Original subtitles

What if there was a technology that allowed us to teleport

the contents of our minds across time and space directly

into someone else's brain...

..that worked across huge distances, that could send our thoughts

into the future,

yet was so simple a child could use it?

Such a marvel, of course, already exists.

It's not the internet or mobile phones, but an ancient technology,

one that's at least 5,000 years old -

the technology of writing.

Writing is something that most of us do every day

without stopping to think about it.

But if you do stop and think about it, you realise

that what you are doing is quite magical.

You are taking the thoughts from inside your head and putting

them out into the world in a form where another human mind

can understand them, even if they are thousands of miles away -

or perhaps centuries in the future.

In this series, I want to explore this transformative technology,

the different scripts that can turn spoken language into visual form,

the varying methods we have used to put words on a page and the way

that changing the way we write has changed the course of history.

And the first question is about the origin of writing.

Did it develop in different times, in different places?

Or do all the scripts we see around us share a single common root?

And, if that is the case, then where and how did it all begin?

And who began it?

Egypt, the Saqqara funerary complex near Cairo.

In 2300 BC, what today looks like a hill of sand was the pyramid

tomb of Pharaoh Teti.

Inside the tomb, Egyptologist Yasmin El Shazly took me

to see something extraordinary.

Oh, wow!

Yeah, they're pretty impressive, aren't they?

They really are. Yeah.

The walls of Teti's tomb were carved

with thousands of stylised pictures...

..but this was not decoration.

This is the earliest known complete text,

ancient Egyptian text.

Just beautiful.

These pictures are hieroglyphs - a writing system older

than the pyramids themselves.

And what do they say? They are spells that help resurrect the King

in the afterlife.

If you know how to read them,

you can find the King's name repeated again and again

in every incantation.

Oh! Oh! Rise up, O Teti!

Take your head,

collect your bones, gather your limbs,

shake the earth from your flesh.

Take your bread that rots not,

your beer that sours not,

stand at the gates that bar the common people.

Rise up, O Teti, you shall not die!

Wow! Oh, there's so much writing. Yes.

These are all magic spells, designed to resurrect the King

so he could live forever in the afterlife.

The fact that his name is still there

made him, in a sense, immortal.

We're speaking about him right now, and the ancient Egyptians realised that, they realised

that the written word had so much power and that,

by writing your name,

you became immortal, you immortalised yourself.

Hieroglyphs are indeed magic.

They may not raise the dead, but, like all writing,

they allow them to speak.

Writing is one of the few things that all societies do.

Everybody uses a pen or a brush

and, with that, we can express all of our thoughts, record

all of our information,

study the stars and compose poems and write letters to each other.

So writing binds humanity together practically

more than any other activity.

Today, we take it for granted,

but the creation of writing is the event which gave

humanity a history.

When you scrutinise what happened, it is actually very dramatic

in one important sense - what we like to call

in our department the giant leap for mankind.

Writing always starts with pictures

and then it becomes a little bit more complicated, and that's

how you develop into a purely alphabetic system later on.

How did our ancestors conceive of writing?

How did they learn to make pictures speak?

And how did those pictures

eventually become the letters we use today?

As I discovered, the answer to those questions can only be found

in an archaeology of the human mind.

Writing is a recent innovation.

Our species has existed for about 300,000 years

and, for all but the last 5,000 of them, people had to record

and transmit vital knowledge without the aid of writing.

Some cultures still do.

HE VOCALISES

In the Northern Territory of Australia,

Yidumduma Bill Harney, an elder of the Wardaman people, is singing

an ancient song about the creation of the world.

HE SINGS

All the songline trail that they made it,

happening all the way right back from beginning of everything,

to people to people to people all the way,

billion years, to million years,

and come down and 100 years and now,

now come back to right up to us.

And we know all the song now.

That's why we're never sure that creating song away,

we still got it here today.

What kind of knowledge is in those songs?

In a songline trail,

the knowledge that is given you from the old people,

you know what they call songline trail,

naming all the different sights,

the plants, trees, mountain, water hole, and all that.

And so it's like a map?

Like a map. It is a map, in your mind, but all links up.

So break it here? Yeah, like this,

you've got to put your fingernail on it. Yeah?

Meeting Bill,

I was impressed by the richness and complexity of Aboriginal culture

handed down orally for probably tens of thousands of years

without the need to write anything down.

That's amazing!

And that raised a fundamental question about writing.

Why did our ancestors feel the need for it?

What prompted them to start recording things,

not for the ear, but for the eye?

Images are important, indeed sacred in Aboriginal culture

and, before I was allowed to see them,

Bill needed to introduce me to the ancestors.

HE VOCALISES

Thank you.

I said hi to the spiritual people,

call out I brought this stranger to welcome them.

I've got a young lady here, told them it's a lady,

and he's happy.

Thank you.

This is Gandawag-ya, the Moon Rock.

As we talked, it quickly became clear that Bill's way of thinking

about images was quite different to mine.

While we're standing here now,

this one what I call Moon dream inside.

And that's...that's half Moon.

Yeah. That's it in there.

Yeah. When he was a human, he was called Yiwalyarri.

He's up in the sky. Yeah.

Now he's here, in the rock. In the rock. Yeah.

In the Wardaman creation story,

all the plants and animals of the world were once people,

the Wardamans' ancestors,

wandering across a formless, muddy land

until the creation dog let out a mighty howl.

When he's "hooo", like this, the dog and the sound he made,

everything changed.

He changed our world.

And this country now,

where, from the soft mud, man become a rock,

and all these people become a tree, and changed all the different

animals, kangaroos, dingoes,

whatever you can make, lizards, snakes and all.

As the mud hardened, some of the ancestors passed

into the rock, leaving traces of that moment of creation.

They were the mud, and people come along and put their foot there.

See? And that's what it is there.

He was in the mud, now he's in the rock.

The humans there, there's a dog here.

All over, as I said.

And that shatter off to the Moon,

then one day all of the rock as well,

during the creation.

When I see an image, I naturally think of it as a representation,

a picture of something.

But, to Bill, these are not pictures of the ancestors -

these ARE the ancestors gone into the rock.

Bill's song about the ancestors is also addressed to them...

..but he has to rely on memory.

These images, powerful as they are,

cannot tell him which words to use.

In order for images to do that,

they would have to gain a new power -

the power of representation.

And write a big songline from west to east.

Cairo's Egyptian museum is crammed with thousands of objects excavated

from the tombs of ancient Egypt.

One of the very oldest was discovered by Gunter Dreyer

in the 1990s, at a dig in the city of Abydos.

It's a clay vase, which predates the first pharaoh by many centuries.

It was made 5,700 years ago

and it seems to use imagery in a new way.

Gunter believes that the vase is decorated

with a stylised representation

of the distinctive geography of the Nile Valley.

Egyptians have always lived on the land immediately adjacent

to the Nile, where irrigation ditches can bring river water

to the fields.

Ancient Egyptian life was largely confined

to this narrow strip of green.

The desert highlands on either side was where the dead were buried.

So these lines represent something, something that is not present.

It's a conceptual revolution in the meaning of a picture.

And if a picture can represent a thing, it can represent a word.

But what was it that made people want to represent words

in visual form?

5,000 years ago, Egypt lay at one end of a zone of cultivation

called the Fertile Crescent.

At the other end lay Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq.

In both places, people had learned how to irrigate the land

to increase food production,

that meant that not everyone had to work the land

and a more complex society could develop.

Irving Finkel from the British Museum is an expert on Mesopotamia

and the region's first civilisation, Sumer.

To set the scene,

it's important to understand that, in Mesopotamia, the Sumerians

had what we call city-states, independent walled entities

with a large population of farmers all around, administrators,

a central temple and so forth.

And it is in those enclaves of so-called civilisation

that the need was, I think, first felt for some kind

of record keeping.

What we've got in front of us is a very small handful of pieces

of clay with writing on called cuneiform writing.

Yes. And we have in our department a huge collection of 130,000 or so.

I thought, if they were all here, you'd become giddy and dizzy

and perhaps even fall asleep.

Overwhelmed anyway. Exactly.

So we start with this.

So that's the oldest of these ones.

It is.

Do you have an approximate date?

It's probably about 2,900 BC, something like that.

Wow, so 5,000 years old. Something like that.

And the thing about it is you can see it's a very orderly piece

of work because it's ruled into columns and these round things

and half round things are numerals,

and at the back there's a big total, where all the numbers are added up.

And this is a sign for barley,

which indicates that it's some kind of...

You can see, that this is an ear of barley,

in a pictographic kind of form.

Yes. And originally the writing began in the pictographic form,

what we call pictographic form, which means that people produce

the scribes, produce little drawings of whatever

they were talking about, the animals and plants and things like this.

So it's a very primitive level of writing, but it's very ancient.

And it actually exemplifies probably why writing came into existence

in the first place, because it's a document

which is concerned with wages. Yes.

And people argue that this script came out of the requirement

for complicated administration of this kind

where written records became necessary.

But anybody who works with the Inland Revenue will be proud

to feel that that was their striking contribution

to the progress of mankind.

So what I was holding in my hands was the distant ancestor

of today's spreadsheet,

a grid of boxes with symbols that represent numbers

and pictures that represent commodities.

But the language of accountancy is limited.

Eventually, the distinctive wedge-shaped writing

called cuneiform that developed in Mesopotamia

would be capable of representing

the full richness of Sumerian

and the other languages of the region.

It would be used to write great epics,

recount ghost stories and tell jokes.

But as Irving explained, to make pictographic signs speak in this way

would take another great conceptual leap.

You could go quite a long way with these simple signs,

but the giant leap came when somebody conceived

of this matter, that you could draw a picture

which represented something that someone could recognise.

But, at the same time, that sign could be used just for the sound

of the thing it looked like,

so that the sound became drawn out of or separated from the picture.

So, on this tablet here, there is an ear of barley.

Now the word for barley in Sumerian is pronounced like "she".

So your Sumerian sees this and says, "She, barley."

But, at the same time, this scribe or a fellow scribe,

in writing a totally different kind of document,

could use this sign not to mean barley, but just to write

the sound of "she".

And this giant leap is something rather simple, and it's something

which could have occurred to a child, but, nevertheless,

it is of great lasting significance.

