Professor Alim is excited by the linguistic daring of rap: ‘The MCing or rapping is a verbal art form that depends on your delivery, your lyrical inventiveness, your ability to create new rhyming structures. It’s something that really speaks the truth to you – a punchline that could be funny and makes people want to rewind and hear it again or a story that’s really powerful and moving and gives you goose bumps and the hair on your neck stands up.’
Hip-hop, one of the most influential music forms
Rappers have different styles of what’s called ‘flow’, the rhymes and rhythms of their lyrics, with names like ‘The Chant’ and ‘The Syncopated Bounce’ and ‘Straight Forward’. Staying on the beat is crucial as, of course, is not stumbling mid-flow; the smallest falter would ruin the whole effect. For rapping to work, it’s got to be perfect, and as in most things practice makes perfect. So how does a rapper practise his art? Clearly not alone in the bedroom.
‘You step up into the cipher,’ explains Professor Alim. ‘A cipher is like this: we’re having a little cipher right now, we’ve got a circular group. We’re talking together, we’re building together. As an MC you’re in a cipher of MCs, you’re building on each other, sharpening your skills. It’s like a lyrical testing ground, a battling ground, a stomping ground.’
Ragtime, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul – African-American music has always crossed over into the broader American culture, bringing with it the language of cat and hip and funky and hot and cool and chill. Clearly hip-hop has travelled the same route, its music and slang adopted by people throughout American society. Professor Alim gives an example of how a phrase which seems to start in the music world gets taken up by the broader culture and then gets degraded.
‘I was in the locker room, working out in the gym, and there’s a white gentleman of about sixty talking on his cellphone. He ended his conversation and he said, “All right, hit me back later.” And I thought, “What? Since when … ?” ’
It’s an example of cultural appropriation which these rap experts have mixed feelings about. Here’s ‘K2’:
‘From a language perspective, hip-hop becomes the reward for describing social linguistic differences in culture or describing the experience. It’s the modern-day expression for saying, “It’s okay for us to have differences and we can share our experiences, and I don’t have to totally get it.” ’
‘And that,’ adds Professor Alim, ‘is what some people view as cultural theft. Where it’s a positive borrowing, it could be a building of relationships across racial lines. But it can also be viewed within a context of racial discrimination that goes back decades and decades – I can borrow your language but I’m sure as hell not going to borrow your experience.’
Professor Alim thinks that rap’s short, to-the-point sentences make it an ideal language for Twitter and Facebook. It’s one of the reasons why, from Tokyo to Timbuktu, rap has such widespread youth appeal and why, in 2011, this verbal art form is having such a profound affect on social movements around the world.
Rapping and Revolution
A rap by a twenty-one-year-old is thought to have helped bring down the Arab dictatorship of Tunisia. Hamada Ben Amor – aka El General – was arrested after he recorded and uploaded a rap protest song on to Facebook. ‘Rais Le Bled’ (‘President, Your People’) is an extraordinarily brave personal message to the now former President Ben Ali: ‘My president, your country is dead / People eat garbage / Look at what is happening / Misery everywhere / Nowhere to sleep / I’m speaking for the people who suffer / Ground under feet.’
Crucially, it was recorded in Arabic, so it spread like wildfire on the social networks, from Casablanca to Cairo and beyond. Ben Amor’s arrest seems to have inflamed the protests, with even more young Tunisians taking to the streets. Within a week, Ben Amor had been released, President Ben Ali had fled the country and the protest rap was being listened to throughout the Arab region.
As another Tunisian rapper, Balti, commented after the overthrow of the old regime: ‘The revolution is a social movement, and rap is always talking about social issues. We come from very tough neighbourhoods and we talk in our songs about social problems such as unemployment. We feel like our voices didn’t get to the regime, to the top officials, but thank God our voices were heard by the people, so we were the fuel of our revolution.’
El General, Ben Amor, emerged from jail a star. He immediately put out a new rap – an ‘ode to Arab revolution’ – with the lyrics ‘Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Morocco, all must be liberated / Long live free Tunisia.’
As El General proves, language is a powerful tool. It should be used with care but it shouldn’t be restricted. In fact it’s impossible to put a lid on language, and, by making words or expressions taboo, you give them even more power. Language should be left to grow and evolve into more colourful and creative forms for future generations.
CHAPTER 4
Spreading the Word
Writing is, quite simply, the greatest invention in human history – in fact, it made history possible. ‘Without words, without writing and without books,’ said the German author Hermann Hesse, ‘there would be no history, there would be no concept of humanity.’ Or, as H. G. Wells put it, ‘Writing put agreements, laws, commandments on record. It made the growth of states larger than the old city states possible … The command of priest or king could go far beyond his sight and voice and could survive his death.’ We humans have been around for nearly 200,000 years, but we’ve only had writing for a little over five millennia. It’s taken us that long to develop from pictures and scratches on clay and parchment to emailing on a laptop computer. Different writing systems evolved gradually over long periods of time, and there’s still debate about which was the very first. The British Museum has thousands of objects with ancient writing on them, some as old as 5,000 years. Some historians say the hieroglyphs of Egypt have the edge, but Assyriologists like Irving Finkel, who study the ancient Mesopotamian culture, claim that its writing form – called cuneiform – is the oldest.
