Character galore in a riveting show about writing
Writing: Making Your Mark British Library, London NW1
Augmented reality, 5G networks, cryptocurrencies, electric cars: sometimes our obsession with technological advances can blind us to the success of older inventions still commonplace today. Consider the humble umbrella, with its history stretching back to ancient China.
The supreme example, though, of the sort of “invisible” innovation we now take for granted is, arguably, writing – concisely defined by one scholar of its 5,000-year history as a “system of graphic symbols … used to convey any and all thought”.
The written word is so much a part of the fabric of everyday human society – and has been for millennia – that it feels somehow inevitable, like a feature of the natural world. Except, of course, being a complex human invention, it isn’t – as a fascinating new exhibition, Writing:
Making Your Mark, at the British
Library, spells out.
Featuring more than 100 objects, and showcasing at least 40 different writing systems from all over the
globe, including an indigenous Inuit language from Arctic Canada, as well as Ethiopia’s liturgical
Ge’ez script, the exhibition positions writing as one of humanity’s “greatest achievements”.
Few, I suspect, would consider this claim controversial. But the show still generates pulse-quickening urgency and interest by evoking the precarious status of writing in the digital age.
In our era of emoji and video messaging, many scholars discern not only the demise of pen and paper but also an existential threat to writing, itself. Some even argue that we have already witnessed the “death of writing”.
The British Library’s exhibition is less pessimistic – but it does end by acknowledging that, amid a technological revolution, writing is under attack.
To start with, though, it outlines writing’s origins, as, thousands of years ago, our ancestors first turned speech into symbols. Writing evolved in several ancient civilisations, and debate still rages over whether each had knowledge of any other.
First up were the Sumerians, in Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq), who started impressing cuneiform, or “wedge-shaped”, characters into moist clay tablets, using a reed stylus, more than 5,000 years ago. Not long afterwards, hieroglyphic writing appeared in ancient Egypt.
The curators at the British Library posit several explanations for why writing evolved in the first place: to name things, and thus possess them, is an obvious one, as is the idea of writing for religious purposes, to communicate, say, with the dead in the afterlife.
Perhaps the most important factor, though, is also the most prosaic: to count things and record their number in inventories. At the British Library, we find a Mesopotamian tablet recording portions of barley distributed as wages to farm labourers.
It is a strange and bathetic thought that the source of literature is accountancy: without that anonymous Sumerian administrator, who first started recording transactions in the late fourth millennium BC, there would be no Shakespeare or, indeed, Tennyson – whose damaged quill pen appears later in the show.
After examining the origins of writing, the exhibition focuses upon the all-conquering Roman alphabet, which we still use to write English today. An absorbing series of objects bearing ancient inscriptions, discovered across the Eastern Mediterranean, evokes the alphabet’s evolution by demonstrating how, over almost two millennia, the capital letter “A” grew out of a modified Egyptian hieroglyph depicting an ox-head.
Part of a system adopted and disseminated by Phoenician traders, this sign was later finessed by the Greeks and Etruscans, who made it sleeker and more abstract, and swivelled it around, so that its “horns” pointed downwards, before it was finally standardised under the Romans.
The show is full of such insights – but you need to concentrate hard to find them. This is, without question, an intellectually demanding exhibition, full of off-putting jargon concerning “syllabaries” (elements of the Japanese language, apparently) and “abjads” (writing systems, such as Arabic, in which every character is a consonant).
A schoolmarmish label for the Lindisfarne Gospels informs us that the text “harmonises Roman cursive minuscules with uncial majuscules”
– a phrase certain to make anyone bar the geekiest philologist glaze over. No slouching at the back!
What saves the exhibition from donnish pedantry is its strain of subtle, irreverent humour – you sense the curators’ mischievous relish when they juxtapose a luxury Montblanc fountain pen with a Bic Cristal ballpoint, in a section devoted to “Materials and Technology” (over the centuries, writing has been carved on to stone, scratched in wax, incised on metal, and even, on the Somali coast, appeared on driftwood, as a rudimentary blackboard, to help children learn the Koran). Elsewhere, a label accompanying a 14th-century illuminated English psalter directs our attention to amusing, topsy-turvy marginalia depicting a procession of dogs and rabbits – lightening the mood by distracting us from the solemn ostensible point of noting the diamond-shaped “finials” (feet) of the manuscript’s Gothic script. Moreover, the curators consistently select objects with captivating stories attached to them. A pair of Greek wax tablets, bound together with string, from the second century AD, is one of the earliest homework books in the world.
We also encounter pieces of writing by famous hands. James Joyce’s dense, colourcoded notes for Ulysses appear alongside Mozart’s handwritten list of his own compositions and the last page of Captain Scott’s diary, written during his ill-starred expedition to the Antarctic, with its heart-tugging final words: “For God’s sake look after our people.” There are also lots of ravishing examples of calligraphy, and an illustrated Thai folding book, containing Buddhist texts, providing a satisfying aesthetic hit.
As for the crisis facing writing today, the exhibition ends with a series of filmed vox pops, in which members of the public, as well as staff from the British Library, muse on the future of this ancient, and, until now, indispensable, technology.
If there is an overarching message, it is that writing isn’t dying – rather, how people write is changing. As one thoughtful gentleman puts it, people in the future will still have hands – and so we are likely to continue using our hands to make meaningful signs. For writing, then, the last word is yet to be, well, written.
Without that anonymous Sumerian administrator, there would be no Shakespeare or Tennyson
We encounter the last page of Captain Scott’s diary, with its heart-tugging final words