The ancient alphabets still to be deciphered
Hunters of lost words
From Egyptian hieroglyphics to Sumerian wedges, from the Linear of Crete to the mysterious Etruscan documents, via the idioms of pre-Columbian America and Easter Island: vowels and consonants have traveled a long and fascinating road to reach us. A path studded with rebuses yet to be solved
A TURNING POINT IN HISTORY
The "discovery" of writing was a milestone in the development of humankind. There are still many undeciphered ancient languages in the world, such as the Maya script (bottom left in the photo) or the texts of the "Festus record" (top right). Others, however, are almost completely deciphered, among them cuneiform (top left) and Egyptian hieroglyphics (bottom right).
At first it was the sign painted in natural colors on cave walls, engraved on primitive clay coins, dug into animal bones to turn them into amulets. Then the first cities were born, and with them the need to communicate one's thoughts to a larger number of people, to leave an indelible trace of religions and myths. And so, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, around or just before 3000 B.C. writing was born. Symbols and signs divided human history in two: on one side the long night of prehistory, on the other the light of history. At the time of Ancient Egypt, however, the idea of vowels and consonants did not yet touch the minds of those men. At first, in fact, words were drawings depicting objects (pictograms), then the drawings became schematized and moved on to indicate phonetic values, that is, syllables.
To arrive at writing as we "moderns" understand it, we have to wait until 1000 B.C., when the Phoenicians devised a system that also indicated consonants. The decisive leap forward comes shortly after, when the Greeks add vowels to the Phoenician alphabet and spread it throughout the world.
And the older scripts? No longer actively employed, they were gradually forgotten to become, in much more recent times, a major intellectual challenge. If successful, in fact, deciphering an ancient text is not only the solution to a mystery, but also the key to better understanding the civilization of which it is an expression.
One example is the "Festus disk," which has been "deciphered" hundreds of times since it was discovered in 1908, and not a year goes by without someone proposing improbable translations of it.
For rebus enthusiasts
Anyone who undertakes decipherment may be confronted with an unknown script behind which a more or less known language is hidden, or face a known script expressing a largely unknown language, or finally have to deal with an unknown script passing on an equally unknown language. The first thing to determine when examining an unknown script is its verse: it may flow horizontally from left to right or from right to left or alternately in the two verses (in technical jargon this is called bustrophic "like the gait of the plowing ox") or it may proceed from top to bottom advancing from left or right, or it may be arranged in a spiral or follow several verses in no particular order.
In parallel, it must be determined whether it belongs to the pictographic, ideographic, syllabic or alphabetic system. In the pictographic system, which is the most primitive, some stylized drawings indicate objects: the drawing of an eye, for example, simply means "eye." In the ideographic system, pictographs change to indicate an idea connected to that of the object they imitate: the drawing of an eye thus changes to mean "seeing."
This system, however, besides having to use a great many signs, fails to express proper names and abstract ideas. To the rescue comes a rebus system, also called a phonogram system, in which drawings suggest a sound and not a meaning. The correspondence between sign and sound is fully acquired in the syllabic system (in which signs range from sixty to ninety) and in the alphabetic system (in which signs number less than forty).
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Ancient Egyptian writing consists of some three thousand pictograms, unchanged over the centuries, representing a very wide range of things or actions. The pictograms also serve as ideograms: the figure of the Sun, for example, as a pictogram invokes the idea of the Sun, as an ideogram that of the day or time. Concepts that are complicated to translate into images are expressed with figures that sound the same (homophones) even though they mean different things. The sign of a house (pr), for example, is used for the verb "to go out," which in Egyptian has the same pr consonants (Egyptian writing at the time did not use vowels). Homophones are used both for whole words and for parts of the noun: for example, the figure of the catfish (nar) and the figure of the awl (mer) are used to refer to King Narmer.
