Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs & Steel

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had to settle on basic principles that we now take for granted. For example, they had to figure out how to decompose a continuous utterance into speech units, regardless of whether those units were taken as words, syllables, or phonemes. They had to learn to recognize the same sound or speech unit through all our normal variations in speech volume, pitch, speed, emphasis, phrase grouping, and individual idiosyncrasies of pronunciation. They had to decide that a writing system should ignore all of that variation. They then had to devise ways to represent sounds by symbols.
Somehow, the first scribes solved all those problems, without having in front of them any example of the final result to guide their efforts. That task was evidently so difficult that there have been only a few occasions in history when people invented writing entirely on their own. The two indisputably independent inventions of writing were achieved by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia somewhat before 3000 b.c. and by Mexican Indians before 600 b.c. (Figure 12.1); Egyptian writing of 3000 b.c. and Chinese writing (by 1300 b.c.) may also have arisen independently. Probably all other peoples who have developed writing since then have borrowed, adapted, or at least been inspired by existing systems.
The independent invention that we can trace in greatest detail is history's oldest writing system, Sumerian cuneiform (Figure 12.1). For thousands of years before it jelled, people in some farming villages of the Fertile Crescent had been using clay tokens of various simple shapes for accounting purposes, such as recording numbers of sheep and amounts of grain. In the last centuries before 3000 b.c., developments in accounting technology, format, and signs rapidly led to the first system of writing. One such technological innovation was the use of flat clay tablets as a convenient writing surface. Initially, the clay was scratched with pointed tools, which gradually yielded to reed styluses for neatly pressing a mark into the tablet. Developments in format included the gradual adoption of conventions whose necessity is now universally accepted: that writing should be organized into ruled rows or columns (horizontal rows for the Sumerians, as for modern Europeans); that the lines should be read in a constant direction (left to right for Sumerians, as for modern Europeans); and that the lines should be read from top to bottom of the tablet rather than vice versa.
But the crucial change involved the solution of the problem basic to

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Locations of some scripts mentioned in the text

1. Sumer 9. West Semitic, Phoenician 5. Proto-Elamite
2. Mesoamerica 10. Ethiopian 7. Hittite
?3. China 11. Korea (han'g&l) 8. Indus Valley
??4. Egypt 13. Italy (Roman, Etruscan) 17. Easter Island
14. Greece
15. Ireland (ogham) Syllabaries
6. Crete (Linear A and B) 12. Japan (kana) 16. Cherokee
Figure 12.1. The question marks next to China and Egypt denote some doubt whether early writing in those areas arose completely independently or was stimulated by writing systems that arose elsewhere earlier. "Other" refers to scripts that were neither alphabets nor syllabaries and that probably arose under the influence of earlier scripts.
virtually all writing systems: how to devise agreed-on visible marks that represent actual spoken sounds, rather than only ideas or else words independent of their pronunciation. Early stages in the development of the solution have been detected especially in thousands of clay tablets excavated from the ruins of the former Sumerian city of Uruk, on the Euphrates

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River about 200 miles southeast of modern Baghdad. The first Sumerian writing signs were recognizable pictures of the object referred to (for instance, a picture of a fish or a bird). Naturally, those pictorial signs consisted mainly of numerals plus nouns for visible objects; the resulting texts were merely accounting reports in a telegraphic shorthand devoid of grammatical elements. Gradually, the forms of the signs became more abstract, especially when the pointed writing tools were replaced by reed styluses. New signs were created by combining old signs to produce new meanings: for example, the sign for head was combined with the sign for bread in order to produce a sign signifying eat.
The earliest Sumerian writing consisted of nonphonetic logograms. That's to say, it was not based on the specific sounds of the Sumerian language, and it could have been pronounced with entirely different sounds to yield the same meaning in any other language—just as the numeral sign 4 is variously pronounced four, chetwtre, neljd, and empat by speakers of English, Russian, Finnish, and Indonesian, respectively. Perhaps the most important single step in the whole history of writing was the Sumerians' introduction of phonetic representation, initially by writing an abstract noun (which could not be readily drawn as a picture) by means of the sign for a depictable noun that had the same phonetic pronunciation. For instance, it's easy to draw a recognizable picture of arrow, hard to draw a recognizable picture of life, but both are pronounced ti in Sumerian, so a picture of an arrow came to mean either arrow or life. The resulting ambiguity was resolved by the addition of a silent sign called a determinative, to indicate the category of nouns to which the intended object belonged. Linguists term this decisive innovation, which also underlies puns today, the rebus principle.
Once Sumerians had hit upon this phonetic principle, they began to use it for much more than just writing abstract nouns. They employed it to write syllables or letters constituting grammatical endings. For instance, in English it's not obvious how to draw a picture of the common syllable -tion, but we could instead draw a picture illustrating the verb shun, which has the same pronunciation. Phonetically interpreted signs were also used to "spell out" longer words, as a series of pictures each depicting the sound of one syllable. That's as if an English speaker were to write the word believe as a picture of a bee followed by a picture of a leaf. Phonetic signs also permitted scribes to use the same pictorial sign for a set of related words (such as tooth, speech, and speaker), but to resolve the ambiguity

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An example of Babylonian cuneiform writing, derived ultimately from Sumerian cuneiform.
with an additional phonetically interpreted sign (such as selecting the sign for two, each, or peak).
Thus, Sumerian writing came to consist of a complex mixture of three types of signs: logograms, referring to a whole word or name; phonetic signs, used in effect for spelling syllables, letters, grammatical elements, or

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parts of words; and determinatives, which were not pronounced but were used to resolve ambiguities. Nevertheless, the phonetic signs in Sumerian writing fell far short of a complete syllabary or alphabet. Some Sumerian syllables lacked any written signs; the same sign could be pronounced in different ways; and the same sign could variously be read as a word, a syllable, or a letter.
Besides Sumerian cuneiform, the other certain instance of independent origins of writing in human history comes from Native American societies of Mesoamerica, probably southern Mexico. Mesoamerican writing is believed to have arisen independently of Old World writing, because there is no convincing evidence for pre-Norse contact of New World societies with Old World societies possessing writing. In addition, the forms of Mesoamerican writing signs were entirely different from those of any Old World script. About a dozen Mesoamerican scripts are known, all or most of them apparently related to each other (for example, in their numerical and calendrical systems), and most of them still only partially deciphered. At the moment, the earliest preserved Mesoamerican script is from the Zapotec area of southern Mexico around 600 b.c., but by far the best-understood one is of the Lowland Maya region, where the oldest known written date corresponds to a.d. 292.
Despite its independent origins and distinctive sign forms, Maya writing is organized on principles basically similar to those of Sumerian writing and other western Eurasian writing systems that Sumerian inspired. Like Sumerian, Maya writing used both logograms and phonetic signs. Logograms for abstract words were often derived by the rebus principle. That is, an abstract word was written with the sign for another word pronounced similarly but with a different meaning that could be readily depicted. Like the signs of Japan's kana and Mycenaean Greece's Linear B syllabaries, Maya phonetic signs were mostly signs for syllables of one consonant plus one vowel (such as ta, te, ti, to, tu). Like letters of the early Semitic alphabet, Maya syllabic signs were derived from pictures of the object whose pronunciation began with that syllable (for example, the Maya syllabic sign "tie" resembles a tail, for which the Maya word is neh).
All of these parallels between Mesoamerican and ancient western Eurasian writing testify to the underlying universality of human creativity. While Sumerian and Mesoamerican languages bear no special relation to each other among the world's languages, both raised similar basic issues in reducing them to writing. The solutions that Sumerians invented before