Champollion spent three years working on deciphering the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone, and his monumental contribution to history was to prove that hieroglyphs were not simply pictures, but that they represented sounds as well. His 1824 work Précis du système hiéroglyphique gave birth to the modern field of Egyptology.
Michael Ventris
In 1936 the famous archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, who had excavated the ancient palace of Knossos in Crete, held a conference in London on the mysterious writing system inscribed on the clay tablets which he had uncovered, a script he had spent decades trying to decipher, without success.
There was a young schoolboy in the audience that day, who was thrilled and inspired by the story of a secret code which no one could break. His name was Michael Ventris and sixteen years later, on 1 July 1952, he made a BBC radio broadcast which was to secure his place in archaeological and history books for ever. He announced that he’d deciphered Linear B, Europe’s earliest known, and previously incomprehensible, writing system.
Michael wasn’t an archaeologist or scholar, he was an architect, but he was fluent in several languages, and his life’s passion was cracking the Linear B code. He was a loner, an outsider, an unconventional thinker from an unconventional background who’d been brought up by his divorced Polish mother and educated for a time in Switzerland.
Throughout his years of architectural training and practice, which was interrupted by the war, in which he served as an RAF navigator, Ventris worried away at Linear B. He worked on the problem through a series of small, detailed steps, helped by the researches and insights of others, like the American classical scholar and archaeologist Alice Kober, who observed that certain words in Linear B inscriptions had changing word endings – perhaps declensions like Latin or Greek.
Ventris took this clue and painstakingly constructed a series of grids mapping out the symbols on the tablets and associating them with consonants and vowels. He still didn’t know which consonants and vowels they were, but he had learned enough about the structure of the underlying language to begin guessing.
Linear B tablets had also been discovered on the Greek mainland, and Ventris believed that some of the chains of symbols on the Cretan tablets were names. But certain names appeared only in the Cretan texts, so Ventris made the inspired guess that those names applied to cities on the island. This proved to be correct. This gave him a set of symbols he could decipher from. He soon unlocked much of the text and demonstrated beyond any doubt that Linear B was the writing system used by the Mycenaean inhabitants of continental Greece, and that the underlying language was an archaic dialect of Greek, centuries older than anything previously known.
Instant celebrity followed, and in 1955 Ventris published, with the philologist John Chadwick, the monograph Documents in Mycenaean Greek. The following year, at the age of thirty-four, he was dead, killed in a car crash. John Chadwick said of the particular genius of Michael Ventris: ‘Ventris was able to see, in the confusing diversity of these signs, an overall pattern and to pinpoint certain constants which revealed the underlying structure. It was this quality – the gift of being able to make order out of apparent confusion – that is the sign of greatness amongst the scholars in this field.’
Linear B is based on combinations of sounds
Michael Ventris cracked the Linear B code
The Alphabet
By 1200 BC, different writing forms were being used in India, China, Europe and Egypt by 1200 BC. One feature that cuneiform, hieroglyphs and Chinese characters shared was that all three could be used to transcribe either words or syllables. Both the Chinese writing system, which developed around 2000 BC, and the Egyptian hieroglyphs – which means ‘writing of the gods’ – are exceedingly beautiful, functional as well as artistic. They’re complex, too, because they’re made up of several different kinds of signs.
Hieroglyphs comprised pictograms, phonograms and determinatives – signs used to indicate which category a sign is in. In Chinese a single sound can represent several things, depending on how it’s written. For example, the sound shi can mean ‘to know’, ‘power’, ‘world’, ‘to love’, and many other things, according to the other elements with which it’s combined. Each character is formed of a key, which gives the basic meaning, and a phonetic element to indicate pronunciation. It doesn’t stop there, though. The calligraphy of Chinese – the forming of the characters – also contributes to meaning, through the style of the writing, the colour of the ink and the intensity of the stroke. So, to varying degrees, the systems of cuneiform, hieroglyphs and Chinese meant that you had to master a large number of signs and characters to read and write them.
Then, a thousand years before the birth of Christ, a massive change took place in the history of writing: the alphabet was invented. Not overnight, obviously, but gradually in different places, over a long period of development, crossover and osmosis.
An alphabet works differently from the older systems. The key difference was the inspiration that, once you have a set of symbols that represent sounds and not things, you can represent any noise, any word in any language, using the same symbols. In principle, it’s possible to write almost anything with about thirty letters. More or less. We’ve got twenty-six letters, but that’s not enough for us to transcribe all the sounds in English, which is why our spelling is more difficult to learn than, say, Italian.
English has what’s called a deep orthography – there’s no one-to-one correspondence between the sounds (phonemes) and the letters (graphemes) that represent them. It’s notorious for its inconsistencies, for instance in words where the same letters are pronounced differently like cough, bough, dough and tough; or chat, chute and scholar. On the other hand, sometimes different letters are pronounced the same way, like the sh sound in ship, initial and machine. So learning to spell and write English can be difficult, but twenty-six letters is nothing like the 1,000 basic signs needed for writing Chinese, the hundreds of hieroglyphs used in Egyptian, or the 600 cuneiform signs that were hammered for six years into students in the scribe schools in Mesopotamia. With an alphabet came the possibility of spreading learning out from the elite few to the many.
