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REVIEW SHEET FOR M20 (S2013, UCLA)
PROTO-WRITING
Ice Age Symbols
• probably 20,000 years old
Tallies
• Incan Quipus used to keep trace of mov’t of goods in the Inca empire; the sole bureaucratic
recording device of the Incas
Amerindian Pictograms (North American Indians)
Clay tokens
• excavation from Middle East, tokens dated from 8000 BC to as late as 3000 BC, with very
few examples from much later (1500 BC)
• most probable explanation is that they were counting units in accountancy
• maybe diff shapes used for diff entities
• one theory is that the token system was pictographic writing in embryo; thus, the decline in
numbers of tokens w/ the growth of writing on clay tablets in 3000 BC
Clay envelopes (bullae)
• impressions on sealed clay balls are made with tokens, sometimes correspond w/ tokens
sealed inside
• purpose of a bulla was most probably to guarantee the accuracy and authenticity of stored
tokens
• Denise Schmandt-Besserat—she and many scholars feel that the exterior marks on bullae
were a step towards the marking of clay tablets w/ more complex signs and the consequent
emergence of writing
• tokens and bullae continued to exist long after emergence of cuneiform in about 3000 BC
• suggested that rather than giving rise to the idea of writing, they probably acted as
supplements to writing, and they accompanied the development of writing
CUNEIFORM (3350 BC to 200 AD)
Cuneiform created by the “Euphratic” peoples, possibly Sumerians, from about 3500 BC, the writing
system began as a system of accounting tokens, then pictographs, pictorial representations became
simplified and more abstract; Sumerian script was adapted for the Akadian, Elamite, Hittite, Gurrian,
and inspired the Old Persian and Ugaritic national alphabets
HISTORY
The first clay tablets
• earliest known clay tablets come from Uruk in Mesopotamia, date from 3350 BC
• “nuermical” tablets solely concern calculation, which cannot be thought of as true writing
• signs consist of numerals and symbols that are pictographic
• it is possible that the numerals developed out of the impressions made in the exterior of clay
bullae
PICTOGRAMS
Writing direction started off with vertical columns. Certain signs to indicate proper names are known
as ‘determinants’, they were usually written in purely ‘ideographic’ fashion. From about 2900, many
pictographs began to lose their original function, and a sign could have various meanings depending
on context. Number of signs reduced from about 1500 to 600 and writing became increasing
phonological—determinative signs were reintroduced to avoid ambiguity. Process is parallel to and
perhaps not independent of the development of Egyptian hieroglyphic
AKKADIAN CUNEIFORM
Archaic cuneiform was adopted by the Akkadian from 2500 BC and by 2000 BC, the Akkadians
retained the Sumerian logograms and combinations of logograms for more complex notions but

pronounced them as the corresponding Akkadian words. They also kept the phonetic values but
extended them far beyond the original Sumerian inventory of simple types. Many more complex
syllabic values of Sumerian logograms were transferred to the phonetic level, and polyphony became
an increasingly serious complication in Akkadian cuneiform.
King Hammurabi of Babylon (died 1750 BC) unified all of southern Mesopotamia. Babylonia
thus became the great and influential center of Mesopotamian culture. The Code of Hammurabi is
written in Old Babylonian cuneiform, which developed throughout the shifting and less brilliant later
eras of Babylonian history into Middle and New Babylonian types.
The expansion of cuneiform writing outside Mesopotamia began in the 3rd millennium, when
the country of Elam in southwestern Iran was in contact with Mesopotamian culture and adopted the
system of writing. The Elamite sideline of cuneiform continued far into the 1st millennium BC,
when it presumably provided the Indo-European Persians with the external model for creating a new
simplified quasi-alphabetic cuneiform writing for the Old Persian language
In the 2nd millennium the Akkadian of Babylonia, frequently in somewhat distorted and
barbarous varieties, became a lingua franca of international intercourse in the entire Middle East, and
cuneiform writing thus became a universal medium of written communication.
DERIVED SCRIPTS
Complexity of the system prompted simplified versions of the script ! Old Persian was written in a
subset of simplified cuneiform characters known as Old Persian Cuneiform.
DECIPHERMENT
• 17th century (1618): European travelers return from Persia with records of inscriptions in
Old Persian on walls of ancient Persepolis, the capital of Darius and the Persian kings of the
Achaemenid dynasty
• 18th century: 1) Carsten Niebuhr noticed that many of the (new and more) inscriptions
were duplicated, enabling him to check one set of readings against another. He confirmed
the left-to-right direction of the writing. He was able to distinguish 3 unique scripts.
