The Louvre holds quite a number of documents of this type—clay tablets, engraved stones or metal plaques—but it was only the specialists that could make them speak to us. Now the exhibition that has just opened at the Grand Palais, dedicated to The Birth of Writing: Cuneiform and Hieroglyphics, has put on display over 300 items (almost all of them from the Louvre, and one or two also from the British Museum), accompanied by extensive and informative captions. This whole exhibition is one that needs to be read: both the explanation panels, which are indispensable, and the writing in the original documents, on stone, clay or papyrus, however little of these one actually manages to read. Perhaps there is slightly too much material, in terms both of exhibits and of information; but the visitor whose eyesight is not too strained and who overcomes the fear of becoming overloaded (a phase which is inevitable at the outset), can in the end claim to have understood how we reached alphabetic writing.
The linearity of writing has a history that is anything but linear, but it is played out entirely in a strictly limited geographical area, over the course of two and a half millennia: everything takes place between the Persian Gulf, the Eastern Mediterranean coast and the Nile (Egypt represents a lengthy chapter in itself in this history). If it is true that Indian writing too and probably even Chinese script derive from the same stock, we can conclude that for writing (as opposed to language) one can talk of a single birth. (And pre-Columbian America? The exhibition does not broach this problem.)
What is certain is that writing (unlike language) is a fact of culture not of nature, and that in origin it concerns a limited number of civilizations. This is mentioned in the catalogue by Jean Bottéro (famous for a brilliant essay on divination techniques in Mesopotamia, in the volume edited by Vernant, Divination et rationalité (Divination and Rationality)). He points out that the vast majority of spoken languages have never been written languages, even though in our own times many of them have ended up undergoing alphabetization by another culture.
Why Lower Mesopotamia precisely? Five thousand years ago, in those arid lands a new political and economic system was formed which had at its centre the city and a priestly monarchy; irrigation works made possible huge agricultural development as well as a demographic explosion. This led to the necessity for a complicated system of accounting to check the taxes being raised, exchanges of goods and land registries for a huge number of people over vast expanses of land. Even before being used for writing, clay, which was an essential memory aid, was used to set down data that were solely numerical; then suddenly alongside the notches corresponding to figures they began to carve signs representing goods (animals, vegetables, objects) or people’s names.
Are we to conclude then that it was merely a practical, mercantile or indeed tax-related necessity that opened up the boundless spiritual realms of written culture? The story is a bit more complex than that. The earliest forms of graphic symbols were adopted in memoranda regarding income and outgoings because these forms had already been developed in the world of art, especially on painted ceramic vases. Already for some time now, on funerary or cult objects as well as on objects in daily use, the ‘name’ of the individuals or the gods had been represented by shapes that were at the same time expressions of admiration, fear, love or domination: states of mind, attitudes towards the world. The expression of something that we can already define as poetic on the one hand and economic records on the other are thus the two needs that preside over the birth of script; we cannot write the history of writing without keeping in mind both elements.
Towards the middle of the third millennium BC, cuneiform writing passed from the Sumerians to the Akkadians (their capital was Agade or Akkad), who spread the practice throughout their Empire as far as Northern Mesopotamia. The Akkadians had a Semitic language (with a tri-consonantal root) which was completely different from Sumerian. The same signs were used to designate the same things, even though they corresponded to sequences of different sounds (in other words, having been phonetic, they went back to being ideogram-based) or they were identified with the new sound, losing the link with the former meaning (in other words, having been ideograms, they became phonetic).
Everything became more complicated thanks also to the proliferation of signs (several hundred of them); and yet it was through the Akkadians that cuneiform writing spread throughout the whole of the Middle East (we find it again in the library at Ebla, which was recently discovered), passing to the Assyro-Babylonians and the Syrians, to the Elamites of Southern Persia, to the Canaanites of Palestine, to the Aramaic peoples whose language spread from India to Egypt in the first millennium BC.
If the most ancient documents provide individual words, mostly names, which are not articulated into sentences—as though men had learned how to write before knowing what to write—by the time of Nineveh and Babylon these thick tangles of hens’ footprints can give us the epic of Gilgamesh, or provide us with a dictionary, a library catalogue or a treatise on the measurements of the Tower of Babel (apparently it was a seven-storey ziggurat, 90 metres high).
Whereas in Mesopotamia one can follow the evolution from pre-writing (or pre-numbering) to cuneiform script, in Egypt hieroglyphics suddenly appear, admittedly somewhat tentative and disorganized in the beginning, but without any antecedents that we know of. Does this mean that writing was imported into Egypt from Mesopotamia? Chronology would seem to confirm this hypothesis (only a couple of centuries separate the first pictograms in Uruk and the first hieroglyphics), but the Egyptian system is totally different. Are we then dealing with an autonomous invention? Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between: the Egyptians had close trading links with Mesopotamia and soon learned that the Sumerians ‘wrote’; this news opened up new horizons for their inventive capacities and before long they elaborated a highly original way of writing that would be solely theirs. Already by 3080 BC, there are about seventy funerary steles which prove that Egyptian hieroglyphics contained no fewer than twenty-one alphabetical signs (our consonants were all already present), plus other signs which designated groups of letters, rebus-words and signs which served to determine the sense in which other signs were to be understood.
