Writing – the habit of turning language into something that can be transmitted across space and time – is 5,000 years old or more; but that is nothing in evolutionary terms. Unlike speaking, reading and writing involve parts of the brain reserved for other tasks by the non-literate. It’s not natural, in other words. “Writing is an object created by us … It is not biological, it is not in our genes. It is, in short, a cultural gadget”, writes Silvia Ferrara in The Greatest Invention: A history of the world in nine mysterious scripts. Pushed further, this conception of a familiar tool becomes even more unsettling: “writing is something we could also do without”.

For Ferrara, writing is part of a bigger story about ingenuity and curiosity. “The protagonists of our tale … are not the scripts alone, nor those who discovered or deciphered them. We ourselves are the protagonists – our brains, our ability to communicate”. It is a panoramic view, spanning millennia between the multiple inventions of different scripts and more recent efforts to decipher their archaeological remnants. And it is sensible: the temptation to corral historical material into an all-explanatory theory is firmly resisted.

The story always comes from, or with, an unexpected angle. “Take a look at the objects around you”, Ferrara urges: rather than tell the history of the letters through the pictures they came from, she instead points out universal prompts for letters, Ls in table tops, Vs between mountains, the “o” of the sun, the asterisk of the stars, the signifying curls of cords and cables. Neuroscience tells us that lines and contours are more important to our visual cortex than what lies between them, and a comparison of scripts across time shows the same frequency of shapes, from the ubiquitous L- and T-type forms to the less common but still recurrent Xs and Fs. “It’s as if writing sought to copy nature’s contours, to make itself easier to perceive and simpler to read.”

Writing that can’t easily be read is still instructive, however. Not knowing what a script means forces us to turn from the symbols to their context, so from the start Ferrara brings island cultures – Crete, Cyprus and Easter Island – to the fore. Far from being isolated peripheries, these places were “nodes of invention and aspiration, affirmations of identity”, driven by “the urge to prove that [they were] unique”. Such uniqueness underpinned both the success and the downfall of their writing systems: the desire to express an identity meant the scripts were limited to the site of invention, and without spreading further afield they were doomed. “Very few island scripts end in success”, she writes. “Neither for themselves, since they vanish, nor for us, still unable to penetrate their enigmas.”

But such enigmas drive Ferrara’s curiosity about writing: decipherment is the subject of her own research, and the heart of this book is a kind of manifesto, a call for collaboration, to understand the ways in which invention and interpretative rediscovery intertwine. Celebrating the work of archaeologists, anthropologists, geomatics engineers, historians, computer scientists, cognitivists and experts in linguistics, Ferrara describes her field of study as “cooperative … with no more room for prophets. The mantra today is synergy. Not only of group action but of thought”. It’s a call to arms in these days of academic silos and boundaries, but more importantly it says something about the technology she is investigating.

The fact that independent systems arose around the world multiple times is not enough for Ferrara to conclude that writing was ever bound to happen. “There’s nothing inevitable, deterministic, or teleological about [it]”, she writes, putting herself at odds with Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari, who have stressed the “need” for writing and its subsequent invention as a means of satisfying that need. Writing, on this mechanistic view, is an engineer’s response, a solution to a problem, but this “problem” was identified from the point of view of the present, from a highly literate society. Was this “problem” recognized as such by the societies that developed writing? Did they sense the lack seen by Diamond and Harari? If so, the response would have been one-off inventions, which we do not see in the historical record.

Writing is not an engineer’s diagram. Repeatedly, Ferrara finds, it came about as the result of “a series of coordinated, cumulative, and gradual actions” (bar the interventions of lone inventors such as the indigenous American polymath Sequoyah, who wrote down the Cherokee language, and Hildegard of Bingen, creator of a mystical lingua ignota in the twelfth century). “We’d be mistaken to look at this culminating moment … as a project, a scheme, the result of a conscious plan”, Ferrara writes. Instead, she concludes: “Writing is a social invention, where alignment, coordination, and feedback play essential roles”. Without social agreement on the use and meaning of written symbols, there can be no communication, and such a joint activity results in adaptation and innovation across society, seen in changing conventions of grammar (the TLS tells me I can now in some cases split an infinitive, for example, but we haven’t quite reached in print form that ubiquitous innovation of gamers, the emoji).

In her exploration of four sites in which writing was, separately, invented – Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica – Ferrara complicates the usual explanation, which is that this “gadget” emerged to help with the running of states and economies. She gives counter-examples on both sides: Tifinagh is a script still used to record Berber Tuareg languages in North Africa, but the societies that gave rise to the writing were without a governing class or an attendant bureaucracy; conversely, there is Kerma, a culture from Sudan that formed a state nearly 5,000 years ago, without any writing system. The inevitable conclusion is that the emphasis on a bureaucratic purpose is absurd. It is historically illiterate to have such a teleological view of a past invention; worse, for Ferrara, it undermines the wonder of writing and the people who developed it. The origins of our greatest invention lie not with some “bloodless monster that is the state, purveyor of taxes”, but “in the imagination … in our deep desire to name – ourselves, and everything around us”. Discoveries often precede their applications; curiosity matters, and “invention comes later, as an effect of discovery … it needs time and energy before it becomes [an] intention”.