• knowledge of cuneiform was lost until 1835 when Henry Rawlinson found the Behistun
inscriptions in Persia.
• inscription consist of identical texts in 3 official languages of the empire: Old Persian,
Babylonian, and Elamite (3300-500BC), helped in decipherment of cuneiform.
IMPORTANT PEOPLE
• Carsten Niebuhr – a Danish traveler who noticed that there were 3 different cuneiform
scripts at Persepolis
• Grotefend – a German high school teacher who took the first serious step towards
decipherment; attempted to decipher Old Persian cuneiform; concluded that the single
slanting wedges must be word dividers and the system must be alphabetic; although not
wholly correct, it served well in identifying names which were indeed spelt alphabetically;
complied an alphabet of Old Persian, many proved wrong esp when he tried to extend his
system beyond proper name; he attempted decipherment of Old Persian as an alphabet. In
fact, the script is partially syllabic; many of his values were therefore incorrect, particularly
where he allocated more than one sign to a single sound value and more than one sound
value to a single sign
• Henry Rawlinson—the person who copied the entire Behistun inscription; generally credited
with decipherment of Babylonian cuneiform, but never explained how he did it, recent study
of his notebooks suggests that he borrowed the work of the scholar Edward Hicks w/o giving
him credit; knowledge of Avestan and Sanskirt, he expected consistent relationship btw
words of the same meaning in Avestan, Sanskirt and Old Persian ! decipherment of the
Behistun inscription in Old Persian; he came across different Babylonian signs for
ba,bi,bu,ab,ib,ub, he at first regarded the all as diff ways of writing b (homophonous);
conversely, he accepted that vertain signs could stand for more than one sound (polyphonic);

he was able to add to Grotefend’s decipherment; he identified the names of people rule by
Darius and allotted values to many more signs in Old Persian.
Babylonian cuneiform was considered deciphered in 1857 when both Rawlinson and Hincks
came up w/ the same translation of the Tiglath-Pileser I’s text
Babylonian and Elamite cuneiform clearly contained non-alphabetic elements, given their large #
of diff signs
OLD PERSIAN CUNEIFORM (550-400 BC)
• it is not a direct descendent of the Sumerian and Babylonian systems b/c even though the
physical appearance of the signs are cuneiform, but the actual shape of the signs were
completely original
- it is a syllabic script that also contain some logograms, but majority of the signs are syllabogram,
and it is classified as a syllabic script
EVOLUTION of cuneiform:
beginning = pictographic symbols, by the time of Babylonian cuneiform ! signs bore almost no
resemblance to their pictographic origins; perhaps as late as the middle of the 2 nd millennium BC,
signs on clay tablets became turned through 90 degrees counter-clockwise, and script written
horizontally instead of vertically anymore, and from writing direction of colums R to L change to
inline L to R
Egyptian hieroglyphs (3300 BC – 400 AD)
Egyptian hieroglyphs contained a combination of logographic and syllabic elements
HISTORY AND EVOLUTION
For many years, earliest known hieroglyphic inscription was the Narmer Palette (3200BC), but
excavation at Abydos under Gunder Dreyer discovered the Tablets of Abydos with protohieroglyphic
inscriptions
Hieroglyphs consist of 3 kinds of glyphs: phonetic glyphs, including 1)single-consonant
characters that functioned like an alphabet; 2) logographs, representing morphemes (smallest
linguistic unit that has semantic meaning); 3) determinatives, which narrowed down the meaning of
a logographic or phonetic words
As writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified
glyphs forms developed, resulting in the hieratic (priestly) and demotic (popular) script
Hieroglyphs continued to be used under Persian rule, and after Alexander’s conquest of Egypt.
Some believe that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish ‘true Egyptians’ from the
foreign conquerors, another reason may be the refusal of the change of culture by a foreign country.
But by 400AD, few Egyptians were capable of reading hieroglyphs.
DECIPHERNMENT OF HIEROGLYPHIC WRITINGS
Real breakthrough in decipherment began in the early 1800s ! IMPORTANT PEOPLE!
• Thomas Young – one of the first who tried to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, he used the 29
letters of demotic alphabet for decipherment. He concluded that the demotic script was a
mixture of alphabetic signs and other hieroglyphic-type signs, and hieroglyphic script used
an alphabet to spell foreign names, remaining hieroglyphs, the part used to write the
Egyptian language, were non-phonetic
• Jean-Francois Champollion – made the complete decipherment of the hieroglyphs. He
translated parts of the Rosetta stone in 1822, showing that the written Egyptian language
was similar to Coptic (The Coptic alphabet is a modified form of the Greek alphabet, with
some letters (which vary from dialect to dialect) deriving from demotic.), and that the
writing system was combination of phonetic and ideographic signs.

WRITING SYSTEM
same sign can be interpreted in different ways: as a phonogram (phonetic reading) as a logogram, or
as an ideogram (“determinative”, semantic meaning” ), Determinative was not read as a phonetic
constituent, but facilitated understanding by differentiating the word from its homophones
PHONETIC READING
• most hieroglyphic signs are phonetic in nature, meaning the sign is read independent of its
visual characteristics
(Rebus principle)
• phonograms, whether w/ one consonant (unilateral), or two or three. The 24 uniliteral signs
make up the so-called hieroglyphic alphabet
• hieroglyphs are written from right to left and left to right, or from top to bottom, usually
direction from R to L
• words are not separated by blanks or by punctuation marks, but certain hieroglyphs tend to
appear at the end of words, making words easier to distinguish
• There are some 24 uniconsonantal signs in the hieroglyphic script, referred to as an alphabet.
In addition, the script used biconsonantal and triconsonantal signs, and various nonphonetic
signs.
PHONETIC COMPLEMENTS
Egyptian writing is often redundant; redundant characters accompanying bilateral or trilateral signs
are called phonetic complements added before the sign or after the sign or even frame the sign to
provide clarity to the spelling of the hieroglyph, also used to allow the reader to differentiate between
signs which are homophones (A characteristic of several written signs expressing the same phoneme
in the language. For example, the written ‘too, two, to’ are all pronounced too.)
SEMANTIC READING
• Logogram – most frequently used common nouns, they are always accompanied by a mute
vertical stroke, indicating their status as a logogram
• Determinatives – these mute characters are placed at the end of the word to clarify what the
word is about, as homophonc glyphs are common
ANOTHER VERSION
1) Decipherment
Before the Rosetta Stone, most decipherers believed that Egyptian hieroglyphs did not represent
sounds, but rather ideas. Most of these ideas came from Horapollo who wrote a treatise in 4th
century AD, a combination of fictitious ideas about the meaning and the use of signs.
Kircher, entrusted with deciphering a cartouche (a small group of hieroglyphs in the inscription
enclosed in an oval outline), found an elaborate text, while it was just the name of a pharaoh spelt out
phonetically. However, he assisted in the rescue of Coptic, the language of the last phase of ancient
Egypt. The Coptic language dates from Christian times and was the official language of the Egyptian
church, but lost ground to Arabic and by the late 17th century was headed for extinction.
Meanwhile, others started to hypothesize that some hieroglyphs might have phonetic values.
The Rosetta Stone was found in 1799 by French soldiers, the bottom one being Greek and the
top one Egyptian hieroglyphs with visible cartouches and the middle being demotic, a cursive form of
the hieroglyphic script. The Greek translation produced a decree passed by a council of priests on the
first anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, king of Egypt, on 27 March 196 BC.
After looking for names like Ptolemy, Alexander, etc in the demotic script, they noticed that they
names were also spelled alphabetically. However, the demotic script was not wholly alphabetic.
Thomas Young started his work on the Rosetta Stone in 1814. He noticed that demotic and
hieroglyphic symbols were very much alike. He concluded that the demotic scrpt was a mixture of
alphabetic signs and other, hieroglyphic-type signs. Going further, he assumed that Ptolemy, through

written in hieroglyphs, was spelt alphabetically. His reason was that Ptolemy was a foreign name,
non-Egyptian, and therefore could not be spelt non-phonetically as a native Egyptian name would
be.
The full decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs is the work of Jean-Francois Champollion, who
announced it in 1823. His knowledge of Coptic aided him in the decipherment and figuring out the
meaning of the words produced.
In addition to the Rosetta stone, another key was the Philae Obelisk. The base block inscription
was in Greek, the column inscription in hieroglyphic script. In the Greek the names of Ptolemy and
Cleopatra were mentioned, in the hieroglyphs only two cartouches occurred. One of the cartouches
was almost identical to one form of the cartouche of the Ptolemy on the Rosetta Stone. There was
also a shorter version of the Ptolemy cartouche on the Rosetta stone. He decided that the shorter
version spelt Ptolemy, while the longer (Rosetta) cartouche must involve some royal title, tacked onto
Ptolemy's name. He got 2 different signs for t, but deduced that they were homophones (signs
representing the same sound). He applied these values to other non-Egyptian and Egyptian names
and was surprised to discover that they produced Egyptian sounding words. Although initially, he did
not think that the hieroglyphic script had phonetic elements, he accepted it, allowing him to decipher
the second half of the long cartouche of Ptolmey on the Philae obelisk. Knowledge of Coptic was
essential in apply sound values and pronunciation.
The writing system is a mixture of semantic symbols, i.e. symbols that stand for words and ideas,
also known as logograms, and phonetic signs, phonograms, that represent one or more sounds
(alphabetic or poly-consonantal). Some hieroglyphs are recognizable pictures, but the picture does
not necessarily give the meaning of the sign. A picture of a hand can function as a hand or the sound
value of t.
2) Development:
Egyptian hieroglyphs suddenly appear in about 3300 BC, just prior to the beginning of dynastic
Egypt, and virutally fully developed. The stimulus for the creation of the hieroglyphic script may
have been the system of writing that had started in Mesopotamia around 3350 BC. They could have
borrowed the idea of phonography from the Sumerians.
Possible elements of Late Uruk influence on Egyptian writing, Naqada II-III period (3500-3300
BC):
• No evident pre-historical development that would explain the rapid development of
architecture, art, ceramics as is the case in Mesopotamia
• Niched-wall architecture of 1st-3rd dynasties
• clay cones used in architecture
• cylinder seals
• artistic motifs
a. entwined necks (Narmer Palette)
b. Hero scenes (grave paintings (Hieronkopolis) and knife handles)
From hieroglyphs, two cursive scripts developed, hieratic and from it demotic, the first dating
almost from the invention of hieroglyphs, the second from after about 650 BC. Hieratic became a
priestly script, as suggested by its name, only after it was ousted by demotic; originally hieratic was
Egypt's everyday administrative and business script.
Egyptian hieroglyphs were written and read both from right to left and from left to right. They
usually wrote right to left if it was not a special case (like for symmetry).
No one knows what ancient Egyptian sounds like. We assume. Egyptians did not mark their
vowels, we have to guess what they are. Clues are from Coptic and other bilingual texts with Egyptian
script and a script that marks their vowels.
CHINESE (ca 1200 BC to present)
Origin of Chinese characters emerged around 1600 BC, possibly much earlier; influenced Japanese,
Korean and Vietnamese

MAYAN (300 BC to 1600 AD)
• a writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica, earliest
inscriptions dated to 3rd cent. BC, usage continued until shortly after Spanish exploration in
the 16th cent.
• Maya writing used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs
• individual symbols could represent either a word or a syllable, and the same glyph could
often be used for both
• different glyphs could be read the same way (homophony)
Decipherment
The numbers (and calendar) were the first part of the Mayan writing system to be deciphered by
scholars during the 19th century. Mayans used place value that increases in multiples of 20.
• In measuring time, the Maya began by combining the numerals 1 to 13 with 20 named days.
Then they expanded the 260 day count by making a third wheel to make 365 days a year.
This was for the short count.
• For the long count, they created a zero at 4 Ahau 8 Cumku.
• The Dresden Codex is full of dates. It is an almanac for difination, in which each day is
linked to other days by complex astronomical calculations and is thereby given an
astrological significance expressed in the deeds of gods.
The next major step in the decipherment of Mayan glyphs - the realization that they were
partially phonetic—dates back to the time of the Spanish Inquisition. De Landa wrote a book that
contains the Mayan 'alphabet', which proved to be the key to deciphering Mayan glyphs in the 20th
century. He did not realize that the glyphs were syllabic. But he knew that Mayan consonants could
change their meaning depending on whether they were unglottalized or glottalized.
In 1876, Leon de Rosny applied the Landa alphabet to the first sign in the glyph for 'turkey' in
the Madrid Codex. Rosny went on to propose that Mayan writing was a phonetic system, based on
syllables. He was critized by Thompson, who dominated Maya studies, and adhered to his belief that
the script, was logographic.
In 1952, Yuri Knorosov propsed phonetic readings of many glyphs, including the one for dog.
Knorosov noticed that the first sign in the dog glyph was the same as the second sign in the turkey
glyph. He also produced other decipherments like this in the Dresden Codex.
Dramatic breakthroughs occurred in the 1970's - in particular, at the first Mesa Redonda de
Palenque, a scholarly conference organized by Merle Greene Robertson at the Classic Maya site of
Palenque held in December, 1973. A working group was led by Linda Schele and identified a sign as
an important royal title, enabling them to understand the histories of each Mayan king.
Problems with decipherment: no Mayan dictionary, mixed writing system of phonography and
logography (same word could be written in several ways). Words can be written with just logographs,
just phonograms, or both.
Basic features of Mayan: 85% of the Mayan glyphs can be ‘read’. There is a Mayan syllabary
where there are a large number of variant signs for a single sound (homophony). Some syllabic signs
can also act as logograms. There is also polyphony (one sign with several different pronunciations).
Development
• The Olmec is viewed as the “mother culture” in Central America; They developed a system
of writing, the long-count calendar and a complex religion. The Olmecs had a considerable
influence on the fledgling Maya culture.
• During 300 to 900 AD, the Maya refined the long-count calendar and developed a more
advanced written language. New evidence maybe suggests that the Maya were the ones who
invented writing in Mesoamerica.
PRECOLUMBIAN , MESOAMERICAN COMMUNICATION DEVICES
• quipu: a knotted arrangement of ropes used to record and keep track of goods in the Inca
empire. They were the sole bureaucratic recording device of the Incas; it was the job of the

'quipucamayocs' to tie and interpret the knots for uses like tax collecting, output, etc. Each
knot represented a value in the decimal system, depending on its position or absense. Used
during 2500 BC.
• abacus: There have been recent suggestions of a Mesoamerican (the Aztec civilization that
existed in present day Mexico) abacus called the Nepohualtzitzin, circa 900-1000 A.D.,
where the counters were made from kernels of maize threaded through strings mounted on a
wooden frame.
THE ALPHABETS
• The history of the alphabet begins in Ancient Egypt, more than a millennium into the
history of writing. The first more or less true alphabet emerged around 2000 BC to represent
the language of Semitic workers in Egypt, and was derived from the alphabetic principles of
the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
• Egyptian acrophonic principle influenced the Proto-Canaanite and Proto-Sinaitic
inscriptions
• Inscriptions of what are considered Proto-Sinaitic are from Serabit el-Khadem, dated to
1500 BC. Sir Alan Gardiner saw the resemblance between some of these Proto-Sinaitic signs
and Egyptian hieroglyphs that were pictographic. He named the signs using the Semitic
word that was equivalent to the meaning that the sign had in Egyptian, and these names are
the Hebrew alphabet’s letter’s names. The actual inventors could be Canannites and not the
Semitic people living in Egypt.
• Ugaritic alphabet: By the 14th century, hard evidence of the alphabet’s existence is found in
a place called Ugarit. There are only 30 distinct characters. The order of these signs is nearly
identical to the order traditionally used for Aramaic, Phoenician, Arabic, and Hebrew
• Phoenician alphabet: Used as early as 15th century BC at Byblos, the Phoenician alphabet
consisted of 22 letters, and vowels were not indicated. This descended from a North Semitic
script, and it changed only in letters’ shapes. Greek, Hebrew, and the Arabic alphabets
evolved from this script.
• Aramaic alphabet: The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th
century BC as the official script of the Persian Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly
all the modern alphabets of Asia. (Hebrew, Arabic, Brahmic alphabet, etc.) It displaced
cuneiform as the main language and became extinct after Arabic. It is a Semitic language that
does not mark vowels, only consonants.
• Greek alphabet: the Greeks borrowed their alphabet from Phoenician alphabet or could be
from Greeks living in Phoenicia. Earliest Greek alphabet inscriptions are from 730 BC, but it
might have been invented anywhere from 1100-800 BC. They changed the Phoenician
alphabet to make it into sounds that are used in Greek, added vowels, and 3 more signs. The
signs for the classic Greek alphabet are known as the Ionian alphabet, compulsory during
403 BC.
• Roman alphabet: The alphabetic link between the Greeks and the Romans are the
Etruscans. The Greeks that went to Italy brought with them the Euboean alphabet during
750 BC, leading to the different scripts used for Greek and Etruscan/Roman. Etruscans
modified the script to change the g sound to the k sound, etc. Then the Roman/Latin script
was modified with 4 more signs and sounds.
• Hebrew alphabet: Known as the script of orthodox Jewry and a national script of modern
Israel. The older one (Old or Paleo-Hebrew) evolved from Phoenician around the 9th
century BC and disappeared from secular use by 6th century. The second script, known as
square Hebrew, evolved from Aramaic (developed in 3rd century). Hebrew is an abjad
without vowels.
• Brahmi alphabet: The Brahmi script is one of the most important writing systems in the
world by virtue of its time depth and influence. It represents the earliest post-Indus corpus of
texts, and some of the earliest historical inscriptions found in India. Most importantly, it is

the ancestor to hundreds of scripts found in South, Southeast, and East Asia. Appeared by
5th century BC. It is syllabic alphabetic, each sign can be a consonant or syllable. It indicates
the same consonant with a different vowel by drawing extra strokes, called matras, attached
to the character. Ligatures are used to indicate consonant clusters.