This course aims at providing students with a thorough understanding of the role played by writing systems in the development of civilizations and the articulation of polities. The emphasis will be placed on historical, cultural, economic, and religious matters. In order to fully comprehend the nature of these issues, the lion’s share of the course will focus on the functions and the development of early writing in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and the Americas. Additional attention will be given to the history of early writing systems. We will examine how the writing systems in the Near East and East Asia originated and developed orthographic strategies and conventions to record the linguistic realities for which they were designed; what processes and mechanisms facilitated the creation of the first alphabet in the Ancient Near East; how modern scholars have been able to decipher scripts lost long ago (such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform), and how some decipherment processes are advancing and improving our knowledge of other civilizations (such as Maya hieroglyphs). The study of the social and cultural aspects of writing will be grounded in a diachronic approach. In that regard, the course will engage with a variety of historical concerns: the possible reasons for which certain cultures may have started to use writing for bureaucratic and economic reasons, whereas others (such as early China) would seem to have started to use it for rather more symbolic realms of life; and the relation between writing, identity, and script in different areas.
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