The oscillation between figurative elements and writing haunts graphic activity for at least two millennia, and it is this ambiguity that makes the exhibition at the Grand Palais beautiful to see as well as instructive to ‘read’ and explore. An Egyptian stone stele of great beauty has a bas-relief of a falcon, a serpent and the walls of a city; you could say anything about this harmonious figurative composition apart from that it makes you think of something written; and yet the walled city is the sign that designates a king; the thoughtful bird is the god Horus, whose terrestrial form is that of a king, and the sinuous snake stands for the name of the king. On the other hand, some reliefs of birds are nothing but the graphic models for U and A made by a sophisticated designer from the Ptolemaic age.
Even when hieroglyphics have become a well-codified writing system, the Egyptian scribe prefers not to follow a linear arrangement, but to compose groupings that are aimed at the beauty of the whole arrangement, even though this goes against the logical order and proportions between the signs.
The arrangement in vertical columns, which had prevailed before the horizontal mode (from right to left) triumphed (during the Middle Empire), allows one the freedom to read the hieroglyphics in a vertical or horizontal (starting from the right or from the left) sequence: that was when the scribes’ erudite games began, as they combined one direction for reading with another and invented the crossword!
In the same period there were hieroglyphic statues, or all-round rebuses: a dense sculpture of the eighteenth dynasty compacts together
into a single block a serpent, two raised arms, a basket, a kneeling woman: what can this mean? The cryptographic explanation (which I shall not try to summarize) leads to a meaning not through the logic of images but through a succession of sounds.
In the reliefs and pictures on tombs in ancient Egypt, characters represented by figures are placed alongside columns of writing which are the characters’ words, just as in today’s comics. But the great thing is that these human figures, stylized and all seen in profile, seem to have the same nature as the graphic signs, from which they differ only in size, whereas words in hieroglyphics still belong to the world of figures. The analogy between comics and these Egyptian procedures is brought home by the Grand Palais exhibition, for it has commissioned comic book artists to create modern equivalents of these scenes where Pharaohs and priests exchange hieratic phrases with each other, warriors roar threats and insults, and sailors and fishermen address each other with mocking remarks.
The universe of images is infinite, so new signs could always be added to the galaxy of hieroglyphics: ‘Ptolemaic’ writing managed to reach a total of more than 5,000 signs. In this elasticity lay the practical inconvenience of hieroglyphic writing but also its poetic richness: in a funerary papyrus the name of the god Amun was written in five different ways, each one of them corresponding to a different philosophical and religious content. But this inability to become a closed system prevented hieroglyphics from expanding beyond Egypt, whereas cuneiform writing had conquered the whole of the Middle East.
However, in the first millennium BC Egyptian scribes developed a cursive writing of their own, a system that was even more rapid and expressive than cuneiform, and which would last until the first centuries of our era. The owl, in other words the letter M, first became a scrawl, then a kind of Z, then a kind of 3, but all the while retaining something of its initial hieroglyphic. Here too (as with cuneiform) the writing instrument and the material were crucial: in this case ink and papyrus. Everything was ready: there was nothing more to add to the art of writing. Except one thing: the alphabet.
The alphabet, or rather the series of signs where each one corresponds to a sound and when grouped in various ways can represent all the phonemes of a language, started with twenty-two signs on the Phoenician coast (Lebanon today) around 1100 BC. Mohabite, Aramaic, Hebrew and later Greek all derived directly from ‘Phoenician consonantic linear’. Coptic, which developed from the Egyptian cursive, and Arabic alphabets have a separate history, but still connected with this one.
Careful: I notice that now the specialists write ‘Phoenicians’ in inverted commas, or they say ‘Those peoples known as the Phoenicians . . .’. I don’t know what is behind this; and I can tell you I am in no hurry to find out. The story of the Phoenicians was one of the few certainties I still retained. Now, although it seems confirmed that they invented the alphabet, it appears that a suspicion has emerged that they never existed. We live in an age when nothing is sacred, nothing and nobody.
[1982]
The Wonders of the Popular Press
A polar bear devouring a young girl stands out from the posters advertising an exhibition dedicated to human interest stories in the press (Le Fait divers, an exhibition in the Museum of Popular Traditions and Crafts, Paris). These extraordinary events that catch the popular imagination are presented not from the point of view of the history of journalism but as a modern form of folklore.
