and offices. The counterpart to such injunctions is the practice of damnatio memoriae, well known from many ancient cultures, from Egypt to Rome.
We then moved discussion onto Egypt, where practices of hieroglyphic writing were strongly motivated by aesthetics. On the one hand, writing itself was often mobilized for its aesthetic value, as on offering tables and false doors with symmetrical columns of text and writing that may expand outward or converge at central points. Certain monuments seem to have been modelled as readable glyphs in themselves, for example the altar in the sun temple complex of the king Niuserre (c. 2450 BCE).
Altar in the sun temple of Niuserre, in the form of a central disc surrounded by hetep-signs depicting offering trays. Photograph by kairoinfo4u, Flickr, CC-BY-NC-SA.
The altar, which would have bore offerings to the sun-god, is fashioned as four hetep-signs reading ‘offering’ and in the form of a tray carrying a loaf of bread, surrounding a central disc—the sun, the recipient of those offerings. What do we mean by ‘literacy’ in such contexts, where actual objects placed on the altar mirrored the depictions of them that served to write out ‘offering’?
On the other hand, visual spectacle could enhance the expression of language. The famous ‘crossword stela’ dedicated to the goddess Mut by an Egyptian official called Paser, is a flat slab inscribed with what could be called a ‘triple hymn’ to the goddess. It makes visible the rectangular ‘quadrats’ into which hieroglyphic signs are grouped. The quadrats form a dense grid that can be read either vertically or horizontally, the resulting texts being hymns to Mut.
The ‘crossword’ designation is a misnomer: Egyptian quadrats could have one or several signs, so a quadrat could serve as a whole word, or as a series of phonetic signs in a word spanning more than one quadrat. And so the signs could play different functions depending on the direction of reading. In such contexts, literacy was key to fuller aesthetic appreciation. Moreover, the header on the slab states that the monument can be read in three ways, and the elusive third option is likely represented by the frieze of deities along its top edge. Such ‘ornamental cryptography’, as it is often called, write out the names and epithets of kings and gods through atypically-scaled, unusually-formed images that seem more at home as ‘iconography’, yet can be read as text.
And if the curse inscriptions of the Near East extend the self into monuments through the vocalic potential of writing, some ancient Egyptians took the idea to its logical extreme by crafting the self through monuments. One of the best examples of this is a monument dedicated to Mutemwia, a wife of king Thutmose IV and mother of king Amenhotep III (c. 1400 BCE). A massive granodiorite barque bearing a figure of the goddess Mut was dedicated to Mutemwia in the temple at Karnak, where Mut was consort to the patron deity Amun. Thus the monument writes out the name of Mutemwia herself, ‘Mut is in the barque’ (mut-em-wia).
The forms of works such as this one were appropriate for temple contexts, and they negotiated truly intimate links between deity and beneficiary, where each was an inseparable part of the other. Writing was display, display was presence; and in terms of communication, one could ‘get the message’ by ‘reading’ the image even if one could not ‘read’ conventional linear texts.
We were delighted to be able to share this material with Festival audiences, and came away with some really interesting ideas from attendees with knowledge of all sorts of other scripts and languages. Philip and Jordan are exploring these topics and case studies in more detail as part of their VIEWS research, so stay tuned for updates in the form of articles and their eventual monographs!
I recently took my son to see William Blake’s Universe, an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It sets Blake alongside his contemporaries, and does a wonderful job of showing his journey from classically trained artist to something of an artistic revolutionary and, as he is so often labelled, a visionary. While many of his pieces on display are commissions, some of the most recognisable are his own compositions incorporating his poetry, in which each page is of his own design.
Title page of The Song of Los.
What is really striking about Blake’s collections of poetry is that each poem is itself a work of art that combines word and image. He called the works “illuminated books”, implicitly recalling the illumination of medieval manuscripts perhaps, although what he created combined artistic innovation and technology in a novel way.
I visited an exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge recently, Urgent Archive by Issam Kourbaj, and found that it was even more relevant to VIEWS and my research than I realised. The subject of the exhibition is the ongoing, devastating war in Syria – a topic already close to my heart because of my interest in the area in ancient times, and especially because of the many people I know who have been affected by the conflict. Writing and the way writing appears is central to many of the inspiring artworks on display in the exhibition.