Using a picture to represent a sound in this way is called

the rebus principle

and it makes it possible to spell out words using pictures.

To give a really clear example,

there's a word "shega" in Sumerian,

which means beautiful or pretty or nice or something like that

and so a scribe would write it syllabically - "she-ga."

So he would use this sign, the barley sign, for the "she" bit.

And then he'd have to write "ga" for the second bit.

As it happens, "ga" means milk.

So he would draw the picture which represented milk,

and barley and milk together would spell shega,

which had nothing to do with either barley or milk.

So this is a kind of rebus writing.

Rebus is a smart word for it, it's really a pun in some sense.

It's a kind of pun

that you get another meeting out of a sign.

At the other end of the Fertile Crescent,

Egyptians, too, started to make rebus puns.

Compelling evidence of this comes

from an extraordinary object in Cairo's Egyptian Museum,

the Narmer Palette, carved in 3,000 BC.

By conquering the Nile Delta, Narmer took control of the river

all the way to the sea, becoming the first pharaoh

of a unified Egyptian state.

The Palette tells the story entirely through pictures.

But next to the main characters in this grisly tale

are seemingly random pairs of images,

such as a catfish and a chisel.

They only make sense in light of the rebus principle.

The Egyptian word for catfish is "nar", a chisel is "mer".

When combined, they sound out Narmer,

the name of the first of the pharaohs.

Next to his defeated enemy is the symbol for a harpoon -

"war" in Egyptian.

Below it is a rectangle similar to the ones on the Abydos vase.

The next step was to extend the rebus principle,

which on the Palette is used to spell names,

to the full vocabulary of the Egyptian language.

The script the Egyptians created in this way rivals cuneiform

for the prize of being the world's first true

writing system, hieroglyphs.

Orly Goldwasser has made them a lifetime study.

Hello. Lovely to see you.

How are you?

Great. When I'm here, it's great.

What have we got here then?

What do you think it is?

Well, it's certainly a text.

I don't know which way to read it. How do you know it's a text?

It's all pictures. Stylised.

Yeah, what else? With repetitions.

Yeah.

There's obviously a certain ordering.

The sizes. Oh, sizes is very important.

You see everything is actually on the same size -

people, birds, houses, snakes, hands.

The hand of a person and the whole person

is of the same size,

so this gives your mind immediately an order.

The idea you are not in picture reading,

but in script reading. Mm.

This is the greatest experiment ever conducted to write language

in pictures only. Only pictures.

It's an enormous cognitive effort to read it or to write it,

but it's fantastic.

What makes hieroglyphs so difficult is that the scribes use thousands

of symbols and the rebus means that most of them have

at least two quite distinct meanings.

If we are talking about a duck, as you see it here,

it can be a representation of a duck

and this is fine. This is easy.

But in many other cases, he is not a duck at all.

He's just the sound of the duck - so.

For example, the word daughter is sot,

or something like that.

We don't know exactly how to pronounce it.

So, for the so, we have our duck.

And afterwards we put another sign, something that looks like

a small half French bread.

You see it, cut French bread, which gives the meaning - t.

So sot.

The rebus principle was the key that unlocked writing

for the peoples of the Fertile Crescent.

With pictures that spoke, rulers could write

the history of their reigns,

draw up legal codes,

administer far flung empires

and build monuments that still impress us today.

The rebus is among the most consequential intellectual

innovations of all time.

So who discovered it?

True writing starts when the sounds of a language are represented

and that, I think, was first developed in Egypt.

And, of course, there's a bit of a squabble between

Egyptologists and Assyriologists about who invented writing

and, of course, we did - important thing to clarify.

So, was the rebus born in Egypt,

or Mesopotamia,

or somewhere else entirely?

The National Library of China.

I came here to see examples of another ancient script

used more than 3,000 years ago

at the court of the Shang Emperors.

Wonderful. Thank you.

Oh, that's extraordinary.

It's such a complete example.

I was looking at the shoulder blade of an ox -

dated around 1200 BC.

Incised on it are characters in a clearly pictographic script.

This is an oracle bone

used in pyromancy, or divination by fire.

Thousands of them have been unearthed

and each is inscribed with one or more questions.

And these could range enormously

from "Is the Emperor's toothache due to an angry ancestor?"

to "Will it rain next week?"

or perhaps, "Is this a good day to invade our neighbours?"

Once the question had been written on the bone,

you turned it around and made a small pit.

A hot poker was then inserted into the pit and the bone would crack,

and the answer to your question lay in the form of the crack.

And, in fact, this one has been deciphered.

It's asking whether the emperor should muster his army,

that much is clear,

but because we've lost the art of this particular form of divination,

we don't know what the answer was.

The reason the inscriptions are often readable

is that oracle bone script is clearly the precursor

of modern Chinese writing.

In the Beijing Huijia Private School,

Sophia is teaching her six-year-old pupils to read and write.

Sophia's main task is to help her pupils memorise

hundreds of Chinese characters.

To do so, she often starts with the way a character was written

3,000 years ago on oracle bones,

where the pictographic nature of Chinese writing is easier to see.

At root, like hieroglyphs,

Chinese characters are stylised pictures,

but the similarities with Ancient Egyptian writing do not end there.

Professor Yeung Shin Chen is a philologist

who has studied both writing systems.

Egyptian and the Chinese writing are very comparable.

When I started to learn Egyptian hieroglyphics,

I could feel that there are so many similarities.

Firstly, the ancient people think to use pictures,

but they found pictograms are not enough

because there are many abstract concepts

and abstract words in language.

If you want to record the language fully

pictograms will never succeed,

so the...

Think of the method of rebus, rebus principle.

The rebus principle is particularly useful in Chinese

because the spoken language has many homophones -

words that sound the same but have different meanings.

For example, "mu" means "tree"

but it also means "to wash oneself"

and so the stylised picture of a tree can represent the word tree,

and it can also be used as a so-called phonogram

to represent the sound "mu", to wash,

but that, of course, could be confusing.

Sometimes we don't know

what the phonograms indicate -

the meaning or the sound...

..so they use a determinative.

A determinative is a symbol which classifies words into categories

and so gives a clue as to the correct way to read a character.

These three strokes indicate that the character being written

has something to do with water.

They can be used to distinguish mu - tree,

from mu - to wash,

and so clarify the ambiguity inherent in rebus writing.

There are 214 classifier signs

and the majority of Chinese characters are formed using one.

Egyptian scribes, too, divided words into categories

and, as well as representing words or sounds,

many hieroglyphs can also be used as classifiers.

For example, you have a duck

after all the names of birds.

You can say "a falcon" and then you will have a duck,

which means that the falcon belongs to the category of birds.

The phonogram classifier combination is a very good way

to represent a word.

Both Egyptian people and Chinese people believed

that's like a perfect method.

Cuneiform - the writing system of Mesopotamia -

also made use of classifiers...

..as did the last great picture-based writing system

to be developed in the new world around 600 BC.

Mayan glyphs also depend on the rebus principle

to spell out sounds

and use classifiers to sort out the consequent ambiguities.

The similarities are striking.

If you know a bit about cuneiform and Mayan script

and Egyptian script and Chinese script, for example, the main four,

you have an inescapable feeling that even though they look

completely unrelated,

nevertheless they have many things in common,

and this forces you to consider

the whole question of origin and spread.

So could there be a common origin of all writing,

a single time and place

where the secret of turning pictures into words was first discovered?

The way I look at it is this - these writing systems have in common

the rebus principle.

The rebus writing is the written version

of the pun in speech

and everybody makes puns and puns are a natural human form of humour,

and once you start with the idea of reducing speech

to any kind of symbol from which language can be retrieved,

then the rebus thing hits you in the face

because when you're casting around for the way to do it,

it's obvious. It's just obvious.

In other words, the similarities between ancient writing systems

reflect not a common origin,

but what all people throughout history have always had in common -

the human mind.

In other words, any load of human beings, in any context,

who have to invent writing will come up with rebus writings -

it's inevitable.

At the Medieval Round Church in Cambridge,

I went to see an event organised by my friend,

the calligraphic artist Brody Neuenschwander.

He calls it A Brush With Silence

and it celebrates the diversity of scripts in use around the world.

Brush With Silence brings calligraphers

from about 20 different cultures together.

They sit in silence and they write their own scripts.

It is a meditation in ink.

But A Brush With Silence presented me with a puzzle.

While the Japanese and Chinese calligraphers

drew Chinese characters,

whose connection with the origin of writing I could see,

at every other table, the calligraphers were using scripts

which look very different.

Instead of thousands of pictograms,

they employ just a few dozen simple shapes.

These are the world's alphabets.

At first glance, alphabets don't seem to have anything to do

with the rebus principle,

so what was the connection between the way writing began

and the way most people write today?

In search of an answer to those questions,

I came to the Sinai Desert in Egypt

with archaeologist Pierre Tallet.

Pierre was returning to the plateau of Serabit el-Khadim

in the company of old friends.

THEY EXCHANGE GREETINGS

With our guide Saleem, we set out to climb 400 metres

to the plateau above.

We were following a path trod 4,000 years ago

by expeditions sent here by the pharaohs of Egypt

to mine the gemstone turquoise.

This is the real entrance for the place of Serabit el-Khadim.

You have the main access to the plateau

and you can see, on this big face of rock,

plenty of inscriptions and drawings that have been left

by many people trying to commemorate their venue in this place.

Arriving in here into the place, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And, for example, here you have a very skilled inscription

with very nice hieroglyphs,

but, of course, everybody was not able

to write his name.

And you have here other means to commemorate

the arrival of somebody.

They could leave signs, very crude signs, like this star,

that you can see here.

You even have an hashtag on...a kind of hashtag, of course,

on the big rock that you have behind us.

These people are trying to find their own sign

to identify themselves. Yeah, of course.

And you have, in fact, literate and illiterate people

that are all involved in the same operations.

And it's probably the combination of those illiterate

and literate people that would produce a new script.

We were also following in the footsteps

of a famous husband and wife team of archaeologists,

William and Hilda Flinders Petrie,

who first came here in 1905.

At the edge of the plateau, the Petries came across the ruins

of an Ancient Egyptian temple

dominated by dozens of large stone markers called stelae.

The stelae were covered in hieroglyphs

that revealed to the Petries why a temple had been built

in this remote spot so far from the Nile Valley.

