Writing, the ability to make language visible and permanent, is one of humanity's greatest inventions. This book presents current perspectives on the origins and development of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt, providing an overview of each writing system and its uses. Essays on writing in China and Mesoamerica complete coverage of the four "pristine" writing systems - inventions of writing in which there was no previous exposure to texts. The authors explore what writing is, and is not, and sections of the text are devoted to Anatolian hieroglyphs of Anatolia, and to the development of the alphabet in the Sinai Peninsula in the second millennium BC and its spread to Phoenicia where it spawned the Greek and Latin alphabets. This richly illustrated volume, issued in conjunction with an exhibit at the Oriental Institute, provides a current perspective on, and appreciation of, an invention that changed the course of history.

Visible Language: The Earliest Writing Systems, Christopher Woods
Iconography of Protoliterate Seals, Oya Topçuoglu 
The Earliest Mesopotamian Writing, Christopher Woods
Adaptation of Cuneiform to Write Akkadian, Andrea R. Seri
The Rise and Fall of Cuneiform Script in Hittite Anatolia, Theo van den Hout
The Conception and Development of the Egyptian Writing System, Elise V. MacArthur
The Earliest Egyptian Writing, Andréas Stauder
Egyptian Hieroglyphic Writing, Janet H. Johnson
Hieratic, Kathryn E. Bandy
Demotic, Janet H. Johnson
Ptolemaic Hieroglyphs, François Gaudard 
Coptic, T. G. Wilfong
Invention and Development of the Alphabet, Joseph Lam
The Beginnings of Writing in China, Edward L. Shaughnessy
The Development of Maya Writing, Joel Palka
Anatolian Hieroglyphic Writing, Ilya Yakubovich

http://oi.uchicago.edu/museum/special/writing/ (including some video clips, Image Gallery)

Download the Exhibit catalog http://oi.uchicago.edu/pdf/oimp32.pdf

See also: http://ancientneareast.org/tag/oriental-institute/ where kmtsesh reports on the Exhibit and attempts reading the hieroglyphs on a plaque:

Christopher Woods who edited the exquisite volume notes in his introduction:

"The invention of writing and of a convenient system of records on paper has had a greater influence in uplifting the human race than any other intellectual achievement in the career of man. It was more important than all the battles ever fought and all the consitutions ever devised. -- JH Breasted, The Conquest of Civilization, pp. 53-54." The ability to represent language graphically, to make language visible, stands as one of humanity's greatest intellectual and cultural achievements. It is an often-quoted sentiment that speech is to being human, what writing is to civilization, or, in the words of the anthropologist Jack Goody, 'Cognitively as well as sociologically, writing underpins 'civilization,' the culture of cities' (1987, p.300) (Woods, Christopher, ed., 2010, Visible Language, p. 15).

Visible language, a picturesque phrase. Another picturesque phrase appears in what could be the world's very old human document: Ṛgveda. The phrase is takṣat vāk, 'incised speech' since early writing occurred on tablets and potsherds.

Christopher Woods presents a Three-dimensional CT scan of the contents of a clay envelope from the site Chogha Mish in southwest Iran. (Fig. 2.16, ibid., p. 48).

I hope a similar CT-scan will be done of the 10 clay envelopes (rattles?) discovered at Chanhu-daro, the Sheffied of the Ancient Near East, by Dr. EJH Mackay of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I have written to the Museum authorities and hope there will be a positive response.

An example from Page 50 of Christopher Wood's book (2010) may be cited:



Reading rebus the Meluhha words on this cylinder seal, the hieroglyphs -- scarf, reed, four stars, bull -- can be interpreted as logoglottosememes:

dhaṭu 'scarf' Rebus: dhatu 'mineral (ore)'

काँड् । काण्डः m. the stalk or stem of a reed, grass, or the like, straw. In the compound with dan 5 (p. 221a, l. 13) the word is spelt kāḍ. Rebus: kāḍ  ‘stone’; Ga. (Oll.) kanḍ , (S.) kanḍu (pl. kanḍkil)  stone. dula 'pair' Rebus: dul 'cast (metal)'. Thus, together, the glyphs of a pair of scarfed reeds read rebus: dul dhatu kāḍ 'cast mineral (ore) stone'.

meḍha 'polar star' Rebus: meḍ 'iron'
gaṇḍa 'four' Rebus: kaṇḍa 'furnace'
ḍhangar 'bull' Rebus: ḍhangar 'blacksmith'

The upraised circular motif in front of the bull may denote a bun ingot,ḍhāḷako 'a large metal ingot' (Gujarati)
 
Thus, the cylinder seal is a metalware catalog of a blacksmith working with mineral (ore), iron and furnace.

Kalyanaraman

Malcolm Rogers