The polar bear comes from an illustration in Le Petit Journal from 1893 depicting what it calls ‘The Frankfurt Suicide’. An unusual suicide, described briefly by the press but with sadistic details that were bound to hit home: a young girl in domestic service, desperately unhappy in love, goes to the zoo, takes her clothes off and, while singing a song, enters the cage of an animal which then leaps on her.
A considerable amount of the material exhibited comes from the illustrated supplement to Le Petit Journal, which with its colour plates would become the model for Italy’s Domenica del Corriere (but about thirty years before: Le Petit Journal starts in 1863, the Domenica in 1899). In it we see tigers and elephants escaping from circuses, Dantesque tragedies in the Paris sewers, a crime of passion in a butcher’s shop, a suicide inside a tomb, another suicide carried out using a home-made guillotine, a naked man wearing only a top hat and side-whiskers entering a shop while the women cover their eyes. It has the distinction of being the first paper to illustrate the news (even though it is all reconstructed through the illustrator’s imagination), thus anticipating documentary films and television, but it also holds the record in linguistic and above all conceptual terms, since the term ‘fait divers’ appears for the first time in Le Petit Journal.
The period covered by the exhibition, however, goes back much further, starting with the printed sheets with crude engravings and rudimentary texts that were sold in markets in the eighteenth century, with stories and images of bandits and crimes. These continued throughout the nineteenth century, going by the name of canard. The term canard, literally ‘duck’, but meaning an ‘unlikely, probably false story’, has been present for centuries in popular French, and nobody knows its origin: some say that those who sold these canards in the fairs announced their presence with the sound of a little horn which resembled a duck’s quack, but this etymology has not been proven. Broadsheets similar to the canards of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continued down to our own times, still using printing technology that had not progressed very much, and circulating verses of songs about current affairs. For instance, in 1909, the Messina earthquake was depicted with Roman temples in ruins crushing the populace.
The character who dominates such documents is of course the law-breaker: brigands in the countryside and, starting in the nineteenth century, perpetrators of organized crime in the city, but also individual murderers, killing for money, for passion or out of insanity. We learn that the word chauffeur, which for us evokes dynamic images of cars at the start of the century, had between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a terrifying meaning: chauffeurs was the name given to the brigands who attacked houses in the countryside and would burn the feet of their victims to force them to reveal where they had hidden their money.
The fascination which the outlaw and the criminal exercised on the imagination (in an age when crime had not yet become an industry like any other) is proven also by illustrated postcards portraying famous bandits and assassins: the famous bloodbath between members of the Parisian Apache gang over the beautiful eyes of the blonde known as ‘Casque d’Or’ (which would later inspire a fine film in the early 1950s) is portrayed as though it were a photo-story magazine in a series of postcards from 1907. Similarly in 1913 the images of the Bonnot Gang also ended up on illustrated postcards.
It is not only the cruelty of the crime that excited curiosity, but also, from the very start, its counterpart, the cruelty of the punishment. The guillotine is a major motif in popular iconography (and in songs); a series of illustrated postcards that have the objectivity of gloomy, black-and-white photographs has preserved for us a wide-angle shot of the prison, an overview of the apparatus, details of the wooden semi-circle and the basket, and even a framed shot of the garage where the contraption was kept when not in use: the bureaucratic and technological character of the start of the century is documented here in its most depressing aspect.
The old executioners’ custom of selling the rope from a hanging as an amulet continues in a macabre cult of the relics of guillotine executions. Here one can see displayed, framed and beneath glass, a collection containing the collars from Caserio’s jersey and shirt which had been cut off for his final toilette before his execution: Caserio was the anarchist responsible for th
e fatal attack on President Carnot (1894). (The film Danton by Wajda, which is currently being shown in Paris, dwells on the details of this toilette during the French Revolution.)
Murder, like sainthood, produces relics: the furniture in Landru’s house was put up for auction in 1923, and of course the highest price paid was for the wood-burning cooker where Landru got rid of the remains of his ‘fiancées’. Here we are told that ‘an Italian paid 40,000 lire for it’. (Is it still in Italy? Should it be considered part of the country’s heritage to be protected?)
The trial is the moment when the evocation of the bloodshed and that of its punishment are present at the same time, and it is by starting with the trial itself that journalism arouses people’s emotions. It is no accident that many of the documents here revolve around ‘famous trials’. From as early as 1825, with the birth of La Gazette des Tribunaux (The Court Gazette), such cases could count on a specialized area of journalism, which would in turn inspire great writers, from Stendhal and Balzac to Eugène Sue, as well as writers of serial novels.
Black humour about crimes and executions was current not just amongst the more blasé spirits, but also in the popular press: in 1884 we find an Assassins’ Journal, registered as ‘the official organ of Knifers United’ (‘Meeting time and place for subscribers: midnight, at street corners’). But I do not know whether it ever went beyond its first issue.
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