This one is one of the best stelae that we have in this temple,

and it is the biography of an official.

He complains at the beginning because he is sent to Sinai

not in the good period, because it's during the summer

and the weather was too hot, but at the end it's a perfect story

because he is getting more turquoise than everybody before him,

and everybody goes safe and sound back to the Nile Valley.

So this is a common type of monument?

Yes, we have several monuments of that type.

So we have a huge amount of information about individuals.

About individuals, and we have, in fact,

one stele for every mission that was made to Sinai.

The turquoise those missions came here to find

was an important ingredient in the magic

that raised a dead pharaoh to eternal life.

And the temple, the Petries learned, was dedicated to Hathor,

the goddess of turquoise,

so that the miners could invoke her aid,

but it was in the mine workings themselves

that the Petries made their most surprising discovery.

Hilda stepped on a stone

and she picked up the stone and told Petrie,

"There is something here."

And this stone in the mine

was the first inscription in something very strange

that nobody saw ever before.

And Petrie looked on it, and he said,

"This is not Egyptian.

"It looks like ugly, very ugly hieroglyphics,

"but it's not Egyptian.

"There are too few signs here.

"This should be an alphabet."

And this was the boom.

If Petrie was right, these would be by far

the oldest alphabetic inscriptions ever found.

Could this be the first alphabet?

And if so, who was responsible for it?

Pierre showed me a fascinating clue among the stelae.

This individual clearly participated in more than one expedition

because he's pictured on another stela,

where the hieroglyphs give us his name.

Retjenu was an Egyptian name for the biblical land of Canaan

and Canaanite migrant workers may have been a familiar sight in Egypt.

These wall paintings decorate a tomb above the Nile in upper Egypt.

They date from the same period as the stela at Serabit.

And one panel shows travellers,

in the distinctive patterned robes of Canaan,

which contrast with the simple white loincloths

of the Egyptians.

The hieroglyphic inscription explains that 37 foreigners came

to make offerings to the local ruler,

perhaps hoping to be given work.

Something similar happened at Serabit, but, on the plateau,

the cultural exchange between Canaanites and Egyptians seems

to have had momentous consequences.

It seemed that the inscriptions in the mines were related

to the hieroglyphs in the temple - but how?

Then another Egyptologist examined an object that Petrie had brought

back from Serabit to the British Museum.

Thank you, Mark. Really, thank you.

Last time that I saw him, he was in a box. Yeah.

He moved now into a basket. Into a basket, yeah.

For me, it's worth all the gold of Egypt,

this little piece that stays here, in the basket.

He has a small inscription in Egyptian and a parallel

inscription in the strange signs below.

So here you have an option to break the code.

This is why I call him the Rosetta Stone of the alphabet.

The code-breaker was Sir Alan Gardiner.

Gardiner looks on it and it's very easy for him to read

the Egyptian part.

It's a repetitive formula,

hundreds of times. It says, "The beloved of the goddess Hathor."

And then he looks on the strange signs below.

Gardiner guessed that they must spell out a similar dedication

in the Canaanite language to a Canaanite goddess.

A Canaanite wouldn't call this goddess Hathor.

So he wants a name, he wants the name of the goddess

because, if his theory is correct, he has the beloved.

Beloved of whom?

On the other side of the sphinx was what looked like a complete

inscription and Gardiner was struck by the last symbol.

It looked like the letter T in the ancient Paleo-Hebrew alphabet

and that reminded him of a Canaanite goddess known from scripture.

In the Bible, we know the God Ba'al

and he had a consort.

The consort in Canaanite is

always with a T ending of the female - and she is Ba'alat.

So Gardiner guessed that this was what

the last four symbols spelled out.

The complete name of the Canaanite goddess,

that he presumed should play the role of Hathor, here,

Ba'alat.

The name of the goddess was the key to understanding

the mysterious Serabit script.

The first letter, this rectangle, was clearly based on the Egyptian

hieroglyph for house, Pr.

Egyptian scribes used this symbol in three ways -

to write the word "house" to represent the sound "Pr",

and, finally, as a classifier attached to any word to do

with buildings in general.

But the Canaanites ignored all these complexities.

The great trick, the genius trick, was to take a picture,

to read it in its Canaanite name.

The house is "beit" in a Canaanite dialect

and then you take only the first sound, the "ba".

And whenever you will need the "ba",

you draw this house.

This is the familiar Rebus principle,

but applied in a radically new way.

The characters do not stand for the sound of the whole word,

but only for the sound at the beginning of the word.

And this is the great invention.

This is the alphabet in around 30 pictures, 25 to 30 pictures.

You can write everything because you are after single sounds

that you need, and to write something in this Canaanite dialect

you needed around 30 sounds, that's all.

And this was the huge...the fantastic invention.

Here it is.

This is it. Yeah, this is it.

And maybe you have in front of you one of the first As

of history, just followed by one of the first Bs of history, also.

Literally alphabet. Literally alphabet.

And it is working as an alphabet.

It is an alphabet. They are using hieroglyphic signs,

but in a much simpler way.

The first B we have.

The first B from the whole history.

It was truly astonishing to see, scratched nearly 4,000 years ago,

a symbol which is the origin of a letter I use every single day.

The journey from the minds of Serabit to the pages of my diary

began when Hebded and his followers took their new script back

to Canaan, where it was adopted

by another Canaanite people - the Phoenicians.

Traders and seafarers,

they spread the alphabet across the Middle East

and the Mediterranean, where it was taken up by Greeks

and then Romans.

We asked Orly Goldwasser to join calligrapher Brody Neuenschwander

to explore the steps that gradually transformed hieroglyphs at Serabit

into the letters we use today.

The Canaanites took the hieroglyphs

that were meaningful for them

and then they saw the head of the bull.

They could immediately relate to it

because this was the head of their own God, Ba'al.

Ah-ha. OK.

But, in in their Semitic dialect, the animal was called "aluf",

or "alph" or "aleph."

So they looked at this bull, but they would say "aluf" instead

of the Egyptian word.

Yeah, they said it in their own language. What did they care?

And then they decided this will stand for "A".

So they would make it much simpler than that, I suppose,

just in a couple of strokes of the brush, really? Right.

Many hundreds of years later, scribes in Phoenicia adopt this...

..this drawing of the bull.

They just turn it around because they don't care about the image

and then the Romans just changed the direction.

And you reach your A in English and in Latin,

and what you have here is actually the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph

of the bull sleeping forever in the letter A,

because this is just the bull turned on his horns.

Do you see?

Almost all the letters of the Latin alphabet are ultimately derived

from the hieroglyphs that the Canaanites of Serabit chose

to represent the sounds of their tongue.

The broken rectangle that was the Egyptian sign for "house"

was abbreviated by the Greeks...

..flipped by the Romans, to create the Latin B.

The Egyptian hieroglyph for "water",

"mayim" in the Canaanite tongue...

..became the Greek Mu

and then the Latin M.

There were two Egyptian signs which represented snakes.

These became the Greek Nu and our N.

So what was the Egyptian word for head?

We don't know exactly, but something like "teptup",

but it is of no interest for the Canaanite.

What is their word for head?

Very different. "Rosh." Rosh. With an R?

Yes, with an R at the beginning, and here they will reach the R.

So this is the Canaanite... This is the Canaanites. ..head.

Yeah.

Then the Greeks make a rather more

abstract representation of the head here,

even though you can see the general idea of head.

The Romans turned everything the other way, systematically.

Everything is in the leading direction.

But it's been centuries

and centuries since we've seen any kind of image in this,

and I don't think anybody would know that behind that letter is actually

a profile of a head. Yes.

Again, the Egyptian hieroglyph is hiding in the R. Right.

They're always hiding.

But it's not just Latin and Greek letters that derive from Serabit.

Almost all the world's alphabet share this same root.

Scripts like Hebrew...

..Armenian...

..Cyrillic...

..Tibetan...

..Devanagari...

..Gujarati.

Sometimes the connection is far from obvious,

but it's still there.

This document is a leaf from a

seventh century Koran dated to 675 CE,

the first Islamic century.

It represents one of the earliest examples of writing Arabic

in a calligraphic style.

But when I look at it, I see in these archaic letter shapes

the echoes of the alphabet at Serabit.

So, for example, if you see this letter here,

it looks like a line with a small tail,

this is the alif, the first letter, the A.

It originally looked a little like a bull, like this,

and it gets stylised in Phoenician, simplified, simply this.

Now the connection between that and our A in English

is quite obvious.

Now, one more step takes us to Nabatiye and Aramaic.

Another simplification, it looks simply like a six.

And then in the Koran fragment that we looked at,

we can see that the loop has almost completely disappeared and we simply

have this little tail.

And then the modern Arabic script, a straight line.

So that straight line through these stages goes all the way back

to that bull, even though at different ends

they look nothing alike.

So the modern Arabic alphabet and the Latin alphabet that we use

to write English are our cousins,

they belong to the same family.

All the alphabets of Arabia, of the Mediterranean,

of the Middle East, all of the alphabet scripts seem to go

back to one original prototype.

It seems that the alphabet, the concept of writing each phoneme

with a separate glyph, that idea, as simple as it is,

was only invented once.

What Hebded and his followers did in the mines of Serabit

changed the world.

They were not scribes or scholars, but, when they adapted the

rebus principle, which was the basis of all ancient scripts, to make

the first letters, they created a form of communication

which would eventually sweep the globe.

We owe to those illiterate migrant workers

the invention of the alphabet...

..a simple script which gave the gift of writing

to countless cultures, uniting the peoples of the world

across space and time.

In the year of our Lord, 1448, in Mainz, Germany,

a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg

was experimenting with a lead alloy

and a hand-held mould.

His aim was to speed up the process of putting ink on paper.

But what he did was speed up history.

Gutenberg's invention spelled the end of the Middle Ages

and ushered in the modern world of science and industry.

Every innovation of today is built on this foundation.

Yet behind Gutenberg's press, lay centuries of development and change

in the way words were written -

without which, he could never have succeeded.

This is the story of history's most important technology.

The technology of putting words on a page.

Looks a bit out of place.

Well, I take a pretty experimental and hands-on approach

to calligraphy, to say the least.

It only takes a few moments actually to make one of the best pens I know.

You're making a pen. Yeah, that's right.