There are also monoconsonantal homophones (such as water, n), there are 24 (as many as there are Egyptian consonants), and they basically serve as an alphabet. But how to distinguish homophones? If today we were to, having no vowels, indicate that the consonants "prt" should be read "port" and not "door," "meadow," or "wall," we would draw near a ship. And the solution found by the Egyptians, who use some 200 pictograms, easy to interpret, as determinatives; among them the egg, a symbol of the feminine, found in many cartouches, including that of Cleopatra.
A few signs for many peoples
The first to make known the signs of a script that appeared to be formed by many wedges was, in 1621, the Venetian scholar Pietro della Valle. Not until 1788, however, were accurate transcriptions of some trilingual (Old Persian, Elamite, Babylonian) inscriptions from Persepolis (the ruins of which are in Iran) published. Invented by the Sumerians, the cuneiform system was made their own by successive peoples in the rule of Mesopotamia and adjacent regions, and was for at least two thousand years the principal graphic system of the ancient East, until it was replaced by alphabetic scripts of Aramaic origin. At first pictographic, the Sumerians' writing soon became ideographic and later also syllabic (most words consisted of only one syllable): with the drawing of a reed (g) was expressed, for example, the syllable gi, with that of a mountain (kur) the syllable kur. Soon the signs became simpler and more abstract; moreover, they were no longer presented as in reality, arranged in vertical series from top to bottom, but rotated to the left, counterclockwise, because this way it was easier to work on the clay tablets. At the same time, writing by incision was replaced by writing by impression, done with the end of a straw pointed so as to present an isosceles triangle in section. The straw left imprinted on the fresh clay typical triangles that looked precisely like wedges. To understand how a mark was to be read, a determinative was placed before it, and the last syllable (phonetic complement) was repeated. For example, to write otre, and be sure that it was not read receptacle, it was written after otre three or 3. Both the determinative and the phonetic complement, of course, were not to be pronounced.
The signs had different pronunciations in the various languages that adopted cuneiform writing, but the determinatives are identical for all of them. This means that if you discover a cuneiform text in an unknown language, you can immediately isolate the proper male and female names, those of deities, places, and so on. The thousands of tablets in the Archives of the Royal Palace at Ebla (in Syria), found in 1975 by the mission led by Paul Matthiae, were written in cuneiform, but they expressed an unknown language, a Semitic dialect of which there was no other evidence. Thanks to the determinatives, it was relatively easy to identify the words of the Ebla lexicon and shed light on the language, benefiting also from what has been described as the oldest bilingual vocabulary of mankind, containing the Eblaite translation of some one thousand five hundred Sumerian words.
The treasures of Crete
Archaeologically, the name of Crete, which was the cradle of Greek civilization, is inextricably linked to that of Arthur John Evans (1851-1941), the discoverer of the palace of Knossos and the Minoan civilization. In the course of his research, the scholar uncovered several types of writing. The oldest (over 2000 B.C.), pictographic type, is found on stones, seals and tablets: because the signs are vaguely reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphics, it has been christened "hieroglyphic." Between 1800 and 1400, in the central and eastern parts of the island, a script called "linear A" became widespread, consisting of about 90 characters of which roughly half were derived from the earlier hieroglyphic script. Later another script became established that Evans called "linear B," consisting of 62 characters and derived in part from A, was used for the vast majority of documents found at Knossos. Despite efforts to decipher them, the Cretan texts remained shrouded in mystery until a 14-year-old boy, Michael Ventris, passionate about the ancient scripts and the puzzles they pose, vowed to himself that he would one day succeed in deciphering the Cretan scripts. Having emerged unscathed from the war and become an architect, Ventris did not forget his purpose, and in 1952 he succeeded, deciphering the "linear B" and proving that it had been used to write an archaic form of Greek. Having taken over Knossos, in fact, the Greeks had adopted the Cretan script for their own language. The deciphering of the "Linear B" left unsolved the problem of the "Linear A" and hieroglyphic writing, the language of which appears not to be Greek or even Indo-European. Also shrouded in mystery remains the "disc of Phaistos," a 16-cm-diameter clay disc dating to about 1600 B.C., found in Phaistos (an ancient city south of Crete) at the beginning of the century by Louis Pernier. The two faces each bear an inscription arranged on a spiral divided into boxes, evidently containing words; the signs, 240 in all, are of 45 types and were impressed with punches, like those of printing. II sign that recurs most, a feathered headdress, was known from Egyptian reliefs to be typical of the Philistines, who probably came from Crete.
