While island hopping and taking forays into her own investigation, Ferrara develops a bold argument. According to the standard history of writing, the first true writing system was invented by Mesopotamian scribes. (Imagine that they keep track of goods using stylized images.) One day one of the clerks is said to have noticed that the image which is, say, walking stick – gi – could do double duty by also rendering the verb “repay”, which sounds the same in Sumerian. Such realizations gave birth to hundreds of characters representing enough syllables to capture an entire language. Writing allowed Mesopotamian city-states to project power deep into the hinterland and rule the first territorial empire.
For Ferrara, this story is true enough, but it has supplanted alternatives that are less about imperial bureaucrats making paperwork (or rather, since paper wasn’t invented yet, clay work). Take, for example, Lady Hao, one of the 64 wives of Wu Ding, the ancient Chinese king. Undeterred by the competition, she became a military commander, in charge of 13,000 soldiers. But her true strength came from her job as the king’s fortuneteller. In ancient China, fortunes were told by manipulating inscriptions on turtles, and from such manipulations writing was born. It would later be taken over by bureaucrats, who would eventually invent paper, but the roots of writing lie in imagination, creativity and meaning making. Lady Hao understood the power of culture.
Other examples of creative ingenuity take us to Easter Island, where inhabitants may have developed writing completely isolated from the rest of the world, and to the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, written in an unknown and as yet undecipherable script in Renaissance Europe. Was it the work of a loner trying hard? Does it hide something spectacular?
Some of Ferrara’s most far-reaching ideas stem from her collaborations with scientists, including the claim that writing literally changes the brains of those who learn it. Perhaps this is what makes it so difficult for literate people to appreciate oral traditions. I would have liked to hear more about the fraught moments when writers have met non-writers and brought down their stories, as happened in countless colonial encounters. Ferrara describes the intriguing case of Cherokee writing, invented in the early 1800s to counter settlers with alphabets, but she doesn’t say much about those who refuse writing altogether. As with any resource, people have done terrible things with, and in the name of, writing.