The fabulous story of the invention of writing, by Silvia Ferrara

Cover of Silvia Ferrara's book: “The fabulous history of the invention of writing”, éditions du Seuil.

© Threshold

Text by: Olivier Favier

5 mins

Silvia Ferrara is the head of the European Inscribe research program dedicated to the inventions of writing.

In a lively and accessible book, she describes the state of research and gives us her specialist and passionate thoughts.

Publicity

Read more

The book opens with a memory.

She is ten years old and can barely read.

“ 

I'm behind the normal pace,

” she says, “

learning to write has been a long and slow process for me.

 But the teacher has just written the first letters of the Greek alphabet on the blackboard and the little girl begins to decipher.

It's a shock.

From this late learning, which the discovery of another alphabet makes it possible to sublimate by offering a new challenge, is born, still confused, an unusual vocation.

As if to leave writing its magical character, the author insists on saying that her book is more spoken than written, that she built it in the manner of her university lessons, in a country, Italy, which is the one in Western Europe which has probably kept its tradition of orality the most.

Writing has been invented several times, and on all continents

Was there, as the title seems to suggest, an invention of writing?

No, says Silvia Ferrara in substance, there have been several, in the sense that writing systems have appeared at different times in different parts of the world not connected to each other.

To put it another way, writing has been invented many times, from the Indus Valley to

Easter Island to

Cyprus.

The scoop could well come back to Nubia, between Sudan and present-day Egypt, although we cannot yet say for sure.

Africa would therefore be the first continent to make history, well before Europe in any case, where writing was invented for the first time in Crete during the third millennium BC.

AD, in other words at the same time as in China or Mesoamerica, but several hundred years later

the

hieroglyphics

and the

proto-cuneiform

of Mesopotamia.

These early writings are moreover often undeciphered, particularly those which were born in islands, and sometimes had no posterity.

The origins of these inventions are multiple, and cannot be reduced, as we read too often, to the need to organize power by setting up a bureaucracy.

The diversity of the documents attests to this, as does that of the contexts in which the scriptures appear and develop.

From Champollion to multidisciplinary laboratories

Equally fascinating is the history of scientific research that works to decipher ancient scriptures.

Champollion left a memory among all French schoolchildren for having succeeded in deciphering the hieroglyphs by relying in particular on the so-called “Rosetta stone”, where the same text is written in Egyptian in hieroglyphs and in the Greek alphabet - called demotic - then translated into Greek.

A century and a half later, the research of two early geniuses, Alice Kober and Michael Ventris, both of whom died in their prime, is equally fascinating.

The first includes the structure of Linear B, a writing of the Mycenaean civilization, of which it identifies the variations.

After his death, the architect Michael Ventris, who became a philologist, identifies linear B as an archaic form of ancient Greek, which he manages to decipher.

Without prior knowledge of the transcribed language and without confrontation with a preserved translation, the exercise is much more difficult and cannot be solved by the hard and romantic work of a passionate person.

Etruscan is a perfect example of a writing - and a language - of which we have many traces which remain undeciphered to this day.

Also the laboratory directed by Silvia Ferrara brings together specialists with very different methods, archaeologists, historians, semiologists, cognitivists, computer scientists - the list is not exhaustive.

" 

The essential thing is the convergence of intentions

 ", adds the researcher who pleads for this multiple approach, without which many writings will remain a mystery forever.

► 

Silvia Ferrara,

The fabulous history of the invention of writing

, Le Seuil, 2021 (translated from Italian by Jacques Dalarun) 22 €.

► 

Listen on RFI,

the program “De Vive Voix” devoted to Pierre Bergounioux

and his book

Le corps de la lettre

, published in 2019 by Fata Morgana.

Newsletter

Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox

I subscribe

Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application

google-play-badge_FR

• Literature

• History

• Culture