Chapter 13 Chapter 12 Blueprints and Borrowed Letters

Nineteenth-century writers tended to see history as a progression from barbarism to civilization.Key signs of this transformation include the development of agriculture, metallurgy, sophisticated technology, centralized government, and writing.Of these, writing has traditionally been the most geographically constrained sign: Australia, the Pacific Islands, Africa south of the equator, and the entire New World except for a small portion of Central America, before the outward expansion of Islam and European colonists. Neither text.Being in a corner, peoples who claim to be civilized always regard writing as the most distinctive feature that makes them superior to "savages."

With knowledge comes power.Therefore, writing has also brought power to modern society. Using writing to disseminate knowledge can be more accurate, larger, and more detailed. It can be spread farther geographically and longer in time. .Of course, some peoples (notably the Inca) managed to run empires without writing, and "civilized" peoples did not always defeat "barbarians," as Roman armies facing the Huns knew. at this point.But the European conquests of America, Siberia, and Australia exemplify the typical results of modern times. Writing, alongside weapons, germs, and centralized administrative organization, has become a modern means of conquest.The orders of the monarchs and merchants who organized the colonizing fleets were given in words.The fleet determined its route by relying on the composition and written navigation instructions prepared by previous expeditions.Written accounts of previous expeditions described the riches and fertile lands that awaited their conquerors, thereby stimulating interest in future expeditions.These records told later explorers what to expect and helped them prepare.The resulting empire was governed by means of writing.While all this information could have been communicated by other means in pre-writing societies, writing made communication easier, more detailed, more accurate, and more trustworthy.

Since writing has such an overriding value, why did some peoples produce writing while others did not?For example, why didn't traditional hunter-gatherers invent their own writing, nor did they borrow others' writing?In island empires, why did the writing appear in spoken Crete, but not in Polynesian-speaking Tonga?How many times has writing been produced in human history?Under what circumstances did it arise?Out of what needs?Among those peoples who invented writing, why are some peoples so much earlier than others?For example, today almost all Japanese and Scandinavians are literate, while most Iraqis are illiterate: why did writing appear in Iraq almost 4,000 years earlier?

The spread of writing from its origins also raises important questions.For example, why did writing spread from the Fertile Crescent to Ethiopia and Arabia, but not from Mexico to the Andes?Was the writing system transmitted by hand copying?Did existing writing systems simply inspire neighboring peoples to invent their own?Since a writing system is only suitable for one language, how do you design such a writing system for another language?The same questions arise if one wants to understand many other aspects of human culture—such as the origin and spread of technology, religion, and food production.But historians interested in such questions about writing have the advantage that these questions can often be answered in incomparable detail by means of the written record itself.Thus, we can examine the development of writing, not only because of its inherent importance, but also because it allows for a general and profound understanding of the cultural history that writing provides.

There are 3 basic strategies that form the basis of the writing system.These strategies differ in the size of the speech unit represented by a written symbol: either an elementary sound, a complete syllable, or a complete word.Among these writing systems, the system used by most peoples today is the alphabet, and the alphabet preferably provides a unique symbol (called a letter) for each basic sound (phoneme) of the language.But in reality most alphabets only have around 20 or 30 letters, and most languages ​​have more phonemes than letters in their alphabet.Consequently, most alphabetic languages, including English, have to assign several different phonemes to the same letter, and combine letters to represent certain phonemes, such as the two-letter combination sh and th in English (and In the Russian and Greek alphabets, each letter represents a sound).

The second strategy is to use the so-called logogram, that is, to use a written symbol to represent a complete word.This is a function of many symbols of the Chinese script, as well as the popular Japanese writing system known as Kanji.Before the spread of alphabetic writing, logographic-heavy writing systems were more common, including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mayan hieroglyphs, and Sumerian cuneiform. The third strategy, the least familiar to most readers of this book, is to use a symbol to represent a syllable.In fact, most such writing systems (called syllabic scripts) use different symbols to represent syllables composed of a consonant followed by a vowel (such as the syllable of the word "fa-W-1y"), and use various symbols. Different ways to write other types of syllables with the help of these symbols.Syllabic scripts were common in antiquity, such as Linear B in Greece.Some syllabic scripts are still in use today, not the least of which are the pseudonyms that the Japanese use for telegraphs, bank statements and books for the blind.

I purposely refer to these three methods as strategies rather than writing systems.No existing writing system has only one strategy.Chinese characters are not entirely composed of logograms, and English characters are not entirely alphabetized.English, like all alphabetic writing systems, uses logograms such as numbers, $, %, and +: that is, a number of arbitrary symbols that represent whole words but are not composed of phonetic elements. "Syllabic" Linear B had many logograms, while "logograph" Egyptian hieroglyphs had not only an actual alphabet with individual letters for each consonant, but also many Syllable symbols.