I am Merten, entering the VIEWS project as a doctoral student preoccupied with the Bronze Age writing of Crete, which in its paucity and yet great variability continues to defy understanding. I previously studied comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands and completed a Master’s thesis in Mycenaean Greek philology.
While the study of the earliest Greek writing affords us indispensable insights into the world of the Bronze Age, this evidence represents merely the last of a tradition much longer but more enigmatic, which compels us to ask: what is writing?
The characters forming this sentence are familiar as examples of writing, and like all such examples that first come to mind, whether in Latin letters or not, they appear to us in the form of linear sequences typically standing for sounds. It is a highly regular system the conventions of which are so instinctive to us that we read the message and not the signs that compose it.
Peering, however, back into the past, and at the objects that the past has bequeathed us, we find forms long supposed to be writing but which in visual character are completely remote. A most vexed example is that of ‘Cretan Hieroglyphic’, signs found on Crete and other Greek islands of the Aegean Sea in Bronze Age sites three to four thousand years old. Often found completely alone or without clear reading direction, these signs occur with such irregular frequency and varied appearance as to confound the recognition of signs that represent language at all: is it rather decoration unconnected with sounds?
Among scholars it has long been accepted that the island of Crete between 2100 and 1200 bc was home to no fewer than three different systems of writing of which examples have been found on more than one object, besides others known by one example alone.
The systems in question are ‘Cretan Hieroglyphic’, ‘Linear A’ and ‘Linear B’, to each of these respectively being attributed the number of hundreds, of thousands and of tens of thousands of signs. Linear B is found on clay tablets and vessels, and Linear A likewise on clay tablets, but also on stone tables and vessels, jewellery and one figurine. The appearance of tally marks on almost all the clay tablets did early suggest an administrative use (Figure 1). Linear B was famously deciphered by Michael Ventris to give us our earliest documentation of Greek. Cretan Hieroglyphic was likewise identified on clay objects that suggest an administrative use (Figure 2), but also on a great number of seal stones cut in soft stone or quartz (Figure 3). These seals are for the most part little beads, at times not reaching ten millimetres in width. It is here that the appearance of the hieroglyphic signs is most striking: they are closest to those things that inspired their form and arranged with a concern seemingly more for visual balance than any clear order of reading. If we consider the seal-stones found in Figure 3, how are they meant to be read? In this respect the ‘hieroglyphs’ on the seals are so different from those on clay objects that we might question their being placed in one class.
Figures 2 and 3: Evans’ drawings of two clay bars with hieroglyphic signs and of two hieroglyphic seals. How might such a seal be ‘read’?
Sir Arthur Evans, who, in collecting and publishing a great wealth of material first asserted that writing had been present in Greece before the Phoenician alphabet did arrive, gave us the terms and the categories that we use, but his sense of his categories was altogether different from ours.
Guided today in drawing a distinction between the two linear scripts by the one’s being already deciphered, we will most likely first point to a difference of language: Greek and non-Greek. Evans, of course, knew nought of the language, nor expressed himself on it beyond a remark that sharing of ‘similar sign-groups’ in scripts A and B would prove their linguistic identity, a view we would not now defend. For him, the need to distinguish the scripts (or to better reflect his language, two ‘classes’ of linear writing) began with the impression of their appearance on him. Nor was it so much the palaeography of the writing — the difference in the formation of signs — that guided his judgement, but the appearance of the documents on which they appeared.
Both forms of writing are found on clay tablets that were in fact unintentionally fired:, the writers appear never to have intended their preservation, and they have only survived because baked in the fires that destroyed those places in which they are found. Tthe Class B tablets of later archaeological layers were larger and fuller, with a regularity of left-to-right writing on ruled lines and meaningful use of spacing and sign size unknown in the preceding Class A. While Evans noted the presence of a few novel signs and believed that some signs found in Class A also appeared in Class B in ‘more primitive form’, it seems to have been this reaction to visual aspect, not a difference of writing system or language, that at first most concerned him, and which gave us two categories that continue in use by an intuition remote from his own.
