Two Recent Books on Ancient Scripts

Both Houston’s The Shape of Script and Englehardt’s Agency in Ancient Writing take up early scripts, sometimes the same scripts, and try to explain their origins, development, and occasionally either their demise (e.g., Mayan) or their survival to the present day (e.g., Arabic, Latin). Houston’s book is mostly presentational, giving basic information on these early scripts (including numerals) and their development over time. The reasons for change are usually ascribed to historical factors, such as the adaptation of Arabic to the various languages brought under Islam. Englehardt’s book is much more theory driven: human agency creates “things,” which, as “material agency,” work with people in creating a total society (a reflexive process called “structuration”1). This review takes Houston’s book first, which consists of 10 studies of how scripts change. The preface, “The Shape of Script—Views from the Middle,” defines script as reflecting “an auditory world” but notes that “in expression it is palpably a thing” (xviii [emphasis original]). The common topics in this book include cursivization (rapid writing), the changes that occur when a script is adapted to another language, and aesthetics. Veldhuis contributes the first study, “Cuneiform: Changes and Developments. ” Archaic cuneiform (late fourth to early third millennium) was a Sumerian “administrative system and does not directly represent a spoken language” (4). By 2700 B.C.E. , syllabic signs transcribed full sentences. Soon, scribes in northern Mesopotamia began writing Akkadian in cuneiform. Often, the Sumerian sign for a word was used for the Akkadian translation; for instance, the Sumerian sign saĝ (head) was used to write the Akkadian word for “head,” rēšu (transcribed as “SAĜ”). In the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1900–1600), new genres in Akkadian emerged, including “new ways to increase the complexity of the system” (23; cf. Johnson and Johnson in Englehardt’s Agency in Ancient Writing). Baines’ study, “Scripts, High Culture, and Administration in Middle Kingdom Egypt,” outlines the history of Egyptian writing: invented in the late fourth millennium, it could notate full syntax within 1,000 years. There are three types of Egyptian writing: formal hieroglyphic, cursive hieratic, and, in the seventh century B.C.E. , a more cursive script, demotic. Hieroglyphic was used for high culture and sacred texts at a time when only the king and the central elite were literate. Throughout its long history, Egyptian writing (scripts and literatures) changed slowly, if at all, except in the First Intermediate period, which saw new genres (e.g., biography, fiction), reformed script styles, a standardized orthography, and a standardized seal form, the scarab, that became popular throughout the eastern Mediterranean. In the third contribution, “Paragrams, Punctuation, and System in Ancient Roman Script,” Bodel outlines a history of the Latin script. The Etruscan alphabet derives from Euboic Greek, and from Etruscan almost all Italian scripts derive. After Rome had shuffled off the Etruscan monarchy at the end of the sixth century B.C.E. , it “spread both the Latin language and the Roman alphabet throughout the peninsula” (70). By the end of the fifth century, Latin had deliberately and pointedly departed from Etruscan; for instance, it read left to right instead of right to left, and it took the top halves of the Etruscan fifth letter “X” for “5” (V) and