Inventing a writing system from scratch is as difficult as borrowing and adapting a writing system.The earliest scribes had to formulate some fundamental principles that we take for granted today.For example, they had to figure out how to break down sequences of sounds into speech units, whether those units were seen as words, syllables, or phonemes.They must learn to recognize the same sound or unit of speech through all the normal variations in volume, pitch, speed, emphasis, word combinations and individual pronunciation habits when we speak.They had to decide that the writing system should ignore all these changes.Then they also had to devise ways to represent language in symbols.

Somehow, these earliest scribes solved all these problems without a previous model showing the final result to guide them.The task is obviously very difficult, and there have been only a few times in history when people have invented writing systems entirely on their own.Two undisputed examples of independent inventions of writing are the Sumerians in Mesopotamia a little earlier than 3000 BC, and the Mexican Indians in 600 BC (Figure 12.1); 3000 BC The Egyptian script and the Chinese script no later than 1300 BC may have also emerged independently.Since then, all other peoples have probably invented their own scripts by borrowing and adapting other scripts, or at least being inspired by existing writing systems.

The most thoroughly studied independently invented script is the oldest writing system in history, the Sumerian cuneiform (Figure 12.1).In the thousands of years before this script was finalized, people in some agricultural cottages in the Fertile Crescent used clay to make various simple shapes to count, such as the number of sheep and the amount of grain.During the last few centuries before 3000 AD, developments in accounting techniques, formats and symbols rapidly led to the first writing systems.A technical innovation in this regard was the use of the flat clay slate as a convenient writing surface.In the beginning, the sharp point was used to mark the clay, and later this point gradually gave way to the pointed pen made of reed rod, because this pen can draw neat and beautiful marks on the dipped clay board.The development of writing formats included the gradual adoption of conventions generally considered essential today: that words should be neatly arranged in lines drawn in straight lines (the Sumerian scripts, like modern European scripts, were as similar as those of modern Europeans). was horizontal; lines should always be read in one direction (the Sumerians, like modern Europeans, read from left to right); and lines on clay tablets should be read from top to bottom, rather than the other way around.

The crucial change, however, is to address a problem that is fundamental to almost all writing systems: how to devise obvious signs that everyone agrees represent the actual language, not just disregarding some concept of pronunciation or word.The early stages of development of this solution are extraordinary evidenced by the thousands of clay tablets unearthed from the ruins of the former Sumerian city of Uruk.Uruk was located on the Euphrates River, about 200 miles southeast of present-day Baghdad.The earliest Sumerian writing symbols were recognizable figures of objects referred to (such as figures of fish and birds).Of course, these pictographic symbols consist primarily of numbers plus nouns for visible objects; the resulting texts are nothing more than brief shorthand journals without grammatical components.Gradually, these symbolic forms became more abstract, especially after the pointed writing instrument was replaced by the pointed pen made of reed stalks.Combining old symbols to create new symbols yields new meanings: for example, to produce a symbol for eating, the symbol for head is combined with the symbol for bread. The earliest Sumerian scripts consisted of phonetic logograms.That is to say, it is not based on the unique pronunciation of the Sumerian language. It can use a completely different pronunciation to express the same meaning in any other language-just as for the number sign 4, English-speaking, Russian-speaking , Finnish and Indonesian speakers all have different pronunciations, pronounced as four, chetwire, nelju and ernpat respectively.Perhaps the most important step in the entire history of writing was the adoption of