Brody Neuenschwander is a calligrapher, an artist who takes

letters as his starting point.

Brody is a modern artist, but he stands in a tradition

that stretches back 5,000 years to the beginning of writing.

For most of that time, words were written by hand

using a variety of tools.

In this film,

Brody and I want to explore the changing methods people have used

to create written texts and how changing the way we write

changed the course of history.

I'm going to write a phrase from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins,

"As kingfishers catch fire" and use this pen.

One of my favourite pens, made of a drinks can, because it gives me

so many possibilities, produce different kinds of lines.

So the A, we'll start with a great...

Oh, yes!

And you should see right away what this is doing for me.

It's doing something very particular.

It's giving me the almost splattered feel of a brush. Yes.

And then the finest hairline of a quill.

And then this great big fat line.

I can do all those different things with this one...

That you made in a minute? In moments, absolutely.

And you know what?

The great thing is, I'm never without a pen.

I can always find a Coke can.

I can always find a pair of scissors and some tape and a pencil

or a stick to put it on. It's beautiful.

So you've created a new piece of technology here.

But I know that you're also interested in the writing implements

of the past, aren't you?

Writing is obviously the fundamental, most important

technology of society.

It's how knowledge is created, how it's shared, how it's preserved

for the future.

And each society does that in its own way,

with its own tools and materials.

And I can investigate that in a very, very precise way

by going back to those tools and materials and see what happens

when I write with them.

So, it's a sort of experimental approach to historical research

using the real tools and materials that were used in earlier times.

Arguably, the history of writing begins in Egypt.

The ancient Egyptians created the world's first nation state.

And they ran it with the help

of one of the very earliest writing systems.

Egyptian hieroglyphs can still be read in monumental inscriptions

carved in stone.

But the Egyptians also had a portable everyday medium

on which to write.

Brody has come to Egypt

to learn about this pioneering information technology.

My name is Sam. I'm Brody. Welcome.

I'll give you a brief idea about this plant, the papyrus plant,

and how the ancient Egyptians were using this plant

to make paper.

Papyrus is a type of sedge,

which grows all along the banks of the Nile.

Readily available and easily harvested,

this unassuming plant was turned by the Egyptians

into one of the foundations of civilisation.

We remove the green parts,

all of the green cover.

We divide it into a long and thin slices, like this.

But that part once was breakable, as you can see,

or easy to break.

To make the slices more flexible,

we use this one.

The slice now would be more strong and more flexible

than before when it was big.

Then we soak the slices in fresh water.

After two weeks, we take the slices from the water.

We arrange them between two pieces of cotton.

These are the slices that we have here, the slices,

in vertical and horizontal lines, like this.

One vertical, another horizontal

and down in space.

One by one, and so, by two, then we complete the whole sheet.

We cover them.

We put them under a press machine for one week.

One week, and off the press,

we get this paper,

and this is the first paper in the world.

Well, it feels like a wonderful surface.

I think I would really enjoy writing on it, actually. Mm.

As civilisation spread from Egypt across the Mediterranean world,

so did papyrus. It became an important export,

and when Egypt was finally conquered by the Roman Empire in 30 BC,

one of the biggest prizes of conquest was domination

of the Mediterranean papyrus trade.

The Romans had a large and complex empire that ran on the written word

and papyrus, being their form of paper, was imported from Egypt,

and it shipped over here in enormous quantities,

and papyrus, rolled up into scrolls, was for centuries the Roman book.

If there was a fresco of a householder,

wanting to show they were literate,

they would be holding a scroll. Very deeply ingrained.

But how were those papyrus scrolls produced?

Back in Brody's studio, we set out to explore how the Romans wrote.

What have you got here?

Well, I just got back from Cairo, where I bought this papyrus,

which I'd never used before.

Now, I'm really interested to see what the surface is like,

and so I've got a reed pen here, cut to nearly a point,

which is what they used for writing semiformal Roman books.

Brody sets out to copy a letter, sent from Rome to Egypt,

preserved in the desert sand for nearly 2,000 years.

So I'm going to see what it's like to write those letters

with this reed pen.

You always learn a lot at the very first moment

that you touch the pen to the writing surface.

How does it feel?

Very...

..smooth, even...

..I would say almost slippery.

It's, er...

..it's like skating.

Whoa, you're going at quite a pace.

Yes, it's encouraging a very light,

sort of almost flicking kind of motion of the pen.

Seems really it's rather amazing.

I have to dip frequently. That's one thing I'm noticing.

So it uses more than... Well, I think, you know, this,

that's probably because of the reed doesn't have a natural reservoir,

the way a quill would. Ah, a quill does, yeah.

So it's flowing out very quickly. Yes.

But it's naturally urging me

to stretch the letters out,

and I'm getting that feeling, that I recognise from Roman scrolls,

of a spacious, horizontal style of writing.

But that's just coming naturally, is it, because of the paper?

Yeah, that's how it feels... Yeah. ..with this pen.

So you are getting a feel for what it is to be a scribe

in Roman Empire?

Yeah, I have the feeling that if I were one of those scribes

working in the book shops near Trajan's Forum,

and you walked in with your copy of Ovid, and you said,

"I need it before a dinner party on Friday",

you know, I think I could manage that for you. Right.

So this is really going very quickly... Yes.

..and since I can write on this papyrus quickly,

and since it's not an expensive, was not an expensive material,

then I think the price of books would not have been very high

in ancient Rome.

So we're here in Trajan's market. Yeah,

and these spaces here are like Roman shops,

single rooms, open directly out onto the street,

and they've got accommodation in there for supplies

and for merchandising, maybe for staff,

and if you look at this travertine doorway here,

you can see there's a shutter or a groove into which... Oh, yes.

Yes. ..the shutters, there's space here for a door to open.

Right. Inside, space for merchandise and stock,

maybe a mezzanine floor above,

where the shopkeeper could sleep at night,

and a really large amount of space for stuff. Right.

And when this was in use, if it was a shop, you could imagine

the merchandise spilling out onto the street here.

We know about adverts written up on the walls,

so if it's a book shop, there would be books on display up here for sale

to try catch passing trade

and intrigue people to come and make a purchase.

So there's a thriving book culture?

Well, we know that there's a lot of books in ancient Rome

and the book market seems to get more vibrant and busier

as the centuries go by.

Papyrus imported in bulk from Egypt was not necessarily very expensive.

It came in different grades, and the top grade might be pricey,

but there were other cheaper grades available.

The labour might be furnished by slave scribes,

working for book-sellers and publishers,

so the labour might not be terribly expensive as well,

and sometimes authors do criticise book shop copies as being cheap

and rushed, made for a mass-market and not with a great deal of care.

The poet Martial says, for example, you could buy a volume of his verse

for one denarius. That's a soldier's daily wage.

So it's not an inaccessible purchase for many people.

And if you couldn't afford a particular book,

you could always go and consult it in one of Rome's public libraries.

As well as the commercial book-sellers,

there were public libraries, founded by the Empress.

We know of about 29 of them by the late antique period,

so lots and lots of them.

It all adds up to a picture of a world where books

were widely available.

In the libraries, we can estimate maybe tens of thousands of scrolls,

and that's just the big public collections.

So around us here in this square mile or so of the city centre,

maybe hundreds of thousands of scroll books.

But that thriving literary culture was all based

on the ready availability of papyrus,

and by the end of the third century,

Rome's control over the Mediterranean had begun to slip.

Over time, the Roman Empire split into East and West.

Seaborne trade became harder and more expensive to do,

as the empire fragmented,

and the trade in papyrus became harder and harder to sustain,

and you can count the number of fragments of books that survive

by each century, and you can see the number goes down and down.

So there are just fewer books being made,

and this city of great libraries and thousands of thousands of papyri

changes, and a late antique writer says, "Libraries are shut up now,

"and echoing like tombs, and empty".

Rome's empire shrinks

and becomes the start of the new Christian Middle Ages.

The fall of the Roman Empire is one of the great inflection points

of history, and it coincides with a change in the technology

of writing in Europe.

As papyrus disappeared, so did the book,

as a relatively inexpensive, everyday commodity.

Books would become rare and precious objects,

as Europeans turned to a new and much more expensive material

on which to write.

I am Lee Mapley.

I am the only traditional master parchment maker left in the world,

which is quite unique.

Essentially, we're taking a raw material,

completely natural sheepskin, calfskin or goatskin,

and we are converting it into a beautiful writing material.

We tie the skin into a frame and it has to be stretched.

I'm realigning the fibres of the skin to get it nice and solid,

to keep that nice flat surface,

so then I can also work any flesh off the skin

and work the grease out of the skin in the frame.

So it's literally elbow grease and hot water to remove

that grease from the skin.

Ah! So I've got here a fabulous quality piece of parchment,

prepared for writing, and you can see where it comes from.

You can see its origin.

The four legs of the cow and the four corners coming out.

This is the spine of the animal.

You can just see a slightly paler line running down the middle

of the skin,

with the pelvic bones even showing here.

This would be where, for a large book, the page would be folded.

That's why we call it the spine of a book.

The spine of a book! Yeah, of course!

The fact the parchment could be folded made it possible

to stitch leaves together into a codex,

the form of the modern book.

Each sheet of parchment would yield eight pages of an octavo volume,

which meant that it took a lot of animals to make a single book.

But a book made from parchment would be extremely durable.

It's resistant to natural acid in the air.

You can't burn it. It is classified as non-combustible.

You can't tear it. It's incredibly strong.

It holds the insides of a beast.

A beast could be 500 or 600 kilos and they don't fall out, do they?

So it's nigh on indestructible.

You know that, whatever you write,

you're leaving this nugget of history for thousands of years

for those that follow.

The medieval pen was also an animal product.

A bird's feather.

Cutting a quill starts with shortening it.

Sadly, it's a little less romantic that way,

but otherwise it would stick in your eye.

And then you have to open the end of it,

and make a slit,

and the slit that I make now by lifting the knife

is what brings the ink to the point of the pen,

and then, starting on the other side,

I cut from one side towards the slit that I just made,

and then from the other side, towards the slit,

and I make a symmetrical point.

Now I use a lot of different tools, modern ones and all,

but I've still never found anything better than a good swan quill.

The lines have been scored into the parchment.

