Punctuation before Punctuation (Part I)
Dots and Dashes at the Dawn of Time
What, according to you, is the most significant invention in human history? The car? The phone? The internet? Vaccines, electricity, the clock, the fridge, the camera, the plane, the computer, the printing press? The big’uns as the BBC and National Geographic believe. Who are we to disagree, then?! Well, let’s go crazy, and disagree…what if the most important invention of all times – the mother of all inventions after which there can be nothing else deserving of the name – the Elvis of inventions, bringing light into the darkness of nothing – what if the most important invention was punctuation. You guessed I’d be saying that, right?
👉🏽 Okay okay, punctuation is second, hard on the heels of writing. WRITING! 👈🏽
All of those inventions most people will think of involve some kind of equpiment, or observation of nature and drawing conclusions, some kind of adapting, problem-solving, technologising. And while I subscribe to designating writing as technology, I’m more interested in the utterly staggering mental leap it takes to come up with the following: this random shape here represents one of the sounds in my language, and a combination of random shapes taken together, grasped by the eyes, understood by the mind, and translated into a movement of my throat muscles, creates a word. This genius invention completly and totally and radically turns upside-down all the notions of history, memory, information storage and retrieval, and communication we humans have hithertoo entertained.
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The concept of writing feels too familiar for most of us today to be able to detach from the fact that there is nothing “natural“ about assigning sound to arbitrary forms that can re-assemble as language in order to send messages across time and space, and that the effort to develop this is purely mental: nobody watches nature, and imitates her. Nobody experiments with objects, or randomly hits on something new. Somewhere in Mesopotamia, thousands of years ago, one person sat and had an idea. That is extraordinary.
Hands down, the alphabet is and will always be the pinnacle of human achievement. Change my mind! ChatGPT, AI, voice assistants, augmented reality, space exploration – we think we’re giants, standing on the shoulders of dwarves. Here’s why it’s actually the opposite. We are the dwarves, they the giants. A brief history of script, setting the scene for punctuation in the earliest writing system. Because where there is script, there is punctuation.
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Soft Moist Clay…
Don´t you just love the sound of “moist”? 😅 Alright, the development of writing is not exactly how I portrayed it. An ancient Mesopotamian didn’t just reach for the alphabet out of thin air, and ta daaa! A, B, C, easy as 1, 2, 3! The forerunners of the alphabet took several thousands of years, although, around 1500 B.C., there must have been that one person, or that small group of people, well versed in existing writing systems, going that bit further. Lightbulb moments are real, y’all!
Around 8000 B.C. (that is a breath-taking 10.000 years ago!), merchants and accountants in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) would press small dried clay-tokens into a flat piece of clay, creating impressions in the shape of the token. These figures referred to items they stored, sold, or exchanged like jars of oil, units of wheat, or sheep. This isn’t writing as such, perhaps, but it’s part of marking a surface with agreed-upon signs referring to something tangible out there.
Around 5000 years ago, the first logograms show up in the area, signs representing a word or phrase (Chinese and Middle-American script are also logograms, and have developed independently). The tokens were no longer impressed on the clay, but their shapes formed by a reed pen with a triangular end. That is the birth of “cuneiform“ – “wedge-shaped“ script – which would become an incredibly influential wide-spread manner of documentation in all sorts of anxient languages like Sumerian and Akkadian (in Mesopotamia), Hittite (in modern-day Anatolia), and Elamite (in modern-day south-western Iran).
One to two hundred years later, around 2800 B.C., those wedges become phonetic signs (signs representing speech sounds), detaching from their referents, and representing syllables, facilitated because Sumerian was a largely monosyllabic language. Just to illustrate syllabic writing (in a bit of a clumsy inauthentic way): let’s say you have a sign for “friend“ like ₮ and one for “ship“ like ₾. Syllabic writing means you can combine those signs and you have “friendship“ (₮ ₾), same sounds, totally different meaning. This is not yet an alphabet as such where one sign stands for one sound rather than whole syllables, but it´s 99% of the way there. To understand that language has constituent parts like syllables at all suggest an enormous cognitive achievement, let alone matching them up with abstract signs —ingenuity unmatched in the history of humanity. There, I said it!
Things got more complicated yet: a cuneiform sign could, for example, represent a word, or a syllable, modify the word´s material or state, or even cause a grammatical change: 𒀭 after a name turned the person into a god. 𒊩 before the word signified a female noun.𒈨𒌍 made the following word into a plural, and 𒄑 before the word meant it was from wood. I can’t wrap my head around how nuanced this level of abstracti already is.