phonetic symbols by the Sumerians, initially by writing abstract nouns with symbols for nouns that sounded the same and could be drawn.For example, it is easy to draw a recognizable picture of the bow, but it is difficult to draw a recognizable picture of life, but the pronunciation of both is ti in Su-English, so—Zhang Gong The graphic means either bow or life.The resulting ambiguity is resolved by adding a silent sign, called a semaphore, to denote the noun class to which the proposed object belongs.Linguists call this decisive innovation the rebus principle, which forms the basis of puns today. Once the Sumerians had stumbled upon this phonetic principle, they set out to use it not only for writing abstract tones, but for many other purposes as well.They use it to write the syllables or letters that form the endings of grammatical words.For example, it is not so easy to draw a picture for the common syllable —tion in English, but we can draw a picture for the homophonic verb shun (to avoid).Symbols expressed phonetically are also used to "spell" longer words into a series of pictures, each picture depicting the sound of a syllable.It's as if an English-speaking person draws a bee (bee) first and then a leaf (Leaf) when writing the word believe (believe).Phonetic symbols also enabled word creators to use the same graphic symbol to represent a group of related words (such as tooth, speech, and speaker, but to resolve the ambiguity one had to add a Phonetic symbols (such as selecting symbols for two, each, and peak). Thus, Sumerian writing ended up as a complex combination of three symbols: logograms, which designate a complete word or name; phonetic symbols, which are actually used to spell out syllables, letters, grammatical components or parts of words; And symbol, silent, only used to resolve ambiguity.Nevertheless, the language symbols in Sumerian writing are far from reaching the standard of a complete syllable table or alphabet.Some syllables in Sumerian do not have any written symbols; the same symbol may have different pronunciations; the same symbol may have various pronunciations, and may be read as a word, a syllable, or a letter. In addition to Sumerian cuneiform, another undoubted example of an independent invention of writing in human history comes from Indian societies in Mesoamerica (probably southern Mexico).Some argue that the emergence of Mesoamerican writing has nothing to do with Old World writing, since there is no convincing evidence that New World societies came into contact with writing Old World societies before the Norsemen.Moreover, in terms of form, the writing symbols of Mesoamerica are completely different from any kind of writing in the Old World.There are about a dozen known Mesoamerican scripts, all or most of which are clearly related (for example, in their numeral and calendar systems), and most of them are still only partially deciphered.At present, the earliest scripts preserved in Mesoamerica come from the Zapotec region in southern Mexico around 600 BC, but the most well-understood scripts so far are the scripts in the lowland areas inhabited by the Mayans, where the earliest known scripts The recorded date corresponds to 292 AD. Although the Maya script was invented independently and had a distinctive symbolic form, its compositional principles are basically similar to those of Sumerian script, and to some other writing systems in western Eurasia that were inspired by Sumerian script.Like Sumerian script, Mayan script also made use of logograms and linguistic symbols.Logograms representing abstract words are usually invented on the principle of rebuses.That is, an abstract word can be written with symbols representing another word, which is pronounced the same, but has a different yet easily drawn meaning.Like the kana symbols in Japan and the Linear B syllable table in Greece in the Mycenaean era, the phonetic symbols in Maya are mostly syllable symbols composed of a consonant and a vowel (such as ta, te, ti, to, tu) .Like the letters of the early alphabet, Mayan syllables come from pictures drawn of the things they refer to, and the pronunciation of the thing begins with that syllable (for example, the Mayan syllable "ne" resembles a tail, The word for tail in Maya is neh). All these similarities between Mesoamerican writing and ancient writing in western Eurasia attest to the fundamental universality of