If the reason for the difference does thus fall away, we might wonder whether the distinction itself be of use. Dr Ester Salgarella,[1] situating our Linear B evidence amidst all the variation of Linear A, recently expressed doubts as to the usefulness of maintaining any distinction, when the difference in language and administrative practice is to her hardly equalled by a distinction in script. If the recognition of one Aegean linear script might replace the long-held separation of scripts A and B, we cannot but ask how this linear writing sits beside Evans’ third classification, that of the ‘pictographic’ or ‘hieroglyphic’.
The studies of this third form of writing, finding their last authoritative expression in the corpus that Jean-Pierre Olivier and Louis Godart published in 1996, long ago departed from its treatment by Evans. It was the origin and development of writing on Crete that most concerned Evans, and its exemplification of the evolution of writing as observed in many parts of the world. He did not keep himself to one ‘hieroglyphic’ category, but again identified a Class A and B, beside a set of still-to-be conventionalised ‘pictograms’ from which the former would stem. With his Class B Evans identified the earliest writing inscribed on clay objects; the linear classes he supposed to emerge in a subsequent period.
With later scrutiny of find contexts, all confidence in this chronological separation was lost, leaving scholars to offer many an alternate explanation for the coexistence of two scripts on one island, without any gaining consensus. Professor Massimo Perna,[2] for example, would see two populations in independent states in north-east and south-central Crete, observing as others have done an association of linear but not hieroglyphic writing with the latter. With both forms of writing found at some northern sites, an ‘amalgamation’ of these peoples is seen, but one might speculate on many other reasons that would surely be at least equally plausible.
It is among the first remarks made whenever the writing of the Aegean is raised that Linear B but not A is deciphered. What this decipherment did entail, however, is much less often described. Ventris’ decipherment of Linear B was the assignment of sound-values to signs. Inasmuch as it shares almost all the same signs (and perhaps is really the same script), Linear A was by extension ‘deciphered’. Then, however, another issue arises, that of the understanding of language. The signs of the script now associated with sounds, on some objects — of the later ‘B’ class — they yield comprehensible texts in discernible Greek, through the arduous philological work begun by Ventris and John Chadwick. On others (Linear ‘Class A’) we are confronted with language that is to us wholly opaque, and almost certainly so to remain. With ‘hieroglyphic writing’, however, the problems are different again.
What in ‘hieroglyphic’ inscriptions is in fact writing? What really was meant to be ‘read’? Can we find correspondences between ‘hieroglyphic’ signs and those of the linear script? These are the questions that concern current research, such as that by Professor Silvia Ferrara and others, and which I myself am now beginning to study. There are accepted equations between ‘hieroglyphic’ and ‘linear’ signs, and yet these are surprisingly few. If we could find a more general correspondence of signs, we might no longer need to assume the existence of two separate systems. Is the highly divergent appearance of signs more a function of a different tradition of writing or rather of how the material and its manner of working constrain the way they are formed? How does the intent behind an inscription influence the form that it takes? What would time constraints do to the copying of the carefully worked seal-signs onto clay? How does variation in ‘hieroglyphic’ writing on clay compare with that of the seal-stones and clay linear script? How much more ‘readable’ might this writing be to a reader with knowledge of the system that we do not share? What do we mean when we call shapes merely ‘decorative’? What might they give to inscriptions? Were all seal inscriptions in fact seen rather as icons, or parsed as a sequence of signs standing for sounds? Can such inscriptions at all be compared with the writing of the Aegean linear script?
This last term I have begun with a study of the so-called ‘Archanes formula’, long –thought to be a bridge between Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A. A group of five Linear signs found in stone, metal and clay was equated with five Hieroglyphic seal signs arranged in more ‘linear’ fashion than is usually seen in such contexts (Figure 4). When we trace the origins of this proposed relationship back through the scholarship and compare the first arguments made for the equation of the Hieroglyphic and Linear sign-groups with what we see on the objects in fact, we find ourselves quite disappointed: wishful thinking and misunderstanding appear to have confounded the question. Being forced to cast the ‘Archanes formula’ aside, the relation between Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A is more obscure than ever, and we must seek an entirely new understanding of it.