So where did our alphabet come from? It’s a story of twists and turns and many scenes. Like so much of our culture, our letters are an overseas import, brought to these shores by the Romans. But it’s not as simple as that. The Romans didn’t invent the alphabet either – they had adopted the Etruscans’ writing system, which they in turn had borrowed and adapted from the Greeks. We get our word alphabet from their two first letters – alpha and beta. But where did the Greeks get their alphabet from? Some romantically minded scholars have proposed that a brilliant contemporary of Homer was inspired to invent the alphabet to record the poet’s oral epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. It seems unlikely, but Homer does give us a clue about the origins of writing. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, he mentions the Phoenicians, traders who travelled the Mediterranean on ships.
Another Greek myth also points to the Phoenicians. Herodotus claimed that the alphabet was brought to Greece by Cadmus, the legendary founder of the Phoenician city of Thebes. The Phoenicians came from the coastal areas of present-day Israel and Lebanon and part of Egypt. Their cities were places like Tyre, Sidon and Beirut.
‘Phoenician’ means ‘dealer in purple’; one of their most important items of merchandise was the purple dye extracted from a large type of sea snail. We call them Phoenicians, but they called themselves Kenaani or Canaanites – as in the Canaan of the Bible, the land flowing with milk and honey.
Phoenician was the first widely used script in which one sound was represented by one symbol, and it’s been called the Mother of Modern Writing. The Aramaic alphabet, a modified form of Phoenician, was the ancestor of the modern Arabic and Hebrew scripts. The Greek alphabet, and its descendants – Latin, Cyrillic and Coptic – was a direct successor of Phoenician, though the Greeks changed certain letters to represent vowels. The big move the Pho
enicians made was turning a symbol for a thing into a symbol for a sound. For example, in the case of the letter aleph which was formed in the shape of a head of an ox, the Phoenicians transformed it from a representative symbol to an arbitrary mark that didn’t have to resemble an ox head any more, and stood for a sound, something like aak.
Comparison of ancient Phoenician, ancient Greek, later Greek and Roman Alphabets
We don’t have many surviving examples because the Phoenicians wrote on papyrus and shells, not on tough, solid clay which was preserved by firing. They didn’t seal their scrolls in jars like the Egyptians or preserve them in tombs, so much has disintegrated in the salty sea air of the Mediterranean. However, they did mark their possessions and objects they made with names and inscriptions, and later also to commemorate the dead on tombstones, and we do have fragments dating back to the ninth century BC which show this non-cuneiform alphabet.
The letters themselves are angular and rough-looking, and the alphabet only contained consonants, rather in the way other Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic are often written without vowels. The twenty-one letters were usually written from right to left and incised with a stylus.
The Phoenicians were a tremendously successful maritime culture, the trading kings of the Mediterranean, and they moved around, making lots of money and contact with different cultures from north Africa to Greece. And as they travelled and traded, they spread this new writing system, knocking down the old barriers of an elite writing class. The Assyrians had their form of writing, and the Egyptians theirs, but they kept them to a priestly caste, a sort of scribal closed shop. The Phoenician alphabet was much easier to learn and it was widely disseminated among all sorts of people and cultures. The Greeks and Phoenicians traded with, learned from and influenced each other, and the Greeks ended up taking the Phoenician alphabet and amending it to suit their own language. A clever Greek must have sat down one day and looked at the writing and thought, ‘Yes, the sounds we make that we’ve never written down could be written down using this symbol code.’
So they systematically analysed each phoneme in Phoenician, along with the correspondence between these sounds and Phoenician letters; then did the same analysis with Greek, and eventually matched almost every phoneme in the Greek language with a Greek letter. They changed some of the letters for consonants which didn’t exist in Greek, and used them instead for vowels. And so were born A (alpha), E (epsilon), O (omicron) and Y (upsilon). I (iota) was an innovation.
Immediately this new alphabet was also transferred to other places, notably Italy, where the Etruscans and then the Romans took it up and adapted it further. And the Romans gave it to us.
A final irony: the Greeks might never have used their alphabet, and so we might never have got ours because, at first, educated Greeks, most famously Socrates, considered their highly developed oral culture superior to a written culture. Socrates felt writing posed serious risks to society – he considered writing to be too inflexible, damaging to memory and he worried about superficial understanding by the untutored reader. Fortunately, Socrates’ student Plato ignored his mentor and wrote all this down for posterity.
The Dead Sea Scrolls
In central Jerusalem there’s an unearthly-looking white domed structure, a bit like a meringue spaceship. This is the Shrine of the Book, a special climate-controlled building where some of the world’s most precious religious documents are housed. The most famous documents here are the Dead Sea Scrolls, 30,000 separate fragments making up 900 manuscripts of biblical texts and religious writings from the time of Jesus which were discovered in caves in the Judaean Desert. They’re considered one of the most important archaeological finds of the modern era.
For the past eighteen years, the Israel Antiquities Authority has been working out how to preserve these priceless fragments of the past. They’re so precious and so fragile that only four highly trained conservators are allowed to touch them with tweezers and rubber gloves.