human creativity.Although among the languages ​​of the world, the languages ​​of the Sumerians and the languages ​​of Mesoamerica are not particularly related to each other, both raise some similar fundamental questions about the translation of language into writing.A solution pioneered by the Sumerians before 3000 BC was recreated by the early Mesoamerican Indians halfway around the world before 600 BC. The Egyptian, Chinese, and Easter Island scripts are possible exceptions, to be discussed later.All other writing systems invented at any time anywhere in the world seem to have been derived from writing systems that either modified Sumerian or early Mesoamerican scripts for their own use, or at least Created by themselves inspired by them.One reason why so few writings have been independently invented is that it is extremely difficult to invent, as we have already discussed.Another reason is that other opportunities for the independent invention of writing were preempted by Sumerian or early Mesoamerican and their derivatives. We know that the formation of Sumerian writing took at least hundreds and perhaps thousands of years.We will also see that the prerequisites for writing consisted of several features of human society that determined whether a society would find writing useful and whether it could support dedicated scribes.In addition to the societies of the Sumerians and early Mexicans, many other human societies—such as those of ancient India, Crete, and Ethiopia—have such prerequisites.However, the Sumerians and early Mexicans happened to be the first to have these prerequisites in the Old and New Worlds, respectively.Once the Sumerians and early Mexicans developed writing, the details and principles of their writing spread quickly to other societies, freed from experimenting with word creation for hundreds or even thousands of years.Therefore, the possibility of some other independent experiment of character creation was canceled or suspended. Writing is transmitted by either of two distinct methods, both of which find precedents throughout the history of technology and thought.Someone invented a thing and put it to use.So why would you, as another future user, design the same thing for your own use, knowing that others have built their own prototypes and made them work? The dissemination of such inventions takes various forms.One end is "blueprint copying", which is to copy or modify an existing detailed blueprint.At the other end is "idea propagation," which simply takes the basic idea and then has to recreate the details.Knowing that it can be done motivates you to work on it yourself, but the specific solution you end up with may or may not be like the first developer's solution. Take a recent example.Historians are still debating whether copying blueprints or spreading ideas contributed more to Russia's atomic bombing.Did Russia's efforts to build an atomic bomb depend decisively on the already built American atomic bomb blueprints stolen by spies and brought to Russia?Or was it simply the revelation of the US atomic bombing at Hiroshima that finally convinced Stalin that building such a bomb was possible, and the principles were then recreated by Russian scientists for use in an independent contingency plan with little to no previous US efforts Get an exhaustive guide?The same question exists about the history of the wheel, pyramids, and gunpowder.Let us now examine how blueprint reproduction and the diffusion of ideas helped the spread of writing systems. Today, some professional linguists use blueprint replication to design writing systems for languages ​​without scripts.Most of these tailor-made systems were adaptations of existing alphabets, although some also devised syllable tables.For example, some missionary linguists designed scripts for hundreds of New Guinea and Indian languages ​​by modifying the Roman alphabet.Government linguists devised not only a modified Cyrillic alphabet for many of Russia's tribal languages, but also a modified Roman alphabet, which was adopted by Turkey in 1928 to write Turkish. Sometimes we also know something about those who in the distant past designed writing systems by copying blueprints.For example, the Cyrillic alphabet (still used in Russia today) was devised by Saint Cyril, a Greek missionary to the Slavs in the 9th century AD, by adapting the Greek and Hebrew letters.The earliest well-preserved