The write stuff | 9 May 2019

The Mesopotamians wrote on clay and the ancient Chinese on ox bones and turtle shells. In Egypt, in about 1,800 BC, someone even found the space to scrawl on a portable sandstone sphinx. Look closely towards the base of the sculpture and you will find a delicate line drawing of an ox head. Remarkably, this picture reveals the origins of the letter ‘A’.

At the first stage in its development, the ox was simplified, so that an engraver could express it with just a couple of lines. An Egyptian seal stone shows the animal’s head in abstract form. Next, the shape was flipped 90º, so that by the time the Greeks had adopted the Phoenician system of writing, in the 8th century BC, it was recognisably an ‘A’. Following some tinkering by the Etruscans and Romans, it was no longer possible to tell what was horn, and what jaw. ‘A’ was no longer for ox.

Writing probably first developed in Egypt, China, Mesoamerica, the Indus Valley and Easter Island at a similar time, but the Mesopotamians of ancient Iraq have long been credited with its invention. The earliest examples of text from across the globe tend to be more functional than literary. A tiny cuneiform tablet records the distribution of barley to farm labourers in about 3,000 BC. A towering Mayan plinth from 7th-century Belize sets out a ruler’s family tree.

This superb exhibition does not so much walk as zigzag you through the history of writing. The display is arranged along diagonals in the basement of the British Library, which means that you hardly notice when you stop proceeding chronologically and slide hundreds of years back in time, as if in an exciting but highly intellectual game of snakes and ladders.