https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/books/review/greatest-invention-nine-scripts-silvia-ferrera.html Sections SEARCH Skip to contentSkip to site index Book Review Today's Paper Book Review|A Tour of Writing's History Bounces From Script to Script https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/books/review/ greatest-invention-nine-scripts-silvia-ferrera.html * * * * * * * What to Read * Coming in March * Critics' Reviews * Editors' Choice * Best Books Through Time Advertisement Continue reading the main story Supported by Continue reading the main story Nonfiction A Tour of Writing's History Bounces From Script to Script * * * * * * * * Read in app A jasper seal stone, carved with Cretan hieroglyphs, including a cat. A jasper seal stone, carved with Cretan hieroglyphs, including a cat. Credit...Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete Buy Book V * Amazon * Apple Books * Barnes and Noble * Books-A-Million * Bookshop * IndieBound When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. By Martin Puchner * March 1, 2022 THE GREATEST INVENTION A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts By Silvia Ferrara. Translated by Todd Portnowitz. For the past 5,000 years, we've been leaving each other text messages, but we don't always know how to read them. It's hard enough to reconstruct forgotten languages, but infinitely harder when you know neither the words nor the signs in which the words were recorded. Even today, despite advances in artificial intelligence, there are plenty of undeciphered scripts, from India to Europe, tantalizing us with their ancient wisdom. (Of course they could just be old shopping lists, but that would be interesting, too.) Silvia Ferrara, a professor at the University of Bologna, has devoted her life to reading these unreadable messages. Her area of specialization is early Aegean inscriptions, found in Greece and on the islands of Cyprus and Crete. Crete is home to two undeciphered scripts, Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A, as well as a mysteriously inscribed disk. In all three cases, we know neither the language nor the writing. One method of cracking these codes involves cats. Both scripts use stylized images of the animal "as if sketched by Walt Disney," Ferrara wryly observes. At first, the cats were taken for mere decoration. Enter Alice Kober, a chain-smoking researcher working at Brooklyn College, who starting in the late 1940s helped to decipher a related script, called Linear B, filing her diagrammed note cards in empty Lucky Strike cartons. The cats, it turned out, also featured in that script, though in a slimmed-down, stylized form. Thanks to Kober, we know exactly what these Cretan cats say: meow. Or rather: ma. (Apparently, cats say the same thing in all languages, while roosters crow in wildly different idioms.) Image A tablet with pictographic cuneiform characters.Credit...The Metropolitan Museum of Art Decryption is made doubly difficult by the cultural assumptions decoders bring to their task, as in the case of the quipu knots devised by the Inca. Some specialists still consider these series of knots made in cotton strings as mere mnemonic devices, like rosary beads, but Ferrara explains that they are a three-dimensional system of communication, and compares them to the tactile arrangements of buttons on your washing machine. They don't represent sounds, but you know how to use them. Another impediment has been the alphabet, which, in the world of writing, is the 800-pound gorilla. Or, in Ferrara's words, the Maserati. While other systems rattled along with hundreds or even thousands of signs, the alphabet, developed by Phoenician traders and Greek merchants, streamlined writing down to two dozen and pulled ahead. The success of the alphabet got into the heads of those trying to decode Mayan signs, which they kept trying to read as an alphabet. It took researchers until the 1970s to realize that Mayan inscriptions, which look like ornamental heads, form an elaborate system involving hundreds of signs. We shouldn't think of such scripts as inferior, Ferrara points out. No writing system is good or bad in itself but works as long as enough people use it. Witness China, which has resisted the Maserati and has proudly held onto its own much more complicated writing system, the oldest in continuous use. The title of Ferrara's book, "The Greatest Invention," might sound bombastic, but the book isn't. One reason is Ferrara's conversational style, rendered into lively English by Todd Portnowitz. Ferrara says she wrote the book the way she talks to friends over dinner, and that's exactly how it reads. Instead of telling a chronological history of writing, she moves freely from script to script, island to island. It can be a bit dizzying but also great fun, and she is constantly by our side, prodding us with questions, offering speculations, reporting on exciting discoveries (and on annoying colleagues: Please don't email her with your theories about ancient scripts). Ferrara also lets us in on engaging discussions with collaborators. Her project was funded by the European Union, which has been supporting research in the humanities on a scale unthinkable in the United States, where scholars mostly labor on their own. The time of these lone thinkers, Ferrara says, is over, and her book doubles as a manifesto for collaborative research. Image The four tablet fragments inscribed with Cypro-Minoan.Credit...Cyprus Museum In the course of island hopping and making forays into her own research, Ferrara develops a bold argument. The standard history of writing has long held that the first real script was invented by Mesopotamian clerks. (Imagine them keeping track of goods with the use of stylized images.) One day, one of the clerks might have noticed that the image representing, say, cane -- gi -- could do double duty by also representing the verb "to reimburse," which in Sumerian sounds the same. Such realizations gave birth to hundreds of signs that represented enough syllables to capture an entire language. Writing allowed Mesopotamian city-states to project power deep into the hinterland and to administer the first territorial empire. For Ferrara, this story is true enough, but it has crowded out alternatives that are less about imperial bureaucrats making paperwork (or rather, since paper hadn't been invented yet, clay work). Consider, for example, Lady Hao, one of 64 wives of Wu Ding, the ancient Chinese king. Undaunted by the competition, she became a military commander, in charge of 13,000 soldiers. But her true power came from her job as the king's fortune-teller. In ancient China, fortunes were told by manipulating inscriptions on turtle shells, and from such manipulations writing was born. It would later be taken up by bureaucrats, who would ultimately invent paper, but writing's origins lie in imagination, creativity and meaning-making. Lady Hao understood the power of culture. Other examples of creative invention take us to Easter Island, where inhabitants may have developed writing in complete isolation from the rest of the world, and to the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, written in an unknown and so-far-undecipherable script in Renaissance Europe. Was it the work of a loner trying to be difficult? Does it hide something spectacular? Some of Ferrara's most far-reaching ideas stem from her collaboration with scientists, including the claim that writing literally changes the brains of those who learn it. Perhaps this is what makes it so hard for the literate to appreciate oral traditions. I would have liked to hear more about the fraught moments when writers have met non-writers and taken down their stories, as happened in countless colonial encounters. Ferrara describes the intriguing case of the Cherokee script, invented in the early 19th century to counter alphabet-bearing settlers, but she does not say much about those who refuse writing altogether. As with any tool, people have done terrible things with, and in the name of, writing. Grappling with the arrogance of those who write is especially important in the internet era, which has produced more writing than all earlier ones combined. At the same time, speech and oral storytelling have adapted -- hence the recent rise of podcasts and audiobooks, along with a renewed appreciation for oral traditions. At one point, Ferrara wonders whether we'll all be using Chinese characters before long. Or perhaps emojis. In any case, we seem to be going back to image-based signs. One thing is certain: The writing of the future will involve cats. After sidling into three ancient scripts and Disney's Hollywood, they managed to take over the internet in no time. Reader, they will be waiting for us with their enigmatic, Cretan smiles, saying: meow. 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