It’s important to use the right words when writing about writing.
Scholars studying the history of it distinguish between pre-writing symbols used to mark objects and more precise marks that establish an exact correspondence between sign and sound; script and language are not the same thing.
A new study in Antiquities illustrates the transition from printed symbol to written word — a metamorphosis that lead author Silvia Ferrara, a philology researcher from the University of Bologna calls “fuzzy.”
“We should not assume that writing is the result of a set of scribes sitting round a table and creating the signs together,” says Ferrara. “It is a complicated, and arguably gradual, phenomenon and it is difficult to set a zero point in time in which the invention took place.”
For this study, researchers started 6,000 years ago, in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk, which is located in what is now Iraq. ...