Ferrara writes with a breezy elan, nicely caught by her translator, Todd Portnowitz. The reader is familiarly addressed and there are many invitations to draw a picture or guess the meaning of words; questions and asides. The directness is deliberate: “I wanted the book to feel dictated … I’ve given it an oral form, to get a sense of just how heavy the armour of writing can be”. The result is that “almost without realising it, I’ve … sidelined the very subject of this book”. But it’s not quite that. The effect of the rhetorical style and of Ferrara’s tendency to disrupt the conventional picture – emphasizing context, stressing disruptions and failures, giving attention to the gaps in our understanding – is to see writing as distinct from its uses, aims and constituent language. “Saussure … the father of linguistics, thought of writing as something parasitic, something subordinate to language. And he was wrong”, Ferrara argues. “Writing has a parallel, independent life of its own.” The religious communities of historic Islam used scripts made up of Hebrew, Greek, Arabic and Armenian alphabets to write not only the languages associated with those alphabets, but also the languages of empire, Ottoman Turkic or Arabic. (For example, Judeo-Arabic is the name given to Arabic written with Hebrew letters.) Conversely, the alphabet you are reading now is used to notate hundreds of different languages. The link between language and script is not fixed. As Ferrara says:

A script can notate several languages … but a language can [also] be notated in several scripts (Greek is one example, written with the alphabet, Linear B, and the classical Cypriot syllabary). The two tracks can be interchangeable, but they always run parallel.

In Silvia Ferrara’s conception of it, writing is a fragile object, nurtured over many phases of human development. Many different kinds of writing have disappeared into obscurity. Even the enduring successes – the alphabet I’m typing now, the much older Chinese script – were not guaranteed; they owe their longevity to accidents of politics and society. The Greatest Invention is a celebration not of achievements, but of moments of illumination and “the most important thing in the world: our desire to be understood”.

Lydia Wilson is a research fellow at the University of Oxford and an editor at New Lines and Cambridge Literary Review. She presented the BBC television series The Secret History of Writing, 2020

Silvia Ferrara tells a fascinating story about writing using the device of nine as yet undeciphered scripts of the ancient world. Each of these scripts is fascinating in its own right. And Ferrara recounts what we know about each in a way that is both authoritative and playful. She is clearly a master of her trade and therefore confident enough to be poetic, humorous, and speculatively self-reflective in her exposition of what might be the most creative as well as productive of any human act, the invention of writing.

I can’t tell my agglutinative from my fusionals not to mention from my polysynthetics in linguistics. But I think there is also another story contained within Ferrara’s exposition of the nine scripts more accessible to the linguistic unprofessional. This is a 5000 year saga of linguistic sociology that is much more engrossing than the research results of the various linguists, archaeologists, ethnographers, and practitioners of geodesy and geomatics who are involved in Ferrara’s work.

This other story is somewhat subtly placed but it is there in her book. So her insistence on some established facts - that writing is a collaborative and experimental invention, that it creates enduring (but not all) societies, that it is the fundamental technology of our species which has allowed us to successfully engage in evolutionary competition - isn’t primarily about her trope of undeciphered scripts. Rather, what she shows is that writing is a tool of alienation as well as empathy, a decidedly mixed blessing just as the biblical story of the Tower of Babel suggests.

As I read Ferrara, this paradox of a linguistically generated empathy and alienation is inherent in written language itself. The paradox doesn’t assert itself suddenly but, like the slowly boiling frog, through an incremental process of development (except for Chinese which had the equivalent of the miraculous Virgin Birth in linguistic terms). For her, writing begins with drawing, particularly drawing of the things of everyday life - animals, plants, parts of the body, natural features. These are images that are purely expressive. They may evoke a response in others but their meaning is solely in that response. They are not functionally dissimilar to, for example, the warning call of the blackbird in my garden announcing ‘there are bipeds on the loose in the area.’ Except, of course, that in writing the warning can be communicated without the sound.

From that starting point, again as I read Ferrara, written language binds people together but at the cost of divorcing them from the rest of the world, including other people, and perhaps even themselves. Linguistic signs (hieroglyphs, ideographs, letters) emerge from the shapes of things drawn. In a sense, drawing promotes a sort of identification, perhaps even a spiritual sympathy, with the things depicted. But these innovative written signs ‘stand for’ something other than what they are. They indicate, or denote, or, direct.