The Etruscan mystery
The difficulty in reconstructing the language of the Etruscans (the "mystery" of the Etruscan language is a widespread cliché) is not due to the writing, which can be read easily because it is a local variant of the Greek alphabet, but to the fact that, as the historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus already stated in the time of Augustus, the Etruscans spoke an idiom "not similar to that of any other people." A language that we have to reconstruct on the basis of really minimal evidence: it would be like trying to understand Italian through the names on gravestones in cemeteries or the stereotypical formulas of ex-votos. Archaeologists like to compare those who are about to decipher the Etruscan language to a person who does not know English while flipping through a British or American newspaper: this person reads the words but does not understand their meaning. In truth we do know some words: we know, for example, that Puia means "wife" and clan means "son," but we still have a long way to go. That is why long documents, which go beyond formulas or small repeated phrases, are very important. Before the Tabula Cortonensis (see box on the previous page) was discovered, only the half-destroyed bandages (restored in 1985) used to swaddle a mummy, which originally constituted a liturgical book (Liber linteus of Zagreb); a modest terracotta slab containing a funerary ritual (Tegola of Capua); a block of travertine with an engraving of a contract between two families (Cippo of Perugia) were known. Now it is the turn of the Tabula which, the entire scientific world hopes, will enable great strides to be made in understanding the Etruscan language.
Long before Columbus
In pre-Columbian times, two main writing systems were in use in Mesoamerica: the system of pictographs and symbolic representations prevalent in central Mexico, and the Maya system, consisting of a more evolved glyph script. After the arrival of the Spanish, indigenous scribes learned to use Latin characters, and the ancient writing systems were abandoned. Of the large number of manuscripts, often of a sacred character, that were present in theI 'entire area, only fifteen nineteen survived destruction (the missionaries who came in the wake of the conquistadmes, in fact, considered the codices a source of superstition and idolatry) , and three of them are Maya. The glyphs had ideographic and partly phonetic value.
Sounds that, even today, are used: in fact there are 35().00() indigenous people who still speak a Mayan language. Evidence of a great civilization that flourished in the Indus River Valley in the middle of the 3rd millennium B.C. found confirmation in 1922 with the rediscovery of the city of Mohenjo-daro (in Pakistan). The signs on the seals (about 270) have not so far been deciphered: many are obviously pictographic in nature and some appear to have ideographic value. But nothing is known about the people who used this writing. Attempts have been made to establish links with Crete, because some seals depict games of bulls like those at Knossos, or with some Mesopotamian civilization; but in the absence of evidence these are hypotheses not easily supported.
Unexplained kinship
Truly striking, however, is the similarity between the Mohenjo-daro script and the Rongo Rongo script, as Easter Island hieroglyphs are called. In 1864, the French missionary Eugéne Eyraud, who is known to have been the first non-Polynesian inhabitant of Easter Island, noticed that all the houses had wooden boards and beams engraved with pictographic signs, which the natives called Rongo Rongo. For fear that "foreigners" would desecrate the tablets, which were considered sacred, they were almost totally destroyed by the natives themselves, and today only twenty-five remain. These are parallel lines of glyphs representing human figures, fish, birds, plants and so on. The writing system is bustrofed, whereby one begins reading at the bottom from left to right and at the next line from right to left. According to Steven Roger Fisher, one of the leading scholars of the inscriptions, they would be a kind of calendar; for others, however, their function was mnemonics, that is, helping to remember the salient points for reciting genealogies and historical traditions. In short, a kind of wooden notepad.