Cuneiform
Mesopotamia, which means the land ‘between the rivers’, was the region around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, largely forming modern-day Iraq and parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran. Around the third millennium BC, Mesopotamia was divided into the Sumerian civilization in the south and the Akkadian in the north. It was the Sumerians who invented the fascinating cuneiform writing system that looks like a series of spindly bird tracks. The scribes used a blunt reed, cut at the tip into a wedge shape, which was pressed down into soft clay in various different ways to cut vertical, horizontal and oblique lines. ‘Cuneiform’ comes from the Latin cuneus, meaning ‘wedge’.
A cuneiform inscription dating from 2100 to 2000 BC
The cuneiform writing system was used for more than 3,000 years. It developed from pictographs, which were realistic drawings to communicate an idea, into a syllabary form, where signs stood for sounds as well as words. For example, says Finkel, initially there would be a sign, a picture representing, say, ‘beer’, and every time you wanted to say ‘beer’, you would draw that picture. But later on came a gigantic leap in the journey of how writing developed: the picture sign came to stand, not for what it looked like, but for the sound that sign represented. What began as symbolic drawing evolved into a system which could be used to express a language phonetically. So, in the case of ‘beer’, a sign could stand for any word that sounded like beer, or had a b sound, and it could be varied and developed, and soon you had a single unit of expression of sound, rather than a slightly more clumsy series of pictures. That gave flexibility and adaptability, and nuance, so that instead of just being able to say, ‘three bottles of milk’ and drawing the sign three times, you could say, ‘Please leave three milk bottles on Sunday morning. Last week it was off.’
Why did people want to have a written form of communication in the first place? On the simplest level it was for making lists, for counting, for keeping a record in areas li
ke trading and tax and money. Mesopotamia was largely a population of shepherds and farmers, and archaeologists have found early clay tablets inscribed with lists of sacks of grain and heads of cattle. Later tablets contain more complex information about social structures, e.g. what sort of jobs people did and how financial dealings were conducted; or they preserve religious texts and stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh, which tells of a legendary Sumerian king’s quest for immortality.
We’ve even unearthed the ancient equivalent of school jotters – tablets found in Sumerian schools which show the teacher’s text on one side, and the pupil’s copy on the other, so we know how people learned to write cuneiform. It wasn’t an easy task: the ancient Mesopotamians had to master the art of inscribing hundreds of signs and learn the various meanings that they might have, depending on the context. It was an art confined to a small number of scribes, who became an elite group in society, more powerful sometimes than the illiterate courtiers or even the king himself. Knowing how to write was a source of power, and a privilege; it took years to learn and was never a system designed for the masses.
Recording the allocation of beer. An upright jar with a pointed base appears three times on this tablet
Cuneiform expert Irving Finkel has a special chart with the English alphabet and their cuneiform signs. He teaches children cuneiform by getting them to write their name down with a pencil, divide it up into syllables and then find the syllables on the chart with which their name can be spelt. That’s not simple, because Far Eastern languages have a very specific pool of sounds, and consonants can’t be written on their own, only as vowel-consonant or consonant-vowel.
The fact that cuneiform documents were written in clay has meant that vital tablets have survived for our examination. When ancient libraries or other buildings housing the tablets were burned, the clay was fired and so preserved for posterity. The British Museum has a staggering 130,000 clay tablets in its safe keeping, and there are probably millions more still buried under the sands of Iraq and Syria. That means, Finkel adds casually, there’s about three centuries of work ahead for Assyriologists like him as they continue to learn from these records of humanity’s past.
Professor Finkel is clearly very excited by the vision of the treasures out there but is there actually something fundamental about our species that can be learned from the study of these ancient peoples and their writings? Oh yes, he says. To him, the people who scratched on clay with a reed and told us about their economy and culture and stories are basically just like us. ‘They were afraid of disease and impotence and not having children and having no money and warfare like everybody else,’ he says, ‘and they told lies and they were truthful and they were committed and they were hypocritical.’ He believes we’d know them on the Underground, these ancient people. ‘The whole dazzling range and wonder of the human mind can be plucked out of these tablets. They were written by people like us.’
The Decipherers
The clever and crucial thing about cuneiform writing was that it could be adapted to write languages other than Sumerian or Akkadian, like Babylonian, Hittite and Old Persian. Between the third and first millennia BC it travelled as far south as Palestine and as far north as Armenia. And wherever it went, it left its words on plaques, clay tablets and ancient stone walls – to be discovered, puzzled over and eventually deciphered thousands of years later. That’s the exciting part of the story. It was thanks to a few brilliant, dedicated men that the secrets of these written languages were unlocked and vast areas of our ancient history reborn.