That has an advantage because both sides are lined at the same time.

Same time, in the same place, same thickness, yes.

Exactly what we want, because parchment is translucent. Mm.

You always have show-through to the other side. Yes.

You want the rows of letters back-to-back. Yeah.

Otherwise, they interfere with the reader. Yeah, yeah.

That makes sense.

I don't want to write into the line,

because that's a little gutter and my ink will run along it,

so I'm going to avoid actually making the mark into the line.

Ooh, that's a nice skin. Why? What makes it a nice skin?

Oh, just the way the pen feels,

when you write in the textured, velvety surface.

Mm.

It grabs it just the right way,

just enough resistance, so that you know exactly what you're doing.

The surface of the parchment has a sort of velvety nap to it.

Very fine, but it's enough to grab the ink,

and as it's drawing,

the fibres close in and hold the ink tightly.

It sounds a little bit odd, but, in a way, I'm almost tattooing

this parchment. Well, it is skin.

It's skin, and the ink is going into the surface.

This is why medieval books last so long, why the letters stay

so sharp and clear, for centuries and centuries.

I mean, look how sharp it is. Oh, and so neat!

Yes. Well, I mean... And regular.

Yeah, well, that's a little bit me... Of course!

THEY CHUCKLE

..but it really is also the materials.

I mean, they just encourage this wonderful...

..sort of stately pace of writing.

Yes.

You see, it's slow. Yes, it's slow. Right?

How many pages do you think you could do in a day?

Well, it depends on the number of words on the page,

but let's say one of the great Bibles, which has two columns,

of 30 or so lines each,

one or two of those pages a day would be a very good day's work.

Two pages a day?

So, if we're talking about a book - say, 250, 300 pages long -

that's a year's worth of writing? Something like that,

and usually split up among a team of people,

but if one person were doing it, yeah, it would take him a year

to do a large book, certainly.

Whereas you were talking about producing an Ovid within a week.

Yes, well, it's a shorter text than the Bible,

but let's just put it in other terms.

I think that writing on papyrus with a reed

is three or four times faster

than writing with a quill on parchment.

As it happens, Brody's studio is in the middle of Bruges.

In the Middle Ages, this city was a great centre of book production,

responsible for a large fraction of all the books being made

in Western Europe.

I went to the town hall to visit the city archivist, Ludo Vandamme,

to try to put what I'd learned about writing on parchment

into historical context.

So, what have you here in the box?

Huh!

Oh, we have animal remains.

Yes, clearly! No way!

Let's take this account.

1307. 1307, and...

But that's quite clearly... Yes. ..a product of an animal, isn't it?

Yes.

Why have they left behind the hide like that?

I have no idea. You don't know? No.

When we have a look into the manuscript... Yes.

..it's an account, an account of the city of Bruges, 1307.

Which language? Then we see that this parchment is a better quality.

Oh, much finer. Look, here.

So nice, white, beige... Very white, very fine.

Fine.

Parchment was rather expensive,

so what's remarkable in this account,

we see that the city of Bruges...

..paid...

I think here we have it,

yeah, here,

"Fronchine, Fronchine",

that's vellum, that's parchment.

So, for all the parchment used by the city administration

for this year... 1307.

..they paid £14, which was a huge amount of money.

So... So the council spent £14 on parchment alone.

On parchment, yes.

Well, you see, it's the highest amount we see here,

in this column... Right.

£4,

£8, and a huge amount,

£14, and it's parchment. Parchment, mm.

The city government may have been spending a small fortune on it,

but most of the parchment used in Bruges went to

the extensive book industry -

and here, too, the archives contain fascinating detail.

So what's this one?

This is a very unique register,

because it's the register of the Guild of St John,

and St John is the guild with all the people

who are working in the book industry in Bruges at this moment.

So we have a snapshot, one year, 1472... 1472.

..of the whole book production in Bruges? Yes.

Amazing. That we have, yeah.

And Bruges is THE centre in Europe at this time, for books.

Bruges is the centre, so we see here a lot of different professions.

Yeah. Here we have a certain Haas,

and he was parchment maker. Yes.

We have book binders, eliminators,

there are scribes, etc,

the whole book production is here in this register.

And there were a lot of women, too,

and that's especially for Bruges and Flanders at that moment,

who ran their own shop.

So these are running workshops? Running workshops, yeah. Excellent.

And how many workshops do you think we have?

If you have a look here, we have 50 workshops. Right.

But we can say about one workshop producing, let's say,

20 books a year. OK.

So 50-ish workshops, we're talking about 1,000 books.

1,000, I think, that's a maximum.

The maximum is 1,000 a year in Bruges,

and Bruges is the biggest centre of production in Europe

at this time, right? Yes.

That's not a lot of books.

It's not a lot, no. It isn't.

Judging by this evidence, it seems that total European book production

in the Middle Ages could not have been more than a few thousand

volumes a year,

something like one book for every 10,000 Europeans.

So books were rare and expensive.

Ludo showed me a contract for one particularly deluxe example.

It is for a nobleman, a huge book,

two volumes, 600 folios,

decorated, eliminated,

the top 1% produced in Bruges,

still conserved in Paris... Oh!

..and what will it cost?

It cost, er...

..here we see,

vingt livres - this is French - £20.

So, one book, two volumes, £20.

Do we have an idea of what that actually means?

Yes, yes, yes... What could it buy in Bruges?

We have an idea.

When you, in this time, you want to buy a house in Bruges,

you can buy a house for £20.

Let's say a middle class house... But still a house. A house.

So the choice is a book or a house? Yes.

Well, he chose the book, this nobleman. Nobleman. Yes.

Money to burn. There's no question.

He chose for the book.

The libraries of Bruges still have examples

of the sort of book that cost as much as a house.

This is the absolute luxury manuscript.

You couldn't get anything more precious, more expensive

and more prestigious than this.

I'm looking at gold, which would have had to have been beaten

into thin sheets to be applied to the page.

I'm looking at blue, which actually came all the way from Afghanistan.

I'm looking at malachite green brought from Central Europe.

It is an 800-page book which represents 400 animals.

400 animals in a very agrarian economy.

Books like this represent a pinnacle of medieval art.

But they also represent a limitation on literacy and scholarship

compared to the broad literary culture of ancient Rome.

When I started my experiments with a reed pen on papyrus,

I was astonished with how quick it was.

First of all, papyrus was a cheap writing material.

That means that books were accessible to a certain segment

of the population in Greek and Roman times.

I think we could almost say that the Middle Ages

is that period when papyrus is no longer used,

no longer available, and parchment becomes the writing surface.

What do we gain from it?

This world of beautiful illuminated manuscripts?

What do we lose? A broader reading culture.

So the shift from antiquity to the Middle Ages

is the shift from papyrus to parchment

and the shift from a wide literate public to a very small one.

Very interesting to see how writing materials and techniques

can have such an immense influence on cultural development.

That's the story in Europe, but in Asia, too,

history has been shaped by the process of putting words on a page.

In China, a rich literary and artistic tradition developed...

..based on a distinctive pictorial script

and a unique writing technology.

The key components of that technology

are traditionally known as the four treasures of the study.

First is paper.

Then the brush.

And the calligrapher needs an ink stone on which to grind her ink,

which comes in the form of a stick of solid pigment.

The four treasures allow Wang Xiaoning

to practise brush calligraphy in much the same way as it has been

for thousands of years.

Brush calligraphy produced works of art that were reprised in China

every bit as much as illuminated manuscripts were in Europe.

But in a medieval manuscript,

the art is in the decoration around the text.

The nature of the Latin alphabet and the characteristics of parchment

produced letters that were regular and repetitive.

But in Chinese brush calligraphy, the art is in the brushwork

that produces the characters themselves.

And that is made possible by the nature of the writing surface.

Paper was invented in China in the 2nd century AD.

And by the 7th century, papermaking was an important Chinese industry.

Paper was key to another Chinese invention.

Wood block printing.

Each handwritten page of text was glued to a wooden block

and then the characters were carved out by a skilled craftsman.

This step was laborious and expensive.

But once the wood block was produced,

it was quick and cheap to print from...

..thanks to paper that was absorbent, flexible and inexpensive.

And because Chinese paper didn't tear easily,

it was a simple matter to stitch the pages together into a book.

Indeed, paper was so plentiful that, even 1,000 years ago,

Chinese people could buy blank notebooks.

It would have been inconceivable to a European from the Middle Ages

to have something like this where you can record your thoughts.

In Europe, every single blank page was an expensive

and scarce resource.

In a world of parchment, many thoughts go unrecorded.

A source of pride, but also a state secret.

For 600 years, only the Chinese knew how to make paper.

But nothing can be kept hidden forever.

This is the Meros Paper Mill near Samarkand,

a key city on the Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean.

In the Middle Ages,

there were hundreds of such water-powered paper mills

operating in the region, churning out paper

for the Islamic Empire of the Abbasid Caliphs.

Papermaking had come to Samarkand as the result of a battle.

In 751, the westward expansion of the Tang dynasty

was checked by Arab forces at the River Talas.

It was a defeat that ensured that to this day

Central Asia would be part of the Muslim world.

And in the captured baggage train of the Chinese army were papermakers.

The secret was out.

How to turn the bark of the mulberry tree

into the seemingly humble material

that was the foundation of Chinese culture and power.

I could watch this forever. Her hands... It's mesmerized.

She just does it so quickly and efficiently.

And you can imagine how important that would have been

because this is being done in hundreds of workshops

by thousands of people to produce this unbelievable quantity of paper.

It starts like this.

To make the paper from mulberry tree,

you cut the spring growth.

That's these thin sticks.

And you can peel it off. Look. Try it. Yeah. Comes off easily.

That's very satisfying.

Yes.

But it gives you the inner pith, which is what you want,

still attached to the outer bark. The harder bark, yeah.

So, to get rid of that, that strip is soaked in water for several days

and that softens it and expands it, opening up the fibres. Yeah.

You get this rather slimy... But squidgy. Squidgy piece of bark.

So now Roxanne, great swordswoman that she is,

can go over this with her sharp knife,

scrape off this brown outer side... Yes.

..trim away any imperfections that she finds

which would otherwise be little brown flecks in the paper. Right.

And then the resulting...

..product is this golden-coloured,

inner... Soft. ..pith.

