Who Benefited from the Gradual Introduction and Development of Writing, and How?
A generation ago, many scholars assumed that administration was the main driver for the invention of writing. For several traditions, however, that has proved to be an insufficient explanation. Prestige and symbolic/aesthetic aspects, rather than more pragmatic ones, tend now to be given at least equal emphasis in interpretation. While the functioning of administration, and especially its proliferation, may have been aided by the new systems of communication, the earliest writing could convey only minimal information. Oral contexts must have been dominant in its operation.
Writing developed into a “full” form over many centuries. In the traditions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Aegean, and Mesoamerica (in rough chronological order of appearance), half a millennium or more separated complex systems of notation from an encoding of language, its phonology, and syntax. In all clear cases, initial phases of writing were situated among elites, who must have been its main beneficiaries. The early context of its emergence should be explored in order to ask in what ways those elites benefited from the complex systems. A relatively full notation of language is unlikely to have been envisaged from the beginning. Its introduction could have been stimulated partly by extending the potential of the systems, partly by significant societal change in the centuries after their first invention, or plausibly by both. When language came to be notated, this was socially divisive, because a single language was generally chosen in what was in most or all cases a multilingual environment.
This paper will discuss questions arising from the points just sketched, with a primary focus on the Egyptian case.