The French academic (and coiner of the word franglais) René Etiemble was full of admiration for the decipherers who wrestled with the messages from the past: ‘Let us ask ourselves, positively, flatly, whether perhaps we should not admire those who deciphered hieroglyphs, cuneiform or Cretan Linear B, a little more … than those who designed the first pictograms, or who created a system for representing a complete vocabulary with a few alphabetic signs.’ These were men who made it their life’s mission to interpret the obscure signs that were engraved on stone, painted on walls and tombs or scratched in clay. They were puzzle-solvers, detectives, archaeologists and linguists rolled into one. While Jean-François Champollion was working on his first translation of the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphs in 1822, another group of scholars was making momentous discoveries about cuneiform.
Georg Friedrich Grotefend, one of the greatest decipherers
It was a piece of inspired guesswork by a scholar and schoolteacher from Germany that led the way. Georg Friedrich Grotefend was an accomplished Latinist and linguist, but he had no background in Oriental languages, so it’s all the more extraordinary that in 1802 he succeeded in partially deciphering the old Persian cuneiform writing and provided the foundation for later work to provide a complete translation of the signs.
Archaeologists had already started collecting artefacts from ancient Assyria and Babylonia and had noted the strange script on seals and clay cylinders, and on the walls of the ruined palaces of the Persian kings at Persepolis. Various travellers and scholars, as far back as the seventeenth century, had copied and written about these mysterious scripts, so people knew about them – they just couldn’t understand them. Then the Danish government sent the German mathematician and cartographer Carsten Niebuhr on a scientific exploration of Egypt, Syria and Arabia. On his way back, Carsten made detailed and laborious copies of the inscriptions at Persepolis – sacrificing his sight in the process – and in the early 1780s published three volumes of his work. At last, scholars in Europe had extensive and accurate records to use, and the work began in earnest.
By the time Grotefend came along scholars had recognized there were three different forms of the script at Persopolis and that the systems were alphabetic. It’s a bit like a scholarly detective story, this quest to decipher and understand. It was all about finding clues and trying to fill gaps, comparing notes and building on other people’s theories until the moment when things clicked into place. Grotefend looked at the three different scripts and decided that they represented three different languages. Here was a powerful king communicating his edict or story in more than one language so that it could be understood across an empire. He also logically worked out that the first script must be in old Persian, the language of the kings, and the other two must be translations. He was feeling his way through deduction, common sense, available information and his linguistic training.
It was like trying to solve the most nightmarishly difficult Times crossword you can imagine. He picked out repetitive phrases, which were used to honour Persian kings. He then compared those letters with the kings’ names, which he knew from Greek historical texts, followed the pattern of inscriptions in Middle Persian which linguists had recently deciphered and eventually worked out the approximate phonic values of about ten characters.
The sting in the tail to Grotefend’s story is that the academic world turned up its nose when his paper was presented to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. They didn’t understand the inductive method he’d used and, frankly, they didn’t believe a schoolteacher who specialized in Latin and Italian and hadn’t studied Oriental languages. It would be another thirteen years before a friend eventually published the paper.
Other scholars then built on Grotefend’s work and in 1905 François Thureau-Dangin produced the first translation of Sumerian, man’s earliest identified writing and the original version of cuneiform – which was where we started this chapter.
The Rosetta Stone
We don’t know whether writing was discovered or invented independently in different parts of the world, or whether it spread by osmosis. But by 1200 BC writing was being used in India, China, Europe and, of course, Egypt. Some scripts, like Cretan Linear A, are still a mystery, but we did find the key to the words of the pharaohs, these beautiful, exotic hieroglyphics which cover countless monuments and tombs, thanks to the Rosetta Stone.
The Rosetta Stone is a big lump of dark granite 45 inches by
28 inches by 22 inches, on which there are three inscriptions. The upper text is in hieroglyphs, the middle portion is demotic script (the language which came between Late Egyptian and Coptic), and the lowest is in classical Greek. Because it presents essentially the same text in all three scripts, scholars could compare the Greek words, which they knew, with the hieroglyphs and their knowledge of later Coptic, and so learn to read the signs.
The stone was discovered during Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt in 1799 and seized by the British when they defeated the French in Alexandria in 1801. It dates from the second century, when the priests who had gathered at Memphis to celebrate the arrival of the young Ptolemy V composed a decree in his honour which was copied on to stone, with the two translations. The stone was placed in the British Museum in 1802 and it’s been there ever since.
Jean-François Champollion deciphered the first hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone, divided into hieroglyphs, demotic script and classical Greek
It was a brilliant young French scholar and philologist called Jean-François Champollion who first deciphered the hieroglyphs on the stone and demonstrated that the Egyptian writing system was a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs. Like so many of the other code-breakers of the ancient writings, he was a superb linguist with a genius for inspired thinking and deduction. He was also obsessed, a workaholic who devoted his life to his studies and died at the age of forty-two. He first heard of the Rosetta Stone as a boy, and it fired an interest in hieroglyphics which burned fiercely throughout his student days in Grenoble. There he studied a multitude of languages, including Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Coptic, and became convinced that Coptic was simply a late form of the language which the ancient Egyptians had spoken.
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