Last Writing: Script Obsolescence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica
Last Writing: Script Obsolescence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica
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最后写作：埃及、美索不达米亚和中美洲的文字过时
DOI：
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发表时间：
2003
影响因子：
0.7
通讯作者：
J. Cooper
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
S. Houston;John D. Baines;J. Cooper
无论以何种标准衡量，文字的创造和发展都是一种具有深远影响的控制论进步。它允许作家与在时间和空间上遥远的读者交流，扩展了人类知识的存储容量，包括从世俗会计到神圣叙事的信息，通过将图标与有意义的声音联系起来，架起了视觉和听觉世界的桥梁，并提供了一种持久的方式来展示和操纵关于各种各样事物的断言。包含纯语义设备的更广泛的写作定义（semasiography, Sampson 1985:29）与古代交流系统有关，特别是“墨西哥象形文字”（Boone 2000:29），但与这里所回顾的书写系统特征的语言基础不同。semasographic的定义对于理解重度语音系统并不是很有帮助。它们对世界文字系统的有限适用性表明了类型学上的弱点；甚至墨西哥的例子也不确定，因为这些文本将真正的词汇项与支持图形设备捆绑在一起。另一种观点是，混合的墨西哥象形文字包含文字，但补充了有效的图像线索。由此产生了一种可翻译的叙事，带有一些受控制的自由，可以转化为语言。将这种独特的特征与埃及、楔形文字或玛雅象形文字的主要语音性质等同起来，模糊了区别。写作的广义定义并不能阐明这些文字，尽管它有助于理解文本和伴随图像的关系（Baines 1989; Taube 2000）。在某种程度上，第一篇文章之所以吸引人们的注意，是因为它有助于对进步的目的论叙述（Trigger 1998: 42）。人们有充分的理由认为，文字的发明巩固了现代社会，使其得以发展。在其较发达的形式中，它是官僚主义、宣传和行政管理所不可缺少的。
By any measure, the creation and development of writing was a cybernetic advance with far-reaching consequences. It allowed writers to communicate with readers who were distant in time and space, extended the storage capacity of human knowledge, including information that ranged from mundane accounting to sacred narrative, bridged visual and auditory worlds by linking icons with meaningful sound, and offered an enduring means of displaying and manipulating assertions about a wide variety of matters.Broader definitions of writing that embrace purely semantic devices (semasiography, Sampson 1985:29) relate to ancient systems of communication, especially “Mexican pictography” (Boone 2000:29), but depart from the linguistic underpinnings that characterize the writing systems reviewed here. Semasiographic definitions are not very helpful in understanding heavily phonic systems. Their limited applicability to writing systems of the world identifies a typological weakness; even the Mexican examples are inconclusive, since these texts bundle genuine lexical items with supporting graphic devices. An alternative view is that the mixed Mexican pictography contains writing, yet supplements it with effective pictorial clues. From this comes a narrative that is translatable, with some controlled liberties, into language. Equating this distinctive package of features with the preponderantly phonic nature of Egyptian, cuneiform, or Mayan glyphs blurs distinctions. A broad definition of writing does not elucidate these scripts, although it is useful for understanding the relation of texts and accompanying images (Baines 1989; Taube 2000). In part, the first writing attracts attention because it contributes to a teleological narrative of progress (Trigger 1998: 42). The invention of writing is thought, with good justification, to undergird and enable present-day society. In its more developed forms, it is indispensable to bureaucracy, propaganda, and administration.