texts of Germanic languages ​​(a language family that includes English) are written in the Gothic alphabet created by Bishop Urfilas.Ulfilas was a missionary who lived with the Visigoths in what is today Bulgaria in the 4th century AD.Like St. Cyril's invention, Ulphaera's alphabet is a hodgepodge of letters borrowed from other sources: there are about 20 Greek letters, about 5 Roman letters, and two letters or taken from them, Or he created it himself.More often than not, we don't know anything about the people who invented famous ancient alphabets.But it is still possible to compare newly emerging ancient alphabets with previously existing ones, and to deduce from the form of the letters which existing alphabets were used as models.For the same reason, we can be sure that the Linear B script of Mycenaean Greece was adapted from the Linear A script of Crete around 1400 BC. Using the existing writing system of one language as a blueprint for adapting it to another, there are always some problems in doing this hundreds of times, because no two languages ​​sound exactly the same.Some of the original letters and symbols are discarded, as would be the case if the sounds represented by those letters in the borrowing language do not exist in the borrowing language.For example, Finnish has no other European languages ​​with b, c, f, g, w, x, and z sounds, so the Finns dropped these letters from their modified Roman alphabet.There is also the often opposite problem of devising letters to represent "new" sounds that are owned by the borrowing language but not in the lending language.This problem has been solved in several different ways: for example by using an arbitrary combination of two or more letters (e.g. th in English stands for sounds represented by only one letter in Greek and Runes). ; add a distinguishing mark to an existing letter (such as the palatalized n in Spanish, the umlaut o in German, and those extra marks that dance around Polish and Turkish letters) ; requisition a letter that is no longer needed in a borrowed language (such as modern Czech reusing the Roman letter c to represent the Czech t8 sound); or simply create a new letter (like our medieval ancestors created j, u and w these new letters). The Roman alphabet itself was the end product of a long series of blueprint replications.Alphabets apparently arose only once in human history: in the second millennium BC among Semitic speakers in the region from modern Syria to the Sinai Peninsula.The hundreds of alphabets, historical and current, all trace their origins to the ancestor of the Semitic alphabet, some (such as the Irish ones) as the result of the spread of ideas, but most of them are derived from the actual copying and modification of alphabetic forms. produced. This evolution of the alphabet can be traced back to Egyptian hieroglyphics, which contained a full set of 24 symbols representing the 24 consonants of the Egyptian language.The Egyptians did not take the (in our opinion) logical next step of throwing away all their logograms, synonymous and symbols for double and triple consonants, and used only their consonant alphabet.Beginning around 1700 BC, however, some Semitic peoples who were well versed in Egyptian hieroglyphics set out to experiment with this logical step. The regulation that symbols could only be used to represent single consonants was the first of 3 major reforms that distinguished the alphabet from other writing systems.The second reform was to arrange the letters in a fixed order and give them easy-to-remember names, thus helping users to remember these letters.Most of the names of our English letters are monosyllabic meaningless ones ("a", "bee", "cee", "dee", etc.).But names of Semitic letters have meaning in Semitic: they are all words for familiar things (aleph = cow, beth = house, gimel = camel, daleth = door, etc.).These Semitic words relate "by truncated phonetics" to the Semitic consonant they refer to: that is, the first letter of the word that stands for the thing, that is, the letter that gives the thing its name ('a, b, g, d, etc.).Furthermore, the earliest forms of the Semitic alphabet seem to be images of those things in many cases.All these features make the form, name and order of the Semitic alphabet easy to remember.The letters of many modern languages, including our English alphabet, still retain their original order after more