These fibres... Are very fibrous. ..will be the paper.

Wonderful.

The mulberry pith is cooked for a while...

..and then the mill pounds it for up to eight hours...

..to produce a pulp.

Added to water,

the pulp makes a thick soup of cellulose fibres,

which are scooped up in a rectangular sieve.

As the water flows through the sieve,

it leaves behind a thin mat of the fibres.

This is pressed between pieces of cotton

to form a single sheet of paper...

..which can later be hung up to dry.

Then the Islamic papermakers added a new step to the Chinese process.

They polished each sheet...

..to produce a smooth writing surface.

The preparation of paper for Islamic calligraphy is quite a process

and the reason is that they use a reed pen,

as the ancient Romans did, but it's cut to a wide point

and that wide point is going to be pushed from right to left

to make the long strokes of Arabic calligraphy.

And therefore you cannot have any unevennesses

or any roughnesses in the paper.

So, I've never used it.

I'm very interested to see how it feels to...

..to guide a reed pen

across this polished paper surface.

The first thing I notice is that the...

..strokes need to be made pretty slowly

because if I'm going fast, the ink is pulling back.

It's a matter of finding the right speed and pressure.

That's really fascinating.

At the beginning, I was going too fast and the ink was pulling back,

but I've found the speed that this paper is demanding

and now my ink stained just where I put it.

What we have here with Islamic paper is something that's cheap

but very sophisticated, very finely manicured and tailored

to making extremely graceful calligraphy.

In Samarkand during the Middle Ages, the papermaking industry

was on a surprisingly impressive scale.

There were perhaps as many as 400 paper mills operating in this region

in the Middle Ages, all the way to the 18th century,

supplying paper to the entire Islamic world.

The production of a factory like this

would have been several thousand sheets a day,

and if you take that times 400, we have millions of sheets of paper

being made every day.

This was the paper that supplied the entire Islamic world

with the basis for its intellectual, religious and cultural life.

And that intellectual life was rich indeed.

The five centuries that followed the beginning of papermaking

in Samarkand came to be known as the Islamic Golden Age.

The arts and sciences flourished.

Islamic scholars made discoveries in geology, biology, medicine

and especially mathematics.

They gave us the words algebra and algorithm,

and we still count using an Arabic number system.

Samarkand was, itself, a great centre of scholarship.

In Registan Square,

three great Islamic universities face each other.

They are covered in monumental Arabic calligraphy...

..praising God and extolling the virtues of learning.

The oldest of the three universities was founded by Ulugh Beg,

ruler of Samarkand in the 15th century.

But today, Ulugh Beg is famous not as a prince, but as an astronomer.

Not far from Registan Square, Ulugh Beg built his pride and joy -

the greatest observatory the world had ever seen.

Unfortunately, it did not survive him

except for the part that was underground.

The top half of the sextant once reached 30 metres above ground,

making it by far the largest such instrument ever built.

Sunlight passing through a controlled opening

would have illuminated the curved track,

which is marked very precisely with degrees.

A copper ruler inserted in one of these slots

added precision by measuring the fraction of a degree

called the minutes of arc.

Ulugh Beg used the sextant to measure the height of the sun

at noon each day.

At midsummer and midwinter, these measurements allowed him

to determine the length of the solar year.

The scientific observations being made here

were far in advance of anything happening in Europe at the time.

In fact, eventually, Islamic science travelled all the way to Europe...

..where it would help to lay the foundations

of a scientific revolution.

This style catalogue, published by a Polish astronomer,

lists the position of the fixed stars

as determined by six great observers.

Among them is Ulug Beighi.

This extraordinary frontispiece shows the ancient Greek Ptolemy,

Tycho Brahe,

Ulug Beighi,

he's the one with the long, Oriental moustache

in the image, sitting at table, being highly honoured

in this sequence of persons who have mighty observatories,

made observations of the fixed stars.

So you've got a succession, on each side, of astronomers and the idea

in this image is that the catalogues are steadily improved as each passes

on their findings for improvement by their successors.

By the time this book was published in 1690, the ancient view

of the heavens had been radically transformed by the discoveries

of astronomers like Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and Isaac Newton.

They were all Europeans.

Proof, that by the 17th century, European intellectual life was every

bit as sophisticated as the scholarship of the Islamic world.

But that change was only possible because of two developments

in the production of the written word.

First, these pages are made of paper,

which arrived in Europe via Muslim Spain.

Even more significant,

this is a printed book.

The impact of printing in the Western world is comparable

in scope, in all areas of learning,

to the impact, in the Islamic world,

of the use of paper.

Printing would eventually spread the written word to every level

of European society.

But how did this radical new technology find a market

in a world where books were a luxury for the very rich?

The European printing revolution

began in the German town of Mainz in 1448...

..when Johannes Gutenberg

began casting the letters of the Latin alphabet in metal.

These little type pieces spelled the end of the Middle Ages

and helped to usher in the modern world,

but they could only do so because of a lucky accident.

The letters of the Latin alphabet just happened to be the right shape.

Gutenberg was looking for a way to produce multiple copies

of the same text in a much faster way than scribes could copy texts

in the manuscript period.

Gutenberg's idea was to speed up the process of putting words

on a page by replacing the scribe with a machine.

The secret of Gutenberg's printing press was his ability to mass

produce multiple copies, in metal, of each individual letter.

And in this, he had a hidden advantage.

The letters of the Latin alphabet are really very simple shapes

and when you write them in the way they would have been written

at the time printing was invented,

all the letters are very clearly separate.

This is a modular way of writing, and, in fact, if I want to make

a little box of metal with them, no problem, because I'm already,

I'm already there, basically.

The design has already happened.

These simple, block like letters can become blocks of metal

and can be printed.

But it's easy for us to forget

what a big risk Gutenberg was taking.

To set up his print shop took capital,

capital which would have to be repaid.

And so it was vital that the first book he printed turn a profit.

Well, this is one of the really great treasures

of Lambeth Palace Library.

It's a copy of the

Vulgate Bible printed by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz

in the mid 1450s.

So it's a copy of the first substantial printed book

to be produced in the West, with moveable type.

The people who bought books in the 15th century

were a small and elite group of rich individuals and institutions.

Every book they had ever seen was a manuscript and they had a clear

idea of what a book should look like.

What people would have really prized in the manuscript,

would have thought marked it out as a manuscript of high quality

was the regularity of the text and of the letter forms,

the evenness of the inking,

the contrast between the white of the page

and the black of the text.

Those qualities, regularity of letter forms and line length,

were precisely the characteristics of moveable type.

What was the challenge for the scribe was relatively

straightforward for the typesetter.

So moveable type could produce a printed book that matched

the quality of the manuscripts

that readers were used to looking at and buying.

And Gutenberg didn't stop there.

He printed on parchment and had the printed text

illuminated by hand.

The impression of a manuscript is so complete

that, for hundreds of years,

the librarians at Lambeth Palace were fooled.

And until the early 19th century, it was thought to be a manuscript.

It was catalogued as a manuscript, and I think Gutenberg

would have been delighted by our confusion,

because what he was trying to achieve with the printing

of this book was to produce a book by a new technique that people

would think was just as good as the manuscripts that they were used

to buying and reading.

So what he was trying to do was to do something new

that would seem old.

Gutenberg's strategy worked.

His printed Bibles sold with ease.

He soon had imitators, and within a few decades, there were hundreds

of printing presses operating in Europe,

manufacturing books on an unprecedented scale.

It's difficult to overstate the transformative effect

that workshops like this had on Europe.

Just one of these printing presses could produce more books in two

weeks than the entire scribal industry of Bruges could produce

in a year.

The price of books plummeted.

What had cost pounds now cost shillings.

And so there was an enormous expansion in the reading public.

All sorts of new books with new ideas start being written

to satisfy this new market.

Europe would no longer be the intellectual laggard.

But what would be the impact of moveable type beyond Europe?

Printed books were soon travelling east

as European printers sought to serve Christian readers

living under Muslim rule in the Ottoman Empire.

It looks quite humble, but this is a rather rare and precious specimen.

This is the first Arabic book printed with moveable type.

It was printed in 1514, in Fano, Italy.

And this here is a Book of Hours, printed in Arabic.

But the manuscript tradition in the Islamic world

was very different from that in Europe.

Instead of a modulus script of separate letters,

Arabic was written in a cursive style, in which the letters

in a word are all connected.

These connections are obligatory, and readers would never have seen

Arabic written any other way.

You see, the Arabic script is much more than simply a cursive script

that connects letters together.

In fact, it's words that stack and are interwoven across the line.

There, it is not simply a sequence of words, but some words

might be higher and lower.

The ends of words might weave into the beginnings of others.

And all of that is incredibly difficult to reproduce

with moveable type.

These difficulties are readily apparent

in the printed Book of Hours.

You can see that we have two forms of the Arabic

script on a single page.

The first form is a recognisable, calligraphic Arabic hand.

It's a cliche, a wooden block.

It's not moveable type.

And so, it would be recognisable to any reader of Arabic

as good Arabic.

But underneath it, you have a completely new invention.

It is the Arabic moveable type script

and it results from the adaptation,

a forced adaptation of Arabic to the moveable type environment,

making it closer to the logic of the Latin script.

And you can see here that the words do not stack upon each other

like the calligraphic hand.

The letters are all on one basic line,

and you can even see, if you look closely, that the baseline

that connects the cursive letters together is not complete,

and there are gaps between the individual letters.

Though well transcribed,

I don't think would have recognised this as Arabic.

It was difficult for moveable type to reproduce the look of an Arabic

manuscript, and that made it hard to compete

with the well-established local book trade.

So, although Ottoman printers were soon printing in the Hebrew

and Armenian alphabets,

it was more than two centuries before the first Arabic print shop

was established in Istanbul in 1727.

What we have here is the first Arabic book,

printed with moveable type, in the Muslim world,

about 200 years after the Book of Hours that we've looked

at previously.

This text shows a remarkable advance

in Arabic printing technology,

where there are many more ligatures that mimic

the Arabic calligraphic hand.

Nevertheless, unlike in Europe,

moveable type failed to capture the market,

and within 20 years, the print shop was out of business.

After a short stint, basically printing technology died off,

and so we can wonder why did printing never really take off?

