ABSTRACT
Writing is perhaps the single most evident characteristic of civilisation, often viewed as a major watershed in the past of humanity, which is traditionally divided into a pre-literate (prehistory) and literate (history) period. The established rationalising view on writing holds that it emerged for the practical purposes of accounting and bureaucracy in the context of Near Eastern temple economies. The weirder aspects of writing (which are plentiful at all times) tend to be regarded as of little importance and marginal compared to its ‘real’ purpose. In this chapter, we suggest that writing is deeply entangled with magical and beneath-the-surface dimensions of reality, from its first emergence all the way to modern computer codes and legal texts. Writing has many practical purposes, and it has mediated socio-cultural changes, but its nature is richer than usually acknowledged in conventional accounts of civilisation. This chapter draws examples from, for instance, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Germanic runic inscriptions, Minoan writing systems, ‘speaking’ artefacts from the dawn of the classical Greek civilisation, early modern fascination with writing systems and pseudo-scripts, and contemporary computer codes. We aim to demonstrate that writing is about communication not only between people but also between different worlds or dimensions of reality. These weirder aspects of writing are not isolated curiosities or superstitions but integral to what writing is as a phenomenon.