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This mixture of pictorial and syllabic script drastically reduced the number of signs necessary to express sophisticated thought, allowing peoples of old to capture their culture, their notions of worship, concept of history, and sense of identity. Syllabic combinations enabled much more complex writing, and it showed: if writing had been used for (to us dreamers) somewhat prosaic functional uses of tax records, receipts, and administration, it now held the secrets of the peoples of the past. Full utterances. Voice. Creation myths, royal praise, law, literature.
The Code of King Hammurabi, for example, is an over 2 metre high stone slab, bearing cuneiform inscriptions of the most comprehensive collection of laws in antiquity, older than the Bible, and giving us access to a highly developed society that provided for all sorts of legal cases from tariffs to theft, from debt to divorce.
Humanity’s first recorded epic was also written in cuneiform around 2700 years ago, found in the huge library of Ashurbanipal, king of Babylon, at Nineveh, modern day Mosul. Gilgamesh is a story about a royal hero, mortality, love, life after death, humans, gods, and is something of a blueprint for world literature.
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Edgy Wedgy Punctuation
So. How might cuneiform punctuation look like? The higher the level of complexity of the script, and the purpose and responsibility of writing, the greater the need to organise it in accessible ways – which is at the heart of punctuation’s task.
There was no such thing as the narrower punctation repertoire we employ today such as full stops or question marks. Even the larger definition of punctuation I have been trying to encourage does not compute regarding cuneiform like capital letters, spaces between words, diverse typefaces (Garamon, Times New Roman, Calibri), or different script versions like bold or italic.
The closest equivalent to punctuation might be line breaks for something like a sentence unit or paragraph unit, although the concept of a chunk of text belonging together was neither inevitable nor immediate for writers and readers back then, and certainly not so for a very long time indeed. As far as I understand now first notions of a paragraph developed in classical times (around 2000 years ago), and it took several hundreds of years to truly take hold in writing cultures across distance and time. The paragraph deserves its own post, but for the very curious, here´s a (gulp) podcast I recorded on it what feels like one thousand years ago.
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If this sounds odd to us today who are so used to this seemingly elementary grouping of words and sense that doesn´t even need explaining…what is a paragraph anyway? What is a sentence? A working definition could be that a paragraph is a larger parcel of sense, probably several sentences together, surrounded by one or more lines of white space above and below, and a sentence is a smaller entity of sense, possibly grammatically complete with at least one subject and one verb. This is debatable. Highly! For example my ’Highly!´ contains neither a subject nor a verb, yet nobody would doubt it is a sentence. Or rather that it performs the work of a sentence which is to stand on its own as an independent unit of utterance which I deliberately detached from the before and after in order to let it stand out. Plus the exclamation point.
Think, for example, of reading the news on your phone while waiting for the bus. The screen is inifintely smaller than a laptop surface, and also smaller than a regular-sized book, so any chunk of text on a phone will feel stretched and overwhelming. I myself struggle with apportioning paragraphs in this newsletter, assuming most of you will read it on your phone.
A manageable paragraph on the laptop looks like a tsunami of words on the phone, while a two-sentence paragraph on the phone-screen seems laughably short on the laptop. Can’t win! News websites have sadly introduced the one-line paragraph, using white space as meaning-maker, and I get it, although I deplore the potential loss of the paragraph, not to speak of the loss of indentation. That’s all a differerent story, but I’d like you to remember that nothing about writing needs to be precisely the way it is – it has a history and it is going to have a future which includes change and even loss. And another point to remember when considering punctuation of really old texts: punctuation, broadly speaking, divides text for easier access. That´s all it is, really.
In Sumerian, the verb would go to the end of the sentence, clarifying where an utterance ends, which de-emphasises the need for final-punctuation.
In some cuneiform scripts like Old Persian, there is a single vertical or sloping wedge, functioning as a word-divider. That´s quite extraordinary! Because it means that readers and writers did have an understanding of text as text rather than as a record of speech with which scholars usually explain the lack of spaces between words in classical text LOOKINGLIKETHIS. I wrote about this here.
So, regarding “punctuation before punctuation“, that is, punctuation before the invention of a dot-system in Greek-influenced Alexandria 200 BC, we need to think more creatively about what punctuation is and does. Some purposes, however, run through the history of punctuation like a read thread, connecting a twenty-first-century hashtag tapped out on a smartphone to a Mesopotamian line pressed into moist clay: punctuation arranges text. Makes it accessible by creating relationships of inside and outside. Guides our eyes, and thus our minds. Divide and conquer – not peoples and civilisations, but the mystery of the magic of script.
Check back in again in two weeks for Punctuation before Punctuation Part II — Ancient Egypt edition! 🔺🐫☀️🏜️👁️🐊