Discovery journey
How We Learned to Write
How do you keep an agreement that must still hold a year from now?
Imagine making an agreement with someone you will only see again in a year. No phone, no paper. How do you still know what was agreed? People in different places found surprisingly different answers. This route follows the traces language leaves behind, and the stories that live on without writing.
- Stop 1 of 7Remembering without writingOral traditionLong before writing, people passed on laws, family lines and stories by word of mouth, often with rhythm, rhyme and repetition. Which would you remember more easily: a story or a row of numbers?
- Stop 2 of 7Signs in clayCuneiformIn Mesopotamia, scribes pressed wedge-shaped signs into wet clay with a reed. It began with lists of goods and grew into letters, laws and stories, for more than three thousand years.
- Stop 3 of 7Pictures that soundEgyptian hieroglyphsA hieroglyph can stand for a thing, but also for a sound. Only in 1822 could Champollion read them again, with the Rosetta Stone, which carries the same text in three scripts.
- Stop 4 of 7A riddle in stoneIndus scriptIn the cities along the Indus, signs appear on thousands of small seals, but no one can read them. The texts are short and there is no bilingual text: sometimes ‘we do not know’ is part of the story.
- Stop 5 of 7Three thousand years unbrokenChinese charactersThe oldest Chinese characters are found on bones and turtle shells from more than three thousand years ago. It is one of the oldest scripts still used every day, even though the shapes of the characters have changed.
- Stop 6 of 7Knots that countQuipuIn the Inca Empire, officials kept track of stores, taxes and people with coloured, knotted cords. We can read the numbers; whether the cords also recorded words, no one knows for sure.
- Stop 7 of 7The same text a thousand timesPrinting pressAround 1450 Gutenberg printed in Mainz with movable metal type and a press. In China and Korea, printing with movable type had begun centuries earlier; in Europe the press made books far cheaper within a short time.