The place that written language began to occupy in almost all human conglomerates on our planet reflects the incredible invention that was writing, a cultural artifact that was invented several times by our ancestors in different places such as Egypt (hieroglyphs are almost a shorthand record from which the world’s alphabets: Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai…), Mesopotamia, China (today’s Chinese as a language is almost the same as it was more than three thousand years ago). Without writing, which was born to name things, our human condition would be unimaginable.

simplification

Philologist Silvia Ferrara – in the book The Great Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Writings (Barcelona, ​​Anagrama, 2022) – proves the fact that writing was invented independently, from scratch, also in Mexico, Easter Island and Peru. Around 1000 and 1200 AD in Rapanui, symbols were carved on the backs of moai (monolithic humanoid statues), petroglyphs were engraved on basalt and lava rocks, and signs were engraved on wooden tablets: rongo-rongo is the full script of the Polynesian language, although we haven’t deciphered it yet.

Inspiration

When the Spanish arrived in Central America at the beginning of the 16th century, they found some codices on the Yucatan Peninsula that collected the stories of the Mayan ancestors, which Europeans considered pagan manifestations. But the drawings-signs of the Maya have a specific phonetic value and function like a syllable: they are a letter. Ferrara wonders what he calls the Inca paradox: How could the largest pre-Columbian empire in the Americas have been built without a linguistic record? How could the beauty of Machu Picchu be built without signs to describe it?

Speech failure

The point, according to Ferrari, is that the Incas bequeathed us a three-dimensional system, a 3D script: quipus, a type of spreadsheet in Excel, with columns, lines, numbers, sums and totals, a system of presenting data and also undoubtedly a narrative part, since knots have shape, direction, thickness, color, and multiple knots: “We have to keep an open mind with quipus. Perhaps our too limited imagination prevents us from understanding them,” he says. The latest interesting thing is that the current emoji connect us to the iconic origins of written expression.

Writing, which has accompanied us for more than five thousand years, changes us human beings from the inside, since the act of reading what is written also affects our neurons, reconfiguring our cognitive system. The eye that scanned the horizon adapted to recognize drawings of letters and signs. Was the world less interesting before the invention of writing? We do not know. But, connected to drawing, writing is a kind of natural continuation of the art that conquered the world in all its habitable parts. That is why writing is “the greatest invention in the world”. (OR)