a tall Babel

“I grew up in the shadow of a big bookcase: a tall Babel, where verses, novels, histories, row upon row . . . all mingled and murmured.”

—Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil.

the seeds of writing

“Since the days of cave painting, people have made marks to keep count of objects. We can call these marks the seeds of writing, since a mark means not Here is a mark, but something else. But the marks do not reach beyond space and time. They are voiceless unless the maker of the marks is standing there, explaining: This line is a cow; this one, an antelope; these are my children.”

–Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

The seal

“Written history began sometime around 3000 BC. . . .

Very early, a Sumerian who owned valuable resources (grain, or milk, or perhaps oil) would tie closed his bag of grain, smooth a ball of clay over the knot, and then press his seal on it. The seal, square or cylindrical, was carved with a particular design. When the ball of clay dried, the mark of the owner . . . was locked into the clay. The mark represented the owner’s presence. It watched over the grain while he was absent.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

cuneiform

“Over the course of at least six hundred years, Sumerian pictograms . . . evolved into phonetic symbols. These symbols, made in wet clay by a stylus with a wedge-shaped edge, had a distinctive shape, wider at the top than at the bottom of the incision. . . . [I]n 1700 an Old Persian scholar named Thomas Hyde gave the writing the name cuneiform, which we still use. The name, derived from the Latin for “wedge-shaped,” does nothing to recognize the importance of the script. Hyde thought the pretty signs on clay were some sort of decorative border.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

hieroglyphs

“[F]ar from being phonetic, hieroglyphs were designed to be indecipherable unless you possessed the key to their meaning. The Egyptian priests, who were guardians of this information, patrolled the borders of their knowledge in order to keep this tool in their own hands. Ever since, the mastery of writing and reading has been an act of power.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

Hieratic script

“Hieroglyphs could preserve their magical and mysterious nature only because the Egyptians invented a new and easier script for day-to-day use. Hieratic script was a simplified version of hieroglyphic writing, with the careful pictorial signs reduced to a few quickly dashed lines. . . . Hieratic script became the preferred handwriting for business matters. . . .

Sometime around 3000 BC, an Egyptian scribe realized that the papyrus used as a building material in Egyptian houses (reeds softened, laid out in crossed pattern, mashed into pulp, and then laid out to dry in thin sheets) could also serve as a writing surface. With a brush and ink, hieratic script could be laid down very rapidly on papyrus.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

the lines of hieroglyphs

“Sumerian cuneiform died and was buried. But the lines of hieroglyphs have survived until the present day. A later form of writing, which we call Protosinaitic . . . borrowed almost half of its signs from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Protosinaitic, in turn, appears to have lent a few of its letters to the Phoenicians, who used it in their alphabet. The Greeks then borrowed the Phoenician alphabet, turned it sideways, and passed it on to the Romans, and thence to us. . . .”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

a cerulean blue grand piano

“In a sunken area in the middle of the coffee lounge, a woman wearing a bright pink dress sat at a cerulean blue grand piano playing quintessential hotel-coffee-lounge numbers filled with arpeggios and syncopation. Not bad actually, though not an echo lingered in the air beyond the last note of each number.”

—Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1989.

an unappealing orange

“The carpet was an unappealing orange, the sort of orange you’d get by leaving a choicely sunburnt weaving out in the rain for a week, then throwing it into the cellar until it mildewed. This was an orange from the early days of Technicolor.”

—Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1989.

The yellow glow

“The yellow glow of the light bulbs drifted about the room like pollen.”

–Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1989.