How Drawing Becomes Writing: Proto-orthography in the Codex Borbonicus Page: 42
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I offer this explanation more as a model or metaphor for the way in which writing
developed than as an empirical explanation. I believe framing the development of writing as an
exaptation is useful for thinking about the way in which it re-combined forms that already
existed in human culture and applied them to language functions. However, as Gould admits,
(cf. Gould 1991) it is exceptionally difficult to determine the historical origination of socio-
cultural phenomena outside their current usage, particularly one such as writing, for which the
evidence is so fragmentary and difficult to interpret as we see immediately below. So any such
theory must by necessity be more of a model or heuristic than a real claim to empirical
knowledge, and we as social scientists must simply make do with the explanation that fits best
with the relevant data, which in this case would be examples of historical writing, modern
anthropological accounts of oral and primarily oral societies and psycholinguistic data about
literacy and the development thereof.
As such, I briefly run down the contentious history of the development of literacy,
excluding the present because while interesting, it does not bear on the ideas presented in this
paper. I begin with cuneiform, as it is traditionally held to have been the first manifestation of
true writing in the world. It emerged out of early Mesopotamian society, located a fertile region
with a newly emergent cluster of cities bounded by tribal hill peoples. Cities were structured
around the temple ziggurat, and a temple could employ hundreds of people of every class and
occupation (cf. Graeber 2011).
Cuneiform writing is considered to have taken form between 3500 and 3200 BCE in
Sumeria with an initial repertoire of about 700 signs. These mostly functioned as multivalent
logograms that could be strung together into complex signs that would depict various items42
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Bolinger, Taylor. How Drawing Becomes Writing: Proto-orthography in the Codex Borbonicus, thesis, May 2013; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc271783/m1/49/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .