A new book emphasises the imaginative leaps that were required to invent writing
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskWriting is such an everyday miracle that it is easy to take for granted. People who can read cannot stop themselves, as studies have shown in which subjects are told to ignore a word flashing on the screen while attending to another task, but are unable to do so. Reading is the prime goal of education everywhere. Writing seems so fundamental that it is hard to believe just how recent, and contingent, it really is.
“The Greatest Invention”, a new book by Silvia Ferrara of the University of Bologna, restores a sense of wonder at the imaginative leaps required to invent writing. Part of her story is familiar: the procession from drawings to visual icons , to symbols. The leap to symbols is crucial: these are distinct from the original referent, allowing them to stand for abstract things, including the many verbs that are hard to picture.
It may be that all those who invented writing independently relied on the rebus . Some moved past it to alphabetic writing, with characters representing sounds, not syllables. But the rebus remains the core of the story, bootstrapping societies from complete ignorance of the very idea of writing to lives that cannot be imagined without it.
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