Writing: from complex symbols to abstract squiggles

There's a new exhibition on "Writing:  Making Your Mark" at the British Library.  Judging from the homepage and all that I've heard about it, this is an exciting, informative, comprehensive display of more than a hundred objects and forty different systems pertaining to the history of writing during the past five millennia and drawn from around the world.  Since it's open until Tuesday, August 27, 2019, if you're in the vicinity it would be worth your while to stop by and take a look.

There's also an excellent article by Kristina Foster about the exhibition in Hyperallergic (6/7/19):

"A History of Writing, from Hieroglyphs to Squiggles:  An exhibition at the British Library powerfully delves into the personal and political complexities of writing, driving home that it's not only one of humanity's greatest inventions, but born out of the strongest human motivations."

Near the beginning, Foster admits:

No one can pinpoint exactly when writing was invented, but the earliest evidence of this faculty hails from Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq). On show is a 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian clay tablet impressed with cuneiform script — wedge-shaped markings made with a reed stylus — indicating wages distributed to farm laborers. Next up is picture-writing: Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphics stand preserved in limestone stelae lionizing their respective pantheon of deities and dynasties.

But my favorite paragraph is the last:

"Isn't that amazing?" mused the art historian E. H. Gombrich in his book A Little History of the World, "with twenty-six simple signs, each no more than a couple of squiggles, you can write [down anything] you like, be it wise or silly, angelic or wicked." If nothing else, this exhibition fascinatingly details the communicative powers of the "squiggle," weaving the nuances of human character and emotion through the history of writing in a way that is at once intellectual, fractious, moving, and joyous.

If writing, as the exhibition's wall text refers to it, is "mankind's greatest invention", then those twenty-six little squiggles are the most wondrous creation within that achievement.

Selected readings

"Universal alphabet" (2/27/13)

"The World Alphabet Olympics" (10/16/12)

"Love those letters" (11/3/18)

[h.t. John Rohsenow]