origins of writing complementary information for the exposition 12.06.15– 31.01.16
MUSEU DE CULTURES DEL MĂ“N Institut de Cultura de Barcelona La Rambla, 99. 08002 93 316 10 69 premsaicub@bcn.cat www.museuculturesmon.bcn.cat www.bcn.cat/museuculturesmon
INTRODUCTION 5 A SPECIAL TYPE OF SYMBOLS
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ON THE WAYS TO DRAW WORDS
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ENGRAVING AND PAINTING 11 WHEN DRAWINGS BEGAN TO TALK
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OTHER SIGNS FOR OTHER VOICES
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THE POWER OF IDENTITY
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THE POWER OF FASCINATION
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THE POWER OF EVOCATION
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THE POWER OF EXCLUSION
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RECOVERING LOST VOICES 22 BIBLIOGRAPHY 24
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v o lta i r e
wrote once :
“Writing is the painting of the voice.�
writings symbols, words, powers
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an we imagine our contemporary societies without writing? What differentiates the gra足 phology of a complete writing? Do we identify ourselves with our writing? What are the secrets of deciphering the ancient writings? The first temporary exhibition of the Museum of World Cultures will show us how writing, developed originally as an instrument for conserving and spreading the word, has become a symbolic reference of the culture to which it belongs evoking identitary and collective keys. The exhibition shows an extensive route through the cultures of the world in order to present the varieties, uses and multiple developments of this means of communication without which it would be impossible to undertake our daily lives. Through the ten different settings and from several museum supports, we can see how these writings have had specific geneses and evolutions in the different peoples of the planet, in accordance with the languages and cultures for which they were created, until the present time...
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GRAPHIC EXPRESSION is among the most universal traits of human culture. Writing sys tems arose within the pictorial tradition as a special way of using visual symbols. Writing systems appeared in different parts of the world as revolutionary practices that allowed words to travel furher than the voice and last lon ger than memory. These advantages led to their extraordinary proliferaction. Today, writing is a worldwide phenomenom, without which our world would be unthinkable. Societes that have used writing haven’t seen it merely as an ingenious tecnhique to convey and preserve a message. These systems have also been infused with a wide range of social power. Writing has been ended up occupying its own, central role in life in these cultures.
writings symbols, words, powers
Sumerian administrative tablet, 1971 BC, Umma, Iraq.
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writings symbols, words, powers
A special type of symbols Humankind has communicated with drawings, graphic signs, for many milllenia in some parts of the world. But writing differs from this more general form of communication in the application of two innovations: the use of a finite number of images or strokes and the assignment of a precise meaning to each of these elements, wich is not to open to the free interpretations of the viewer reader. Cave of the Hands, 7300 BC, Santa Cruz, Argentina. The images of hands are negative painted, that is, stencilled. Most of the hands are left hands, which suggests that painters held the spraying pipe with their right hand or they put the back of their right hand to the wall and held the spraying pipe with their left hand.
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symbols, words, powers
Not all writing systems in the world reflect isolated souns, as the alphabets we use in the West do. Writing systems can also represent more complex groups of sounds or other elements of communication, like whole ideas, words, etc. Depending on the elements the signs in a system evoke, writing systems are classified into different groups.
writings
On the ways to draw words
Engraving and painting Writing systems around the world have resorted to different materials to write on, choosing the ones most fitting for transport and preservation. Depending on the materials available naturally around them, and later depending on the technological developments, different cultures have used different instruments and tecniques to create their written documents. All writing, from a technical point of view, requires two basic elements: a medium or material base on which to make the signs , which must be hard enough to preserve for some time but easy enough to transport and store (papyrus, paper, clay tablets, stone, wood, parchment, etc.); and tool with which to make the signs (finger, reed, brush, stylus, pen, typewriter, etc.) either trough incision or painting.
Book of changes, 1100 BC, China. Ancient divination text and the oldest of the Chinese classics. Possessing a history of more than two and a half millennia of commentary and interpretation, the I Ching is an influential text read throughout the world, providing inspiration to the worlds of religion, psychoanalysis, business, literature, and art.
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The Sumerians first invented writing as a means of long distance communication which was nece ssitated by trade. With the rise of the cities in Mesopotamia, and the need for resources which were lacking in the region, long-distance trade developed and, with it, the need to be able to communicate across the expanses between cities or regions. The earliest form of writing was pictographs – symbols which represented objects – and served to aid in remembering such things as which parcels of grain had gone to which destination or how many sheep were needed for events like sacrifices in the temples. These pictographs were impressed onto wet clay which was then dried, and these became official records of commerce. As beer was a very popular beverage in ancient Mesopotamia, many of the earliest records extant have to do with the sale of beer. With pictographs, one could tell how many jars or vats of beer were involved in a transaction but not necessarily what that transaction meant. As the historian Kriwaczek notes. All that had been devised thus far was a technique for noting down things, items and objects, not a writing system. A record of `Two Sheep Temple God Inanna’ tells us nothing about whether the sheep are being delivered to, or received from, the temple, whether they are carcasses, beasts on the hoof, or
anything else about them. In order to express concepts more complex than financial transactions or lists of items, a more elaborate writing system was required, and this was developed in the Sumerian city of Uruk c. 3200 BCE. Pictograms, though still in use, gave way to phonograms – symbols which represented sounds – and those sounds were the spoken language of the people of Sumer. With phonograms, one could more easily convey precise meaning and so, in the example of the two sheep and the temple of Inanna, one could now make clear whether the sheep were going to or coming from the temple, whether they were living or dead, and what role they played in the life of the temple. Previously, one had only static images in pictographs showing objects like sheep and temples. With the development of phonograms one had a dynamic means of conveying motion to or from a location. Further, whereas in earlier writing (known as proto-cuneiform) one was restricted to lists of things, a writer could now indicate what the significance of those things might be. The scholar Ira Spar writes: This new way of interpreting signs is called the rebus principle. Only a few examples of its use exist in the earliest stages of cuneiform from between 3200 and 3000 B.C. The consistent use of this type of phonetic writing only
writings
symbols down on paper to repre sent words and concepts began very much earlier. Early writing systems, imported to other cultures, evolved into the written language of those cultures so that the Greek and Latin would serve as the basis for European script in the same way that the Semitic Aramaic script would provide the basis for Hebrew, Arabic, and possibly Sanskrit. The materials of writers have evolved as well, from the cut reeds with which early Mesopotamian scribes marked the clay tablets of cuneiform to the reed pens and papyrus of the Egyptians, the parchment of the scrolls of the Greeks and Romans, the calligraphy of the Chinese, on through the ages to the present day of computerized composition and the use of processed paper. In whatever age, since its inception, writing has served to communicate the thoughts and feelings of the individual and of that person’s culture, their collective history, and their experiences with the human condition, and to preserve those experiences for future generations.
symbols, words, powers
becomes apparent after 2600 B.C. It constitutes the beginning of a true writing system characterized by a complex combination of wordsigns and phonograms—signs for vowels and syllables—that allowed the scribe to express ideas. By the middle of the Third Millennium B.C., cuneiform primarily written on clay tablets was used for a vast array of economic, religious, political, literary, and scholarly documents. The role of the poet in preserving heroic legends would become an important one in cultures throughout the ancient world. The Mesopotamian scribe Shin-LegiUnninni (wrote 1300-1000 BCE) would help preserve and transmit The Epic of Gilgamesh. Homer would do the same for the Greeks and Virgil (70-19 BCE) for the Romans. The Indian epic Mahabharata (written down c. 400 BCE) preserves the oral legends of that region in the same way the tales and legends of Scotland and Ireland do. All of these works, and those which came after them, were only made possible through the advent of writing. The early cuneiform writers established a system which would completely change the nature of the world in which they lived. The past, and the stories of the people, could now be preserved through writing. The Phoenicians’ contribution of the alphabet made writing easier and more accessible to other cultures, but the basic system of putting
Written by JOSHUA J. MARK A freelance writer and part-time Professor of Philosophy at Marist College, New York, Joshua J. Mark has lived in Greece and Germany and traveled through Egypt. He teaches ancient history, writing, literature, and philosophy.
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When drawings began to talk In the beginning, writing wans’t a universal phenomenon. It only arose in specific civilisations and spread from these peoples to the rest of the globe. The societies where writing was first developed belonged to highly varied cultural frameworks but share one important civilisational trait: they were sedentary, urban societies with an incipient nation-state structure. Writing appeared as a result of these new states having the technical meand and need for inventory and memory. From these original cradles, writing systems have spread around the world. On their travels, the systems have gradually been transformed in terms of what they represent and how they are read, as well as in the number and appearance of their signs.
Ensô and calligraphy, 19th century, Japan. Kakeiju (hung scroll) with Japanese calligraphy by monk Takeda Motsugai. The complexity of the text, which deals with the Festival of the Dead (Obon), is complemented by the minimalistic graphics of the ensô circle, which is probably the most profound symbol of Zen calligraphic art and has many possible meanings including enlightenment, the void and the universe.
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Other signs for other voices Writing has not only been the product of the large ancient civilisations of Africa, Asia and America. In later times, new writing systems have also been created with the aim of better preserving certain languages or cultural traditions.
writings symbols, words, powers
Book of Death, 1550 BC, Egypt. The Book of the Dead was part of a tradition of funerary texts which includes the earlier Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts, which were painted onto objects, not papyrus. Some of the spells included were drawn from these older works and date to the 3rd millennium BC. The surviving papyri contain a varying selection of religious and magical texts and vary considerably in their illustration.
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da vinci
wrote once :
“One day, a sheet of p desk with other shee It suddenly realised t with marks. A pen ha words all over it in ve Now you are no long paper, but a message of man’s thoughts...”
writings symbols, words, powers
paper was lying on a ets just like it. that it was covered ad written a lot of ery black ink... ger just a piece of e. You are guardian �
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Divination book, 1800-1899, Indonesia. In the traditional Batak society of northern Sumatra, only priests used a writing system, known as surat na sapulu sia (the nineteen letters). As a result, writing was reserved for religious, magical or ceremonial texts and could only be learned and interpreted by the priests.
The power of identity In addition to being a vehicle for transmitting the spoken word, each writing systems has its own history, tied to certain states, cultures or religious traditions. In theory, a language can be encoded in any graphic system. Using one specific writing system instead of another is often a question of identity: the group does so in order to be considered part of specific cultural tradition. For example, Greek writing was associated in tis time with Hellenism; the Lating writing system, with Roman Christianity; and Arabic with Islam. In some cases it isn’t a whole wiritng system that is seen as representative of a specific cultural identity but single typograpghy or calligrapic style, as happened with the gotic style of the Latin writing system in Europe, tied to pan-Germanism, or with Farsi calligraphy in Arabic writings in Pakistan, India and Afghanisran, associated with the Persian cultural tradition.
writings symbols, words, powers
The power of fascination The creation of written text, as part of the graphic sphere, takes on a special artistic dimension in some cultures. This is called calligraphy, which sees the text not only as a vehicle to transmit information but also as an object of beauty in and of itself.
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The power of evocation The signs that comprise writing systems, historically, based on pictorial images, preserve their original meaning as evocations of real entities or objects in some cultural contexts. The characters of a texts, and the texts as a whole, thus take on symbolic value beyond their formal meaning; they represent the world and can interact with it. In many world cultures, as a result of this role as visual symbols, we find that some signs are taboo. Forming these signs is a way of “invoking� the objects represented, with all of the magical or symbolic consequences that entails. The use of written texts or single signs as amulets or talismans also falls into this category.
Ocean of narratives, s. XVIII, China. Jataka stories in fifty-one chapters, tracing the causes of present tragedy in human lives to events which took place in former lifetimes. The theme of each narrative is the same: the tragedy of the human condition, the reason for this tragedy and the possibility of transcending it.
writings symbols, words, powers
The power of exlusion Reading and writing is a matter of learning a precise, complex code, and in stratified societies (classes, castes, etc.) only a specific subset of the population has the time and means to devote this process. The line between those who know how to reald and those who are “illiterate� has traditionally been an economic one, not one based on supposed differences in terms of intelligence. As a result, knowing how to write has always been a hallmark of social prestige. The use of writing has come to be seen as a right in modern democratic societies. Literacy has always been part of egalitarian movements, while those defending lasting power of one group of human being over another (for reasons of class, gender, etc.) have frequently restricted acces to writing as a means to this end.
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24 Magic scroll, 19th century, Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, the ancient tradition of making healing and protecting amulets is still alive. Most of them are in the form of parchment scrolls containing prayers, quotations from the Holy Scripture, incantations and magic formulas written in Geez, the ancient language of Ethiopia. The texts are accompanied by magic pictures representing good and evil spirits, various amuletic figures and talismanic signs. The textual and pictorical content of the scroll responds to the specific needs of the commissioner. Since the scrolls are believed to be a protection against the attacks of evil powers, they are usually the same length as their owners.
Recovering lost voices Writing systems are “secret codes” accesible only to their users. Deciphering a written code from outside of the community that uses it entails numerous difficulties. As they don’t have a directly representative (pictorial) function, each sign can be associated with unpredictable meanings. A sign may represent a sound, a word, a whole idea: it’s impossible to know what it refers to just bades on appearance. In the case of ancient writings, especially those used to represent extinct languages, it is even more complicated, It requires deciphering a writing system that refers to a language that is unintelligible. This what has happened with a the attempt to decipher the ancient liberial writings.
writings symbols, words, powers
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writings
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symbols, words, powers
All the information about the exposition www.museuculturesmon.bcn.cat/en/expositions/writing-symbols-words-powers www.museuculturesmon.bcn.cat/sites/default/files/dossier_premsa_exposicio_escriptures_ca.pdf
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susanna van roessel