Books in Brief
010
Sign, Symbol, Script
Edited by Martha L. Carter and Keith N. Schoville
(Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 1984), 96 pp., $5.00, paperback
Rarely does a catalogue designed as companion and guide to an exhibition stand on its own as effectively as does the catalogue of Sign, Symbol, Script—An Exhibition on the Origins of Writing and the Alphabet. Gracefully written for the layperson and lavishly illustrated with objects from the exhibition, this brief soft-cover book traces the history of writing and the alphabet back to cave paintings and the clay tokens of the Near East, up through the complexities of the computer printout.
The catalogue’s introduction chronicles the gradual development of writing from the time that record-keeping became important with the rise of cities in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley. The origin of writing, c. 3500 B.C., is attributed to the Sumerians in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, in what is now Iraq. “With writing, history began,” the author declares. “In a very real sense, the history of writing and the history of mankind are synonymous.”
Chapters following the introduction discuss the nearly simultaneous development of cuneiform in Mesopotamia and hieroglyphics in Egypt; the origins of the Semitic alphabet in Syria-Palestine; European writing systems such as Linear A and B, and the Greek and Latin alphabets; and the development of writing in the Orient, beginning with the proto-Indic writing of the Indus Valley. The concluding chapter traces the diffusion of the alphabet.
The exhibition is co-sponsored by the departments of Hebrew and Semitic studies, anthropology, East Indian languages, classics and history of the University of Wisconsin and is directed by Dr. Keith Schovale of the University of Wisconsin. The chief authors of the catalogue are Schovale; Michael Fox, chairman of the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies; Martha Carter, art consultant; and Rudolph Dornemann, head of the Milwaukee Public Museum’s history department. Menahem Mansoor, professor emeritus of Hebrew and Semitic Studies, initiated the project.
The core of the book concerns the revolutionary invention of the alphabet in Canaan (c. 2000–1500 B.C.). The author conjectures that Canaanites knew how to use one or more of the pictograph systems then extant, with the hundreds of signs to be learned. The shift to representing a limited number of basic sounds or phonemes by a small number of signs was made by a person “thinking in disgust that there must be a better, more efficient way to write this, and the idea of the alphabet was born.” The book conjectures that the alphabet was invented, “only a few hundred years before the earliest poetic texts in the Bible (such as Exodus 15) were penned.”
The possible threats the computer poses to writing are discussed in conclusion, leading to the prediction that “A system of communication so versatile and so validated by the test of time is not likely to be displaced, but that it will be changed is highly likely.”
The catalogue is generously illustrated with black-and-white photographs of objects in the exhibition—unfortunately, captions are at the end of each chapter rather than with the pictures. Charts illustrate the evolution of different types of writing. One chart compares Sumerian, Egyptian, Hittite and Chinese signs; others trace the origin of cuneiform signs, the development of Egyptian scripts, of the Semitic alphabet, the English alphabet and the East Asian group of scripts.
By the time the traveling exhibit of Sign, Symbol, Script concludes its toura many thousands of people will have seen it, but this helpful catalogue will continue to be a useful reference work.
Dura-Europos: The Ancient City and the Yale Collection
Susan B. Matheson
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983) 42 pp., 34 illus., $3.00, paperback
Many students fail to see early Christianity and the New Testament clearly because of their ignorance of its social and historical context. As J. D. G. Dunn of the University of Durham has suggested, it is “as though earliest Christian history moved along an independent track (‘salvation-history’), which to all intents and purposes hardly intersected, let alone merged, with the track of ‘secular’ history.” BAR readers try to avoid this all-too-common pitfall. They are interested in the “archaeology” of the Bible, including its social and cultural history, or they wouldn’t be reading BAR!
If you are a serious student of Judaism or Christianity in Roman times, then Dura is the first Jewish or Christian site outside the Holy Land to explore and ponder. Not only is it intrinsically important and of manageable size, it is also well excavated and well published, and many of the artifacts are permanently in North America, at Yale University.
Located on the eastern border of the Greco-Roman world, Dura-Europos contains the earliest Christian church building ever discovered, one of the two most important ancient synagogues (Sardis in Turkey has the other), and a number of other temples and shrines, some in the Greek tradition, but most dedicated to such eastern deities as Mithras, Bel, Atargatis and Hadad. The popular religious art of these buildings is particularly striking: Jews and Christians apparently joined local followers of other religions in decorating the walls of their respective sanctuaries with central cultic themes.
Dura’s history is manageably brief. As is so often the case in the Greco-Roman world, it is a military history: founded about 300 B.C. under the Seleucids, captured by the Parthians about 113 B.C., taken by the Romans about 164 A.D., and captured and destroyed around 250 A.D. by the Sassanians, successors to the Parthians.
Dura’s private homes, fortifications, shops and religious buildings were carefully excavated by a French and American team during the years between the two World Wars. Most of this work has been published by Yale University in a series of preliminary and final reports during the years 1929 to 1967. The best one-volume account of the excavations at Dura is Clark Hopkins, The Discovery of Dura-Europos (1979), reviewed by this author in Books in Brief, BAR 06:04.
Yale University owns nearly half of the excavated artifacts; some 150 items are currently on display at the Yale University Art Gallery. Matheson’s clear, well-illustrated essay on Dura and the Yale collection is a “must” for the library of any serious student of Judaism or Christianity in Roman times.
Sign, Symbol, Script
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