In his new book, Egyptologist Prof. Ludwig Morenz traces the "long road to writing"
In the age of voice messages and videos, writing is easily forgotten. Yet for millennia, it has been the central medium of our cultural memory: it stores knowledge and tells stories. Simple symbols give rise to entire worlds in the mind—almost like cinema without popcorn. Whether painted or carved in stone, it lasts an astonishingly long time. Without it, we would know little about the past. Even before humans could read, they interpreted signs: they read animal tracks, navigated by the stars, and determined the time of day by the sun's position. Egyptologist Prof. Ludwig Morenz of the University of Bonn describes the long road to writing in his new book.
The origins of writing date back more than five millennia. Written characters emerged more or less simultaneously in the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia. "I don't view the development of writing as a single, isolated event, but rather as a process that spanned half a millennium and involved a correspondingly large number of participants who remain nameless to us," says Egyptologist Prof. Dr. Ludwig Morenz of the University of Bonn. Hence the title of his new book, "The Long Road to Writing."
No Straight Path
Accordingly, the development of writing did not follow a straight path, but rather a series of simple steps. Initially, these served to solve specific problems—such as the phonetically accurate recording of proper names. Gradually, however, they revealed a potential that led from various concrete individual solutions to the "system of writing." Researchers often seek a single reason for the emergence of writing. "In fact, however, we see various and interwoven socio-cultural drivers of the emergence of writing," says Morenz. These included both the staging of authority and administration, as well as communication about, with, and for the gods and the dead.
The book offers an attempt at a comprehensive cultural history of Egyptian writing, in which questions of media archaeology are explained in concrete terms using artifacts and placed within a cultural-historical context. "In doing so, I (re)construct 'significant small steps' along a developmental line that leads from image-as-representation and image-as-meaning to word-image and ultimately to sound-image," says the scholar, who is also a member of the transdisciplinary research area "Present Pasts" and the Cluster of Excellence "Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies" at the University of Bonn.
The Quail's Call as a Model
Despite decades of research, Prof. Morenz still encountered surprises: "I was amazed to discover that some monosyllabic signs, whose origins had not yet been explained by previous research, can be interpreted as onomatopoeic imitations of animal sounds." For example, the quail's call "wi-wi-wi" above the bird hieroglyph QUAIL represents the sound "w." The owl ("m") and the vulture ("alef") are also frequently used single-consonant signs. Because these bird images are so striking, Egyptian writing was even referred to from the outside—for example, in Arabic—as "bird writing."
For the scientist at the University of Bonn, single-consonant signs are, so to speak, the keystone in the long process of the phoneticization of the image. "They embody the phonographic principle of one sound value—one consonant. In doing so, they introduce an elementary phonetic dimension into the pictographic signs." This initially began in a very sporadic manner and as a means of problem-solving. The complete inventory of all phonologically relevant consonants then required an understanding of the phonetic structure of the language. "It was only about 300 years after the first beginnings of phonetic marking—around 2950 B.C.—that this developed into a 'system.'"
Away from the center, toward the periphery
For the author, the work of various archaeological missions, as well as his own research both north of Aswan and in the southwest of the Sinai Peninsula, has led to a shift in perspective: In addition to major centers such as Abydos or Hierakonpolis, from which the central monuments of early writing originate, the Egyptologist is increasingly turning his attention to the socio-cultural periphery and highlighting the relatively significant role of the surrounding regions in the development of writing.
Morenz envisions a long-term history of writing as a distant research goal, spanning from the beginnings of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing (as a mixed pictographic-phonetic script) and alphabetic writing (as largely phonetic) through the return of pictorial elements in pictographic scripts since the Renaissance to the present day, amidst digits, emojis, and pictograms. Morenz: "I find it truly sensational to get to the bottom of the origins of a communication technology as central today as writing."
Ludwig D. Morenz: Vom langen Weg zur Schrift – Über Abstraktion und Sedimentierung im Niltal des Vierten Jahrtausends. Thot. Beiträge zur historischen Epistemologie und Medienarchäologie, EB-Verlag, 176. S, 38,00 Euro
Prof. Dr. Ludwig D. Morenz
University of Bonn
Department of Egyptology
Tel. 0228/735733
Email: lmorenz@uni-bonn.de
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