Review by Andrew Robinson.
All academics would presumably regard writing as one of the world’s great inventions, perhaps even the greatest invention. Philologist Silvia Ferrara certainly does. An expert on the undeciphered Cypro-Minoan script, she is the founder of a research group focused on the invention of writing, INSCRIBE (Invention of Scripts and their Beginnings). It organises lectures by worldwide scholars on writing that ranges from the four ancient scripts widely accepted to be of independent origin – Chinese characters, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mayan glyphs, and Mesopotamian cuneiform – to undeciphered scripts such as the Indus script of Pakistan/India, the Isthmian script of Mesoamerica, Linear A of the eastern Mediterranean, Rongorongo of Easter Island, and the notoriously unique Phaistos Disc of Crete. All of these receive attention in The Greatest Invention, her intellectually stimulating, chattily written survey of the invention and significance of writing in both the ancient and modern world, translated from its original Italian edition.
But, as Ferrara notes at the end, visitors to the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm do not agree with this academic verdict. Asked to rank the 100 most important inventions in history, adults voted for the wheel, followed by electricity, the telephone, and the computer, with the printing press at position 18. Writing was relegated to position 30 by these adults and 38 by children between ages 11 and 12. ‘Writing sits just beneath the zipper, and well beneath – wait for it – the stove. At least it beat the vacuum cleaner.’ And yet computers, not to mention the printing press, of course depend on writing.
The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates – as quoted in Plato’s Phaedrus – pinpointed our long-time ambivalence towards writing, as Ferrara also notes. He spoke of the Egyptian god Thoth, the supposed inventor of writing, who came to see the king seeking royal blessing on his enlightening hieroglyphic invention. The king, however, told Thoth: ‘You, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite to that they really possess… You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant.’
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