~ Merten Wiltshire, VIEWS Project PhD Student
Works referenced
[1] Salgarella, Ester (2020), Aegean Linear Script(s): rethinking the relationship between Linear A and Linear B. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[2] Perna, Massimo (2014), ‘The Birth of Administration and Writing in Minoan Crete: Some Thoughts on Hieroglyphics and Linear A’, in Nakassis, Dimitri, Gulizio, Joann and James, Sarah (eds.), KE-RA-ME-JA: Studies Presented to Cynthia W. Shelmerdine, 251–60. Prehistory Monographs 46. Philadelphia: INSTAP Academic Press.
Happy International Lego Classics Day! I am on maternity leave at the moment, so I haven’t been able to do my usual build for the big day. However, my son Ben has kindly lent me a couple of pieces of Duplo so that I can do something small!
Taking a Duplo elephant as my starting inspiration, I thought I would make a little tribute to the Carthaginian general Hannibal.
Today is International Lego Classics Day, #ILCD24, when the internet celebrates the classical world through the timeless medium of Lego.
Perhaps surprisingly, Lego has never really done a proper ancient world theme, but even so, more than a little ancient and historical writing has found its way into official sets over the years, to say nothing of the many wonderful fan builds. Let’s take a look at the different scripts on offer and the various ways Lego designers have chosen to handle them.
We’re excited to announce the first VIEWS conference – Writing as Visual Experience – will be taking place in Cambridge on 20-22 September 2024. We would like to invite scholars and practitioners working in any field and with any chronological or geographical focus to submit proposals for 30-minute papers looking at methodologies and ways of approaching the visual aspects of writing.
Please send abstracts to views@classics.cam.ac.uk by 31 March.
Please also contact us at that email address to register for the conference without presenting.
The conference will be primarily in-person, but we hope it will also be possible to watch presentations live online (where speakers agree). We will confirm the details of this nearer the time.
Today is World Endangered Writing Day, a new initiative by the Endangered Alphabets project aimed at highlighting and celebrating minority and Indigenous writing practices in the modern world, and the communities that practise them. Endangered writing is something we’re very interested in here at VIEWS, as you’ll know if you’ve been following our Endangered Writing Network. We want our work on the scripts of the ancient world to have a beneficial effect today, and one of the ways we can do this is by using ancient case studies to improve our understanding of the idea of ‘vitality’ in writing practices, and conversely, what processes lead scripts and related practices to fall out of use.
When we look back at the ancient world from a vantage point thousands of years later, it’s very easy to lose sight of the people and processes behind social changes in the grand sweep of history. Societies rise and fall, cities are founded, flourish and are destroyed or abandoned. Things can take on a certain air of inevitability: of course nothing lasts for ever, however unimaginable that might be to the people living with those things. Scripts fall by the wayside, just like pottery forms, religions or styles of dress: it would be weird if they didn’t.
But why? Because when we look closer, there’s no inevitable life-cycle of writing. Some are brief flashes of activity, like the alphabetic cuneiform used in the Bronze Age Syrian port of Ugarit, which seems to have been invented, been used across a wide range of contexts and then disappeared entirely in the span of perhaps less than a hundred years. Others, like Mesopotamian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs last for thousands of years. Our own alphabet – all modern alphabets, in fact – can be traced back to the early second millennium BCE at least, although it has developed enormously over that time and splintered into numerous mutually unintelligible varieties. Many scripts fall somewhere in between, flourishing for a few centuries before becoming obsolete or developing into something different enough that we give it a new name.
Next Tuesday, 23rd January, is the inaugural World Endangered Writing Day, organised by our colleague Tim Brookes of Endangered Alphabets. This is a day for everyone and an important opportunity to hear about threatened writing systems around the world and ongoing efforts to identify and preserve them.
You can find out all about the day’s events and register to participate via the official website HERE.
Although Pippa is currently on leave, she will be taking part in a conversation with Tim on the day – so do tune in if you want to hear more about her research on writing endangerment in the ancient world, her recent book and her plans for the Endangered Writing Network.
The VIEWS project 