Immediate Pre-Histories and Earliest Developments of Writing in Southern Egypt
Recent analyses strongly suggest that the earliest Egyptian writing developed out of an earlier, increasingly sophisticated and exclusionary visual culture strongly focused on power and violence. In no small part, glottography thus emerged initially as an additional exclusionary refinement within that visual culture. The paper describes the assemblage of graphic forms seen in tomb U-j and the earliest forms of hieroglyphic writing beginning a century and a half later, setting these in perspective with one another. Given the understanding that the relation between the two is neither direct nor deterministic, I discuss and attempt to model the developments that saw the latter emerge.