That is to say, signs come gradually to exist in their own right - and clearly so, there on rock or papyrus, turtle shells, or in clay tablets. They ease into a new status of icon. Continuing the evolutionary process, the icon is transformed into a logogram. The logogram is a sort of independent icon, a free radical in chemical terms perhaps, which can change its meaning without changing its sound. Logograms attach themselves to other logograms like molecules of hydrogen and oxygen to form the equivalent of water in new linguistic substances. Writing has then become liberated from speaking and an entirely new world is opened up as linguistic ‘things’ proliferate.

Logograms most significantly form into the revolutionary (as well as evolutionary) invention of syllables. Syllables are the building blocks of all language, much like prime numbers are the building blocks of mathematics. They can be mixed and matched in any number of ways. They are structured into words (or sometimes combined with pictograms in a sort of rebus) which are then mixed according to emerging rules called grammar. What might have been vocal convention now becomes a linguistic requirement of writing, which, while not entirely fixed, is much slower to change.

Freed from speech, logograms also can have different sounds without changing their meanings, as with many Chinese characters. Or, more problematically, they can retain their links to sounds and have multiple meanings. These are the homophones which exist in abundance in English as well as Chinese. English relies almost solely on context to distinguish meaning while Chinese developed special marks to denote what would be vocally ‘tones’ and so kept writing competitive, as it were, with speaking. And as Ferrara points out: “Using this one, small, versatile unit of meaning [the logogram], we can express two things on completely different ends of the semantic spectrum, and create humor.”

At some point grammar intrudes and provides structure. Written marks with no sound at all, - like the so-called ‘determinants’ which indicate the grammatical class of a word or the tonal designations in Chinese. Cases and declensions emerge directing how words relate to each other rather than to things that are not words. Words are created for things that aren’t even things - emotions, relationships, abstract concepts, God. Each step in the evolution of writing takes it further from the drawing which was a mere appreciative expression of the natural world.

In time, written languages start to breed with each other, as with Sumerian cuneiform and Akkadian script. Most remnants of any original ‘natural’ symbology are obscured or erased entirely (except, once again, in Chinese!). The array of written symbols themselves becomes totally abstract. In many definite ways they become the new nature in which we exist. Is it the laws of society that control us through language, or the laws of written language that controls us through society? It’s hard to tell.

Having become independent of speech, writing became a universal mark of social class and power. Simply being human is the only requirement for speech. Wealth, position, and education are necessary for writing. Nothing about writing is natural. It is the ultimate artifice, the primal human technology. No matter how much writing describes, recounts, or even directs the world, it is not of the world but an entirely human convention about the world to create “An infinity of fictions, one layered atop the other.” And many of these fictions are meant to manipulate, constrain, and control.

The undeciphered scripts analysed by Ferrara are actually evidence that we have no certainty about how writing emerged or when. Her story is one of those infinity of fictions which writing itself promotes. And it is a fiction with theological resonance. In addition to being our fundamental technology, written language is also our fundamental religion. It seems to have created itself ex nihilo, out of nothing. We cannot imagine a world without it. It keeps us safe and it oppresses us with complete impunity. It is everywhere simultaneously and at every time and yet nowhere definite and timeless. It is within us, around us, and totally separate from us in the manner of the Christian Trinity. We trust it but we are wary of its capacity to deceive. When we pray, we honour it. When we recite a creed, we extol its power. We worship it through education in the hope of a better, fairer, more peaceful life… or just to survive.

We recognise not language itself but written language as the ultimate source of power. It is the power of contracts, of the design specs for nuclear bombs, of worldwide literary culture. And through science and engineering it is power over the natural world certainly, but also power over each other. Those brought together by language compete against others bound through other languages. Within each language ‘tribe’ we compete for power with each other, mainly the power over language itself in legislation, policy, rules of recognition and advancement. Particularly in democracy, power is sought through the language of persuasion and promise and exercised in written laws, regulations and codes.

The written word has become so dominant that we find it difficult to distinguish it from the natural world at all. The Egyptians scratched out the written names of people and animals on graves and monuments to neutralise their threat. The ancient Chinese created “flash fictions,” prophecies which gained credibility by being carved on turtle shells. Hebrews and Christians published bogus biblical genealogies to establish royal lineages. Isaac Newton devoted as much time to the arcane texts of alchemical magic as he did to his experiments in physics. Randolph Hearst single-handedly sparked the American War against Spain through his newspapers. And, of course, Donald Trump controls the American Republican Party, and Putin the Russian state through patent falsehoods via the internet, written words carried by the technologies built on and by previous written words.

So Ferrara is absolutely correct when she calls writing the greatest invention, or rather inventions since they were discovered independently in probably a half dozen places. Arguably it is written language which is the sine qua non of what we mean by civilisation, the collecting together into cities. And it written language that has enabled empires, industrial progress and vastly increased human numbers and longevity. But it is also written language which may eventually eliminate our species either through mutual self-destruction or the destruction of the minimal conditions for human living. Writing tears us apart as vigorously as it binds us together. Bloody, bloody Babel.