And while the most obvious difference between the first book

printed using moveable type in the Muslim world

and the Gutenberg Bible, is the book's contents.

This is a dictionary.

This would have had a much more limited audience.

It wouldn't have been consumed by everyone and wouldn't

have been a book that everyone would have had an interest in.

That book would have been the Koran, but moveable type,

although improved, was still not good enough to reproduce

the calligraphy of the holy book.

If you could have had affordable and mass-produced Korans,

I think you would have had a huge market for that.

The trouble is, they had to meet a certain quality.

You could not print a Koran like this.

This does not reproduce a manuscript, it does not reproduce

the format of the Koran that the faithful were used to seeing.

So the most widely read and widely appreciated Arabic book

was never printed using moveable type.

And that took a huge part of the market out, whereas Gutenberg

printed the book, the Bible, that, basically, everyone on

the continent would have wanted.

So there's an irony.

Printing took off in Europe in large part because Gutenberg

could produce, with moveable type, a book that looked

as if it had been written by hand.

And that was possible because he was printing the Latin alphabet.

If he had been trying to print a different script,

he might never have succeeded.

That simple fact lies behind a thousand fold increase

in the availability of information,

an explosion of ideas

that led directly to the European scientific revolution,

the Industrial Revolution that followed,

and the world we live in today.

Pen and paper, ink and alphabet.

These things are so familiar as to be almost invisible.

But these are world altering technologies.

Our history has been shaped

by the shape of the letters we write

and the means we use to write them.

Remember THAT next time you pick up a pencil!

OVERLAPPING VOICES READING THE WORDS

GIRL SPEAKS SPANISH

Martha is reading from The Book from the Ground -

a novella by the famous Chinese artist Xu Bing.

He has assembled hundreds of emojis and icons

into a script that can be read by anyone, of whatever nationality,

because it is freed from the words of any particular language.

Is this a glimpse of our future?

For 5,000 years, the technology of writing

has allowed people to communicate across space and time

and made civilisation itself possible.

From common roots,

writing developed into a myriad of distinct scripts.

But, today, a new digital communication technology

is becoming universal across the globe.

Will this new technology bring a new universal way of writing?

And as writing changes, will we change with it?

CROWD CHANTS

This is Dolmabahce Square in Istanbul.

Every year, Turks gather here to mark the anniversary

of the death of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Mustafa Kemal was the founder of modern Turkey

and his influence is still felt on many aspects of Turkish life,

not least whenever anyone here picks up a pen,

because, in 1928, Mustafa Kemal did something extraordinary.

He changed the way that Turks write.

The written word is so important in everyday life

that there can be few more radical acts

than forcing an entire nation to learn a new script.

Yet what happened in Turkey in the 1920s

was just part of a movement that swept across the world

in the 20th century.

A series of script reforms that threatened to replace

the multitude of traditional writing systems

with a single, universal script -

the Latin alphabet.

The Latin alphabet was the script of the Roman Empire.

But its global spread was due to printing.

It was because Latin letters turned out to be easier to print

than other scripts...

..that printing took off in Europe in a way it did not elsewhere.

The resulting explosion in information

led to scientific and industrial revolutions that,

by the early 20th century,

had taken Europe to unprecedented levels of wealth and power.

This link between the Latin alphabet

and the rise of Western industrial society...

..led leaders in other parts of the world

who wanted to take their countries down the same path...

..to see, in the Western script, a key to modernity.

The Latin script, it's a Western thing,

and even the idea of modernisation

is so much geared towards the West.

Could adopting the Latin alphabet be a shortcut to mass literacy,

mass communication and a modern society?

Or was changing the script a recipe for confusion and conflict?

The story of script reform in Turkey

begins with the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

For more than 600 years, the Ottoman Turks had ruled vast territories

that, at times, included much of south-eastern Europe,

West Asia and North Africa.

But then came the First World War.

With military defeat at the hands of the Western Allies,

Turkey lost its empire and gained a new reformist leader

in the shape of Mustafa Kemal.

Mustafa Kemal is an Ottoman officer.

His project is basically to combine his own political ambitions

with some kind of a modernising agenda

for what remains of the Ottoman Empire and, hence, the desire

to set up a modern, Westernised writing system.

Mustafa Kemal's plan to Westernise the Turkish writing system

built on decades of dissatisfaction

with the way that Turkish was written.

Since the very beginnings of the Ottoman Empire,

its rulers had chosen to represent the Turkish language

with the script of the Quran, the Arabic alphabet,

but spoken Arabic and spoken Turkish

are two very different languages.

The problem for Ottomans is that Turkish

is not very compatible with the Arabic script.

I mean, it's almost diametrically opposed

in the sense that Arabic has an incredible number of consonants

and, on the other hand, it has a very limited number of vowels.

By contrast, spoken Turkish employs limited consonants

but a large diversity of vowels.

Vowels which are not represented in the Arabic alphabet.

The idea that the Arabic script was a mismatch

was something that was more or less recognised by members of the elite.

The Ottomans had been toying with the idea

of reforming their alphabet for at least 50, 60 years.

But Mustafa Kemal was not a man for half measures.

Rather than reform the Arabic alphabet,

he decided to replace it completely with the Latin alphabet of the West.

It's in the summer of 1928 that he came up with the idea

and then it's like a PR campaign,

because he travels through Anatolia and his instrument is a blackboard.

There's a fascinating photograph, it's become iconic,

where you have him pointing at the new letters.

With the Latin alphabet,

it was easier to spell Turkish words phonetically,

which it was felt would make it easier to learn to read.

There was little ground to really

oppose the logic behind this transformation,

given that 90% or even more of the population was illiterate.

It was very rapid - almost overnight.

I think it took one year for everybody to address,

including the press.

Overnight, you are told that you should insert

more and more Latin scripts,

so you can still keep, you know, the usual Arabic alphabet,

but, at the end of the year,

you're going to have to have it all in the Latin script.

For Mustafa Kemal was not content with introducing a new script,

he was also determined to ban the old one.

And, by 1929, Arabic script is outlawed.

It is outlawed. You cannot use it.

MUSIC

At first sight, it seems unnecessary to ban a script

which literate Turks have been using for centuries,

but Mustafa Kemal was aware that the meaning of the Arabic script

was not confined to the words it represented.

SINGING

Sufis are a case in point.

They are famous for their whirling trance

and their deep study of Islam.

Sufis try and achieve a direct communion with God

through rituals such as these.

But also through the text of the Quran.

They believe that there are hidden meanings not just inside the words,

but inside the very letters of the Arabic alphabet.

SINGING

Cemalnur Sargut, a renowned Turkish Sufi writer,

told me something about the sacred significance of Arabic letters.

And the meanings multiply.

For example, many chapters of the Quran begin with Muqatta'at.

Mysterious groups of three, four or five letters

that do not spell any known word in Arabic.

The most common Muqatta'at is Alif Laam Meem -

the equivalent of A, L and M in the Latin alphabet.

As Cemalnur explained,

to Sufis, these letters are a sort of spiritual code.

The spiritual connection between script and religion

extends to the act of writing itself.

Mahmut Sahin is a Turkish calligrapher

but, 80 years after Mustafa Kemal's script reform,

he still writes mostly in Arabic letters.

Even the materials used in writing acquire sacred significance.

Whatever the practical justification,

discarding the Arabic alphabet came at a high cost to many Turks.

There is, of course, the psychological, cultural trauma

of people who are highly attached to their religion,

for whom the language, the script, is not just a script,

it is the script of the Quran.

But, for Mustafa Kemal,

this brutal rupture with the past was precisely the point.

The adoption of the Latin script was not just a practical matter

of improving literacy,

it was also an attempt to alter the trajectory of Turkish history

away from its Islamic past towards the kind of secular,

technological society that was being created in Europe.

For Mustafa Kemal, it's really the appeal of the West.

There's a linguistic justification for the, erm...for the reform,

but there's also a civilizational one.

It is because you want to become European.

So the script is crucial.

It's one of the most daring reforms

because it really touches...

And it has a promise of enlightenment.

I mean, viewed from the perspective of the 1920s,

this is a way of saying,

this is our first step towards creating a nation

and of spreading literacy and education to the masses.

The script in itself is so symbolic.

It's something that everybody recognises.

Symbolically, I think it's a very powerful move,

and it's very well received by the West.

It's a huge PR thing.

REPORTER: Ataturk lives quietly, spends time teaching the youngest

of his six adopted daughters the alphabet he made all Turkey learn.

But Turks were not the only people having to learn a new way to write.

In the 1920s, the Latin alphabet,

with its promise of modernity, was on the march across Asia.

The story of what happened next

illustrates the power of script to shape who we are.

# Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar

# Allahu Akbar

# Allahu Akbar... #

There is nothing more evocative of the Islamic world

than the call to prayer.

But there's something else that tells us

that we're in a Muslim country.

The Arabic script is everywhere,

because script isn't just a means of communication,

it's a badge of identity,

and with a change in script comes a fundamental change in identity.

This is Bukhara in Uzbekistan.

Once an important oasis city on the Silk Road

between China and the Mediterranean.

In the 19th century, it, like most of the Islamic states

of Central Asia, was absorbed by the expanding Russian Empire.

Under the tsars, the Turkic languages of the region

continued, however, to be written in the Arabic script,

which had been used here since the Muslim conquests of the 8th century.

But, in 1917, the Russian Empire collapsed

and power was seized by the Communist Party.

Their leader, Lenin, was determined to modernise and secularise

every aspect of society across the new Soviet Union

and, in Central Asia, as in Turkey, that meant changing the script.

Shahnoza Soatova is a philologist

and an expert on script reform in Uzbekistan.

As in Turkey, the new script was part of a literacy drive.

But, as in Turkey also, it created a brutal rupture with the past.

For the Arabic script is quite literally woven into the fabric

of cities like Samarkand.

Practically every panel of every building in this magnificent place

is covered in writing.

It's a masterpiece of Arabic calligraphic art

expressed in architecture.

Some of the panels look like geometric patterns

but are, in fact, also writing in the angular Kufic script.

For example, in the very middle of this pattern above the gate

is a lozenge where, in the middle, in dark blue,

is the name of Allah four times,

made to look like a repeating pattern.

And around the side of that lozenge, picked out in turquoise,

is the name of Muhammad.

Latinisation was, at heart, a political project.

