Papyrus painting. Photo by the author.

Today this column ventures through not only space but time—to ancient Egypt, or more accurately to a papyrus painting in the style of Egyptian hieroglyphics, kindly given to me by the parents of a student graduating from my writing program, a decade ago.  

Like most people, I know next to nothing about Egyptian hieroglyphics, so what I see at the heart of the painting are three figures, possibly a pharaoh and two attendants. Above and below are what I take to be accompanying or explanatory text, which consists of a combination of what seem to be visual images (human figure, bird, cup) and non-representational abstract lines and shapes (horizontal lines, vertical lines, circles, half-circles).

Instinctively, I have separated the painting into two distinct categories: art and writing. The “art” portions make some kind of sense to me immediately, as they are apparently representational: they are people, or generic versions of people. They seem to be the most important elements because they are the largest features of the painting—but also because I (mistakenly) feel I understand them, unlike the smaller elements around them.

Here’s the point: for centuries, observers have seen such documents as proof that whoever made them (or the Mayan characters for example) did not have the intelligence to use what we call writing, so they just drew pictures of things to convey their meanings, a sign they were intellectually and culturally inferior. Primitive. Backward. Unevolved.

The ignorant shoe, though, is on the other foot. How easy it must have been to see something like this, be baffled by the small abstract shapes and so assume they must be meaningless, recognize only the human figures and the birds, assume that the best the Egyptians could manage was what one linguist in 1799 called “imperfect representations of visible objects,” leading us to conclude that if they can’t write, they can only draw, and they must have been intellectually inferior.

Likewise, “They didn’t have paper, so they had to make do with papyrus”—a reed that grows abundantly along the Nile.

Hold on a second, because there is another serious point here about writing. You didn’t just write on papyrus. Papyrus had to be peeled, cut into strips, soaked, layered, glued, hammered, dried and polished. In other words, what we’re seeing in this Egyptian work is anything but primitive: it is a reminder that writing was once a high-skill, high-investment act much more like what today we would call art—used at great expense by highly-trained individuals for the most important purposes.

These Egyptian creations, like similar artifacts found elsewhere in the world, were not just picture-writing for lack of sophistication: they used multiple forms of symbols for multiple purposes with combined effects and were far, far more sophisticated than we give them credit for, even to this day. We cling to our assumptions as if to an electric fence.

For an even better example, let’s go even farther back in time—to a time when we assume people spoke in grunts and hit each other with clubs. To a time of cave people, a phrase that in itself bespeaks primitive brutality and ignorance.

Artifact from the Chauvet cave, created 30,000 years ago. Source: Wikipedia.

In fact, just as I was working on Writing Beyond Writing, word came through the internet of a dramatic illustration of how poorly we have judged ancient “primitive” writing forms, how massively we have underestimated them.

First of all, let’s stop and look at this work. These artifacts are as much as 30,000 years old—but even today they are vivid and alive. I can’t paint anything like that well. But once again, the “pictures” are only the beginning, the obvious, and what else is on those walls reveals the entire construction, and our own ignorance, in a totally different light.

An article in the New Scientist reported that a recurring series of 32 geometric symbols discovered on cave walls and Ice Age objects across Europe (previously overlooked or ignored as researchers stared at and tried to interpret the purpose of the astonishing paintings of bison, bear, and so on) might be an information system as much as 30,000 years old.

The researchers evidently carried out some extraordinarily thorough and perceptive research—which discovered that our ancestors, too, were carrying out some extraordinarily thorough and perceptive research.

“By using the birth cycles of equivalent animals today as a reference point, the researchers were able to work out that the number of marks associated with Ice Age animals were a record, by lunar month, of when they were mating. [The researchers] previously hypothesized that [a particular] sign stood for “giving birth” and the work of the team was able to confirm this theory.

“Their work showed that the sequences record mating and birthing seasons and found a “statistically significant” correlation between the numbers of marks the position of the … sign and the months in which modern animals’ mate and birth respectively.”

This astonishing intellectual endeavor (and let’s say it again, 30,000 years ago) refutes, once and for all, the “evolution” fallacy that depicts human history as a steady march from the primitive to the sophisticated, and that our own 2023 ideas, being modern, are therefore right. It also hints at another possible origin of what we call writing—namely as an outgrowth of calendrical or statistical notation.

We saw the walls of the Chauvet and Lascaux caves through the lenses of our assumptions and our ignorance. We interpreted the images we recognized (in this case, the animals) as drawings, we ignored what we did not understand (the notations), and concluded Stone Age people used pictures because they were too primitive to understand writing.

It never occurred to anyone, I imagine, that both the “art” and the “writing” might be parts of a coherent expression that might be what we’d call a diagram, or, given the magical power of visual images in many cultures, something else entirely. A high-skill, high-cost, high-value production of immense importance to its users.

In a way, this one piece of research illustrates what the Endangered Alphabets Project is all about—namely, asking people to revisit their own assumptions in the light of long-overlooked and habitually-dismissed evidence from out-of-the-way places. 

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Tim Brookes is the founder and president of the non-profit Endangered Alphabets Project (endangeredalphabets.com). His new book, Writing Beyond Writing: Lessons from Endangered Alphabets, can be found at https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/writing-beyond-writing/.