than 3,000 years, with some small changes (in the case of Greek, even the original names of the letters: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc.).A small change that readers may have noticed is that the g in the Semitic and Greek letters became the c in the Roman and English letters, and the Romans created a new g in its current place . The third and final reform that led to the alphabet of modern languages ​​was the provision of vowels.In the early days of the Semitic alphabet, experiments were already underway with ways of writing vowels, either by adding additional small letters to denote specific vowels, or by adding dots, lines, or hooks to consonants.In the 8th century BC, the Greeks became the first people to systematically represent all vowels in the same letters as consonants.The Greeks got their vowels by "requisitioning" the five letters of the Phoenician alphabet used to represent consonants not found in Greek. One line of script evolution is the blueprint copying and gradual modification of these earliest Semitic alphabets, which developed into the early Arabic alphabet, and then developed into the modern Ethiopian alphabet.A much more important route was through the alphabet used for the official documents of the Persian Empire to the alphabets of modern Arabic, Hebrew, Indian and Southeast Asian languages.But the line of evolution most familiar to European and American readers reached the Greeks via the Phoenicians at the beginning of the eighth century BC, from the Greeks within the same century, and the Romans a century later. Without a little modification, it becomes the English alphabet.Because of this potential virtue of combining precision and simplicity, the alphabet is now adopted in much of the modern world. While copying and modification of blueprints is the most straightforward option for disseminating technology, sometimes this option is not always available.The blueprint may be hidden, and it may not be readable by those who are not advanced in this way.People may hear that something was invented somewhere far away, but the details may not be known.Perhaps all that is known is the basic idea that someone somehow succeeded in achieving a certain end result.Knowing this, however, may be the spread of ideas to inspire others to devise their own ways to achieve such results. A striking example from the history of writing: Around 1820, a Native American named Sequoyah in Arkansas invented syllabary for writing Cherokee.Sequoyah noted the great convenience that white people had in making marks on paper and using those marks to record and repeat long speeches.The complex role of these marks remained a mystery to him, however, because (like most Cherokee men before 1820) Sequoyah was illiterate and could neither speak nor read English.Because Sequoyah was a blacksmith, he first invented a bookkeeping method to help him keep track of what his customers owed.He drew a picture for each customer; then he drew circles and lines of various sizes to indicate the amount owed. Around 1810, Sequoyah decided to devise a writing system for Cherokee.He started drawing again, but gave up because drawing was too complicated and artistically demanding.Next he invented individual symbols for each word, but was dissatisfied when he created thousands of symbols and still wasn't enough. Finally, Sequoyah realized that words are made up of a number of different sounds that recur in many different words—what we call syllables.He started with 200 syllable symbols and gradually reduced them to 85, most of which represented combinations of a consonant and a vowel. A schoolteacher gave Sequoyah a spelling book of English words, which he used to practice copying the letters, which became a source of his symbols.About two dozen of his Cherokee syllables were taken directly from the English alphabet, with completely altered meanings of course, since Sequoyah did not know what they meant in English.For example, he singled out the symbols D, R, b, and h to represent the Cherokee syllables a, e, si, and ni, respectively, while the symbol for the number 4 was borrowed to represent the syllable se.He changed some English letters to create other symbols, for example, he designed the symbol ,andto represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively.There are also some symbols that are completely his own creation, such as the symbols