The texts are of great religious and historical significance, as they include the oldest known surviving copies of biblical and extra-biblical documents. They’re written in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, the ancient language we think Jesus spoke. Some texts are substantial and complete, the longest scroll being 8 metres long, but the majority have disintegrated and broken up over the centuries, and what remains are thousands and thousands of fragile pieces of a jigsaw. The texts were written over a period of around 200 years, up to about AD 70, the date of the First Jewish Revolt.
A more complete fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Carbon dating puts the earliest of them at about 150 BC. Scholars think they were placed in the caves to hide them from the advancing Roman army. The people who wrote them were clearly a sect who had had enough of Jerusalem and segregated themselves from mainstream Judaism. They wrote about their lives and ideas, and about their belief in a Messiah. It’s these writings which are of particular interest to Christian scholars.
The scrolls contain all the books of the Hebrew Old Testament, except Esther and Nehemiah, many in several copies; religious texts which aren’t part of the standard canon, such as Enoch and the Book of Jubilees; and other religious texts and secular writings including lists of laws, advice on warfare and a catalogue of places where treasure was buried.
How on earth did these ancient writings on parchment and papyrus survive? It was all about location. They were hidden in caves in the Judaean Desert, at Khirbet Qumran on the north-western coast of the Dead Sea, a low-lying area with a dry climate. The story of their discovery is a great yarn, no doubt embellished and added to over the years, like all the best stories. In 1947 a Bedouin shepherd looking for a lost goat came upon these caves. He threw a stone into one to see if the goat was there, and he heard a strange noise. The noise turned out to be his stone hitting one of the clay jars containing some scrolls. He went in to investigate and found a broken jar with scrolls inside. He took the scrolls and brought them to an antique dealer in Bethlehem, and the antique dealer, realizing what he had in hand, told him to go back and bring some more. So he went and brought more, and these are the first seven scrolls, parts of which are exhibited at all times at the Shrine of the Book.
The goatherd’s name was Muhammad Ahmed al-Hamed, nicknamed Muhammad edh-Dhib. Another version of the story says that edh-Dhib’s cousin, Jum’a Muhammad, saw some cave holes one day and threw a rock in to find out how big they were. He discovered they were big enough to fit a man and told his cousin what he had found. Edh-Dhib went and had a look, fell into one of the holes and retrieved some scrolls from a pot.
Once the initial discovery was made and pieces of ancient scrolls began to appear on the market and change hands, news of the finds spread, and gradually over the next few years dozens of caves were discovered, eleven of which contained pots of scrolls. The scrolls came to Israel by various routes. Four were sold through an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal in June 1954 and bought for the Israel government by the archaeologist Professor Yigael Yadin for US$250,000. They were brought to Jerusalem and put on display in the Rockefeller Museum.
Eventually, work on reconstructing and preserving the scrolls began. It was a hugely complicated, delicate and flawed process at the start, because no one knew the best way to do it. The first scholars at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem spread the fragments on trestle tables, and every two pieces that they thought matched they Sellotaped. Sellotape was the latest invention then, and they had no idea it would be so destructive. It penetrates the parchment or the papyrus and causes its disintegration. Much of the work of preservation today is about undoing – literally – the damage done, because they’re still trying to get the sticky mess off.
The ad that appeared in the Wall Street Journal
Archaeologist Yigael Yadin scrutinizing a piece of scroll on which Hebrew writing is clearly visible
Sellotape wasn’t the only well-meaning but harmful intervention. The British Museum sent a conservator in the 19
60s to have a go with another treatment, which also proved to be quite damaging.
Different attempts to conserve and restore the scrolls continued through the 1970s and 1980s, and in the 1990s the project to publish them really got going. Scholars from all over the world were given access, provided they published, and so far, forty volumes of photographs of the scrolls, plus commentary, have been published by Oxford University Press.
As the team continued their work on repairing and preserving the scrolls, they were concerned in case they were, in their turn, causing more damage. They needed to know what was happening to the scrolls, what their underlying condition was, so they turned to state-of-the-art infra-red and multi-spectral multi-wavelength imaging, which can ‘see’ deep into the scroll and reveal things not visible in natural light – not just the physical condition of the parchment, but previously hidden words which allow scholars to interpret the texts afresh.
They went even further and, working with scientists and scholars, decided to digitize everything and make it available to the public online. The scrolls were photographed in the best-possible colour images, as well as infra-red, and published online alongside all of the translations, transcriptions, the bibliography and comments of the scholars. The imaging process shows up all sorts of things not visible before, including tiny details like the lines which the original copiers drew on the parchment before they started. Curiously, they wrote below the line, not on it, so it looks as if the words are suspended. All this – the scrolls in greater clarity than ever before, the transcription, the translation, the commentary – will be available online on your computer at home. Everyone, from the professional academic to the schoolteacher to the curious public, will have access. These precious, fragile bits of history, discovered by chance in the musty darkness of remote caves in the desert, have been preserved by the technology of the space age for the generations of the internet age, and beyond.
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