representing ho, li and nu respectively. ,and .Sequoyah's syllabic script is generally appreciated by professional linguists because it closely matches the pronunciation of Cherokee and is also easy to learn.In a short period of time, the Cherokee learned almost 100 percent of this syllabic script, bought printing presses, cast Sequoyah's symbols into lead type, and began printing books and newspapers. Cherokee writing remains one of the most well-documented examples of the spread of ideas producing writing.We know that Sequoyah was given paper and other writing materials, ideas about writing systems, ideas about using different symbols, and dozens of forms of notation.However, since he could neither read nor write the English language, he could not get the details or even the principles of word creation from the various existing scripts around him.While the alphabets of the languages ​​around him were unknown to him, he independently re-created a syllabic script without knowing that another syllabic script had been created in Crete 3,500 years earlier. The example of Sequoyah can also be used as a sample of how the spread of ideas might have led to many writing systems in antiquity.The Hangeul alphabet designed for the Korean language by King Sejong of the Lee Dynasty in AD 1446 was apparently inspired by Chinese square characters, but also by the alphabetical principles of the Mongolian and Tibetan Buddhist scriptures.However, King Sejong created the form of the Hangul alphabet and several unique features of his alphabet.This includes using cursive script to group the glyphs into squares, using the associated letter shape to represent the associated vowel or consonant, and using the characteristic shape of the consonant letter to describe the position of the lips and tongue to pronounce that consonant.From the Ogham alphabet used by Zuo Shi in Ireland and parts of Celtic-speaking Britain in the 4th century AD, the principle of alphabetic phonetics was adopted (at this time, there were ready-made European alphabets that could be used), and only invented A unique alphabetic form that is apparently based on the five-finger system of sign language. We can reasonably attribute the appearance of Hangeul and Ogham to the spread of ideas, rather than independent creation behind closed doors, because we know that these two societies maintain close contacts with societies that possess writing, and at the same time Also because it is obvious which foreign texts provided the inspiration.In contrast, we can also safely attribute Sumerian cuneiform and the earliest writings of Mesoamerica to independent creations, because when they first appeared, there was no possible writing in their respective hemispheres. Additional text to inspire them.Still debatable is the origin of the writings of Easter Island, China and Egypt. The Polynesians who lived on Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean had a unique script.The earliest well-preserved samples of this writing date only to around AD 1851, long after Europeans arrived on the island in 1722.Perhaps, writing arose independently on Easter Island before the arrival of the Europeans, although no samples survive.However, the most straightforward explanation is to take some facts for granted. Suppose that in 1770, a Spanish expedition delivered a written statement of annexation to the residents of Easter Island. It was reading this statement that prompted the islanders to invent a language. with).Each square represents a syllable, and each constituent symbol within the square represents a letter. As for Chinese characters, the earliest physical evidence is around 1300 BC, but there may be earlier ones.Chinese characters also have symbols and certain combination principles unique to the local area, so most scholars believe that it also developed independently.Writing developed in Sumer, 4,000 miles west of early Chinese urban centers, by 3000 BC, and in the Indus Valley, 2,600 miles west of these urban centers by 2200 BC, but in the Indus Valley and The entire region between China and China is not known to have an early writing system.因此，没有证据可以说明中国最早的抄写员已经知道了其他任何可以给他们以启发的书写系统。 在所有古代书写系统中最有名的埃及象形文字，通常也被认为是独立创造的产物，但如认为埃及文字和中国文字不同，是思想传播的结果，这种解释似乎更为合理。象形文字于公元前3000年左右以几乎完全成熟的形式相当突然地出现。埃及在苏美尔西面仅仅800英里，埃及和苏美尔也一直有贸易往来。使我感到可疑的是，竟然没有关于象形文字逐步发展的任何证据流传下来，尽管埃及的干燥气候可能会有利于保存更早的文字实验成果，尽管苏美尔同样干燥的气候至少在公元前3000年前的几个世纪中已经产生了关于苏美尔楔形文字发展的丰富证据。同样可疑的是，在苏美尔文字和埃及文字出现之后，又在伊朗、克里特和土耳其出现了其他几种显然独立设计出来的书写系统（分别为所谓原始埃兰语文字、克里特形象文字和赫梯象形文字）。虽然这些书写系统的每一种所使用的一套特殊的符号，都不是从埃及或苏美尔借用的，但发明这些书写系统的民族几乎是不可能不知道他们邻近的贸易伙伴的文字的。 如果人类在没有文字的情况下生存了几百万年之后，所有这些地中海和近东社会在彼此相距不过几百年的时间内，碰巧竟各自独立地偶然想到发明文字这个主意，这可能是一个非同一般的巧合。因此，在我看来，一个可能的解释就是思想传播，就像塞阔雅的情形一样。这就是说，埃及人和其他民族可能已从苏美尔人那里了解到发明文字的思想，可能还了解到某些造字原则，然后又为自己发明了另外一些原则和全部字母的特有形式。 现在，让我们再回到本章开始时的那个主要问题：为什么文字在某些社会出现并向某些社会传播，但不向其他许多社会传播？我们讨论的方便的起始点是早期书写系统的有限容量、有限用途和有限使用者。 早期文字不完整、不明确或复杂难懂，或三者都有。例如，最早的苏美尔楔形文字还不能连组成文，而只是一种电报式的简略表达方式，它的词汇只限于一些名字、数字、测量单位、代表数过的物件的词以及几个形容词。这情形就好像一个现代的美国法院书记员由于英语里没有必要的词和语法，无法写出“我们命令约翰把欠政府的27头肥羊交来”这样的话，而只能写成“约翰27头肥羊”。后来，苏美尔楔形文字能够写出散文来，但也显得杂乱无章，正如我曾经描绘过的那样，是语标、音符和总数多达几百个不同符号的不发音的义符的大杂烩。迈锡尼时代的希腊的B类线形文字至少要简单一些，因为它根据的是一种大约有90个符号和语标的音节文字。和这个优点相比，B类线形文字的缺点就是很不明确。它把词尾的辅音全都省略，并用同一个符号来代表几个相关的辅音（例如，一个符号代表l和r，另一个符号代表p、b和Ph，另有一个符号代表g、k和kh）。我们知道，如果土生土长的日本人连l和r都分不清楚就去讲英语，那会使我们感到多么莫名其妙：请想象一下，如果我们的字母把我刚才提到的其他一些辅音也同样类同起来，那会造成什么样的混乱。这就好像我们把“rap”、“lap”、“lab”和“laugh”这些词拼写成一个词一样。 一个相关的限制是很少有人学会书写这些早期的文字。只有国王或寺庙雇用的专职抄写员，才掌握关于文字的知识。例如，没有任何迹象表明，除了宫廷官员中很少几个骨于分子外，在迈锡尼时代的希腊人中还有谁使用或了解B类线形文字。由于B类线形文字的各个抄写员可以根据他们留在保存下来的文件上的笔迹区别开来，我们可以说，和宫殿保存下来的用B类线形文字抄写的文件分别出自仅仅75个和40个抄写员之手。 对这些简略、笨拙、不明确的早期文字的使用，同它们的使用者的人数一样都受到了限制。任何人如果希望去发现公元前3000年苏美尔人的思想和感情，是注定要失望的。最早的苏美尔文文本只是宫廷和寺庙官员所记的一些毫无感情的账目。在已知最早的乌鲁克城苏美尔档案中，大约如90％的刻写板上都是神职人员记下的采购货物、工人配给和农产品分配等事项。只是到了后来，随着苏美人从语标文字逐步过渡到语音文字，他们才开始写作记叙体散文，如宣传资料神话。 迈锡尼时代的希腊人甚至没有达到写作宣传资科和神话的阶段。在克诺索斯宫殿出土的全部B类线形文字刻写板中，有三分之一是关于绵羊和羊毛的账目，而在派洛斯宫殿发现的极大部分文字记录的都是亚麻。B类线形文字本来就不明确，所以始终只用来在宫廷中记账，由于有上下文和选词限制的关系，解读起来是很清楚的。关于这种文字用于文学创作，则无迹可寻。和《奥德赛》⑫是不识字的行吟诗人为不识字的听众创作而传播开来的，直到几百年后才随着希腊字母的发展而见诸文字。 同样的使用限制也是早期埃及、中美洲和中国文字的特点。早期的埃及象形文字记录了宗教和国家的宣传材料以及官员们的账目。保存完好的马雅文字也同样专门用于宣传、记录国王的生辰、登基和战争胜利以及祭司的天象观测结果。现存最早的商代晚期的中国文字被用来为朝廷大事占卜吉凶，卜辞就刻写在所谓甲骨上。一个商代文字的样本是：“国王在识读裂纹（骨头经火灼而产生的裂纹）的意思后说，'如果这孩子是在庚日出生的，那将非常吉利。'” 对于今天的我们来说，我们不禁要问：既然早期的书写系统是那样的不明确，使得文字的功能大受限制，只能为少数抄写员所掌握，那么拥有这些文字的社会为什么竟会容忍这种情况？但提出这个问题正好说明了在普及文字方面古人的观点和我们自己的期望之间的差距。早期文字在使用方面所受到的限制乃是蓄意造成的，这种情况对发明不那么含糊的书写系统产生了实实在在的抑制作用。古代苏美尔的国王和祭司们希望文字由专职的抄写员用来记录应完税交纳的羊的头数，而不是由平民大众用来写诗和图谋不轨的。正如人类学家克劳德·利瓦伊—斯特劳斯所说的那样，古代文字的主要功能是“方便对别人的奴役”。非专职人员个人使用文字只是很久以后的事，因为那时书写系统变得比较简单同时也更富于表现力。 例如，随着公元前1200年左右迈锡尼时代希腊文明的衰落，B类线形文字不见了，希腊重新回到了没有文字的时代。当文字在公元前8世纪终于又回到希腊时，这种新的希腊文字、它的使用者和它的用途已十分不同。这种文字不再是一种夹杂语标的含义不朗的音节文字，而是一种借用腓尼基人的辅音字母再加上希腊人自己发明的元音而得到改进的字母文字。希腊的字母文字代替了那些只有抄写员看得懂、只在宫中阅读的记录绵羊头数的账目，从问世那一刻起就成了可以在私人家中阅读的诗歌和幽默的传播媒介。例如，希腊字母文字最早保存下来的例子，是刻在大约公元前740年的一只雅典酒罐上的一行宣布跳舞比赛的诗句：“舞姿最曼妙者将奖以此瓶。”第二个例子是刻在一只酒杯上的三行扬抑抑格6步韵诗句：“我是的酒杯，盛满了玉液琼浆。谁只要飞快的喝上一口，头戴花冠的。会使他的爱欲在心中激荡。”现存最早的伊特鲁里亚和罗马字母的例子，也是酒杯和酒坛上的铭文。只是到了后来，字母的这种容易掌握的个人交际媒介，才被用于公共或官方目的。因此，字母文字使用的发展顺序，同较早的语标文字和音节文字使用的发展顺序正好颠倒过来。 早期文字在使用和使用者方面的限制表明，为什么文字在人类进化中出现得如此之晚。所有可能的对文字的独立发明（在苏美尔、墨西哥、中国和埃及），和所有早期的对这些发明出来的书写系统（如克里特岛、伊朗、土耳其、印度河河谷和马雅地区的书写系统）的采用，都涉及社会等级分明、具有复杂而集中统—的政治机构的社会，这种社会与粮食生产的必然联系，我们将留在下一章探讨。早期的文字是为这些政治机构的需要服务的（如记录的保存和对王室的宣传），而使用文字的人是出生产粮食的农民所种植的多余粮食养活的专职官员。狩猎采集社会没有发明出文字，甚至也没有采用过任何文字，团为它们既没有需要使用早期文字的机构，也没有生产为养活文字专家所必需的剩余粮食的社会机制和农业机制。 因此，粮食生产和采用粮食后几千年的社会进化，对于文字的演进向对于引起人类流行疾病的病菌的演化是同样必不可少的。文字只在新月沃地、墨西哥、可能还有中国独立出现，完全是因为这几个地方是粮食生产在它们各自的半球范围内出现的最早地区。一旦文字在这几个社会发明出来，它接着就通过贸易、征服和宗教向具有同样经济结构和政治组织的社会传播。 虽然粮食生产就是这样地成为文字演变或早期文字采用的必要条件，但还不是充分的条件。在本章开始时，我曾提到，有些粮食生产的社会虽然已有复杂的政治组织，但在现代之前并未能发明或借用文字。我们现代人习惯于把文字看作是一个复杂社会必不可少的东西，所以这些例子一开始就使我们感到迷惑不解，这些例子还包括到公元1520年止的世界上最大的帝国之一——南美的印加帝国、汤加的海洋原始帝国、18世纪晚些时候出现的夏威夷王国、赤道非洲和撒哈拉沙漠以南西非地区在伊斯兰教来到前的各个国家和酋长管辖地，以从密西西比河及其支流一带北美最大的印第安人社会。 尽管所有这些社会也具有有文字社会的那些必备条件，但为什么它们却未能获得文字呢？ 这里，我们必须提醒——下自己，大多数有文字的社会之所以获得文字，或是通过向邻近的社会借用，或是由于受到它们的启发而发明出文字，而不是靠自己独立创造出来的。我刚才提到的那些没有文字的社会在粮食生产方面比苏美尔、墨西哥和中国起步晚。（这种说法唯一难以确定的是印加帝国的最后领地墨西哥和安第斯山脉地区粮食生产开始的有关年代问题。）如果假以时日，这些没有文字的社会也可能最后靠自己的力量发明出文字来。如果它们离苏美尔、墨西哥和中国更近一些，它们也会从这些中心得到文字或关于文字的思想，就像印度、马雅和其他大多数有文字的社会一样。但它们距离那些最早的文字中心太远了，所以没与能在现代之前获得文字。 这种孤立状态的重要作用对夏威夷和汤加是极其明显的，这两个地方同最近的有文字的社会隔着重洋，相距至少有4000英里之遥。另一些社会则证明了这样一个重要的观点：乌鸦飞过的距离不是人类衡量孤立状态的—种恰当的尺度。安第斯山脉、西非的一些王国和密西西比河口与墨西哥、北非和墨西哥的有文字社会的距离、分别只有大约1200英里、1500英里和700英里。这些距离大大小于字母在其发明后的2000年中从发源地沿地中海东岸到达爱尔兰、埃塞俄比亚和东南亚所传播的距离。但人类前进的脚步却由于乌鸦能够飞越的生态障碍和水域阻隔而慢了下来。北非国家（有文字）和西非国家（没有文字）中间隔着不适于农业和城市的撒哈拉沙漠。墨西哥北部的沙漠同样把墨两哥南部的城市中心和密西西比河河谷的酋长管辖地分隔开来。墨西哥南部与安第斯山脉地区的交通需要靠海上航行，或经由狭窄的、森林覆盖的、从未城市化的达里安地峡的一连串陆路联系。因此，安第斯山脉地区、西非和密西西比河河谷实际上就同有文字的社会隔离了开来。 这并不是说，那些没有文字的社会就是完全与世隔绝的。西非最后接受了撒哈拉沙漠另一边的新月沃地的家畜，后来又接受了伊斯兰教的影响，包括阿拉伯文字。玉米从墨西哥传播到安第斯山脉地区，又比较缓慢地从墨西哥传播到密西西比河河谷。但我们在第十章已经看到，非洲和美洲内的南北轴线和生态障碍阻滞了作物和家畜的传播。文字史引入注目地表明了类似的情况：地理和生态条件影响了人类发明的传播。

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Notes: 和《奥德赛》：古希腊史诗，相传均为荷马所著。前者主要叙述特洛伊战争最后一年的故事；后者描写奥德修斯于特洛伊攻陷后回家10年流浪的种种经历。——译者