But, back in Moscow, politics were changing.

Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin,

was less interested in world revolution

than in consolidating his total control

over all the subject peoples of a new Russian empire.

And, once again, new politics meant a new script.

The Russian Cyrillic alphabet remained the script of Central Asia

for five decades,

but then the politics of Russia changed again.

In 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart

and Uzbekistan became an independent country.

Uzbeks now had a new political identity

and for the nation's leader, Islam Karimov,

there was no stronger way to signal this change

than to change the script yet again.

Out went Cyrillic, but it wasn't Arabic that returned.

No country has changed its script more often

in such a relatively short period as Uzbekistan.

But, through all these dizzying changes,

there has been one constant.

The pull of the Latin alphabet as a means of connecting

with the wider world and as a symbol of a nation that embraces modernity.

But the eastward march of the Latin alphabet would eventually bring it

into contact with a culture with writing at its heart.

In any park in China, it's not unusual

to find people of all ages writing words in water.

They are not using an alphabet

but writing characters in China's ancient pictorial script.

The Chinese script has been in continuous use

for more than 3,000 years.

But, for much of the last century, those who ruled China

were determined that the ancient Chinese script would fade away,

to be replaced by something simpler.

China had yet to industrialise.

The people were still living a traditional way of life.

The resulting economic weakness made the country prey to Western powers.

Popular discontent of the decline of China

exploded on May 4th, 1919.

The streets of Beijing were filled with protesting students

demanding radical change.

It was a moment that heralded 30 years of political turmoil

that would lead to civil war in China and a war between scripts.

The most enthusiastic partisans of script reform

were the Communist Party of China.

They turned to their ideological allies in the Soviet Union

who had already Latinised the scripts of Central Asia.

The new system was designed to make reading and writing easier

by spelling out words phonetically.

It was called Latinxua Sin Wenz - Latin new writing.

As Mao's forces marched south, conquering more and more territory,

Latinxua Sin Wenz followed behind.

It was used in newspapers, books, in school textbooks

and in railway timetables.

Kept in the National Library of Beijing,

thousands of publications attest to the Latin push

throughout the country.

The librarians were kind enough to let me look at a few of them,

dating from the 1930s to 1950.

It's fascinating to see Chinese written in Latin letters,

the Latinxua Sin Wenz,

because you get the feeling you can understand it,

which isn't usually the case when you see

a page of Chinese characters.

It feels more familiar, and that's made more so by the fact

that this content is sprinkled with words that I can understand.

"Stalin." "Trumen."

But there is a range of content.

There is a lot of poetry and there are a lot of articles

on how to write the new Latin script,

including little pictures on how to hold the pen

and also how to form the cursive of the Latin letters.

Interestingly, a lot of them have the order of the strokes,

one, two, three,

which is something you see in school books for Chinese characters,

where the order of the strokes is very important,

but not something so common in the West.

What is obvious is the overtly political nature of all of this.

Here we have Gorky

stabbing a fat capitalist with an enormous pen,

giving the idea that the pen is mightier than the sword

and perhaps underlining the need for mass literacy.

But even into the 1950s,

all the content is written in both systems -

the Latin letters and the Chinese characters -

which shows that, even after decades of publishing,

the editors can't be sure that the readers

will understand the new system.

The revolution might have triumphed by this time

but the new writing has not.

Dozens of dialects are spoken across China

and the pronunciation of words varies greatly.

For example, in the Mandarin-speaking areas,

the word for love is "ai",

but in the Cantonese dialect, love is pronounced "nuo".

Rendered phonetically, the two words would look quite different,

but, in the Chinese script, they are both represented

by the same character,

so even if the spoken languages sound completely different,

the written characters are shared everywhere.

In this way, the Chinese script binds the Chinese people together.

And the Chinese people have a deep, emotional attachment

to their ancient script.

Chinese writing is the embodiment of Chinese civilisation.

Every character tells a story

about how the ancestors of the Chinese people

saw the world around them.

For example, the character for woman...

..is combined with the character for child...

..to give a character which means good.

The character for field...

..when combined with the character which means strength...

..gives the character for a man.

In 1949, Chairman Mao declared the birth

of the People's Republic of China.

The Communists had been victorious.

But, by this time, Mao had quietly buried Latinxua Sin Wenz.

The cultural cost of abandoning the Chinese script was too high

a price to pay for the supposed efficiencies of the Latin alphabet.

But that left the problem of achieving mass literacy

with a complex script which, throughout Chinese history,

had always been the province of the elite.

CHILDREN RECITE TOGETHER

TEACHER SINGS IN CHINESE

To be able to read and write Chinese,

you need to learn several thousand pictorial characters.

It seems like a daunting task for a six-year-old.

I think the Western people

have some illusions about Chinese characters.

In the biggest character dictionary,

we have about...

More than 50,000 Chinese characters.

That's a very big amount.

But if you consider the basic unit,

the basic element, it's not too large.

It's about 300 basic elements,

so it's not so complicated as some Westerners think.

So what is... What is that?

A fruit basket.

Orange. Orange.

Grapes.

Onions.

Dr Thomas Hope is a neuroscientist interested in how we read.

He agrees that it's easy to overstate

the differences between scripts.

Perhaps the most obvious difference between pictographic

and Latin scripts is that the Latin scripts have only 26 letters,

whereas your pictographic scripts appear to have thousands

and thousands of characters.

But of course you can't learn to read just by learning the letters.

I know this. I've been watching my children learn to read.

That is a hat.

It's not enough. You have to learn to understand and recognise

the words, too, and once you've got to recognise the words,

well, there's thousands and thousands of them,

so what that means is that the actual learning problem

you have to solve to achieve skilled reading

is at least roughly similar across these two scripts.

As a scientist, Thomas is interested in whether brain science can

throw light on the question of the accessibility of different scripts.

For him, a key experiment was devised by Dr Tae Twomey,

who came up with a way to compare how the same brain works

when it is reading a phonetic script

compared to when it is reading a pictographic script.

It takes advantage of the fact that Japanese readers

have to learn both types of script.

In my Japanese experiment, we asked the participant to read

a Japanese word written in either kanji characters

or hiragana kana characters,

and we compared whether the brain activation is any different.

To write their language, the Japanese use Chinese

pictographic characters, which they call kanji.

But in most texts, these kanji characters will be found

alongside letters called hiragana kana,

which spell out words phonetically.

For example, the pronoun "I" can be spelt phonetically

with three kana letters.

Or represented by a single kanji character.

There are only 50 or so kana characters

and it's always nearly 100% correspondence

between the letter and the sound,

so once you know what each kana is, you can read everything.

But the kanji characters,

there's no relationship between the print and the sound.

So we're trying to understand whether when Japanese people

read Japanese kanji or Japanese kana,

do they use a different part of the brain?

Three areas of the brain are particularly important for reading.

Two are associated with the senses of sound and vision.

The bit of the brain that does hearing is on the side,

sort of near the ear, and the bit of the brain that does vision

is on the back, basically where the optic nerve goes in.

The auditory area is part of a larger brain structure

called the temporal lobe.

A place where sensations are combined with memories

to create meaning out of our experiences.

All reading starts with a stimulus to the visual region

and ends with that stimulus being interpreted in the temporal lobe.

But that stimulus can travel down two different pathways,

directly from the vision area to the temporal lobe

or via the auditory area.

It's tempting to assume that reading phonetic hiragana kana characters

would activate the auditory pathway,

whereas the direct vision to meaning pathway

would be activated by picture-based kanji characters,

but that's not quite what the experiment showed.

I did assume that the way that we read sound-based

versus a pictographic language would just be completely different,

erm, and it just turns out maybe not so much.

Instead, all three areas are active

irrespective of which type of script is being read.

We use the same set of regions, so the network itself is the same,

but the use of the component was slightly different

depending on the script.

When the subjects were reading the more phonetic scripts,

they tended to prefer just a little bit more the sound pathway,

and when they were reading the pictographic script,

they tended to prefer just a little bit more the visual pathway,

but were still using them both.

Dr Twomey's experiment suggests that our brains are doing similar work

whether reading words represented by Chinese characters

or spelt with a phonetic alphabet.

The two writing systems are equally easy or hard to learn.

Revolutionary political leaders like Lenin and Mao

once saw the Latin alphabet as a necessary ingredient

of a modern society.

But it seems that the key to mass literacy

is, after all, not the alphabet,

it's mass education.

Just send people to school and, if you send people to school,

it turns out they can learn to read pictographic scripts

as well as we can learn to read an alphabetic script.

But, today, it is not just human beings

who have to be able to interpret a script.

REPORTER: While it is true that the computer can be called

a kind of brain, although a very limited one,

in order to solve any problem, the computer must first be

instructed by a human programmer, who has painstakingly

and logically analysed the problem.

In America in the 1960s,

the foundations of the internet were being laid.

The native script of computers is a simple binary code

of ones and zeros,

but, in order to facilitate human interaction with computers,

American computer scientists developed ASCII -

the American Standard Code for Information Interchange,

which allows communication with computers using human language -

language written in Latin letters.

This universal standard meant that, for many decades,

using a computer meant using the Latin alphabet.

That legacy is still powerful today.

In this cafe in a district of Cairo,

a group of young people are using Latin letters to write Arabic words.

This new way of writing a language that has always been written

using the Arabic script is called Franco.

The beginning of the Franco Arab was the Arab gamers.

They didn't have the Arabic keyboard

so the Arab gamers just invented the Franco Arabic.

I just don't like to use it.

I really love talking in Arabic, writing in Arabic.

This is, like, me, this is who I came from,

and the whole thing is about...

I don't like talking in Franco Arabic. It's so weird.

It really destroys my culture.

The desire to use computers pushed young Egyptians

into using a Latin script.

And something similar is happening in China,

where technology threatens to do what even Chairman Mao could not -

persuade the Chinese people to embrace the use of Latin letters.

They are the basis of the successor to Latinxua Sin Wenz,

another phonetic script called pinyin.

For young Chinese especially,

using the Latin alphabet has become second nature.

As a simple phonetic system, pinyin is attractive,

but it poses a threat to traditional Chinese writing.

At school, children learn how to write Chinese characters

by repetition, which builds muscle memory.

But, in the adult world, thanks to computers,

writing by hand is becoming a rare occurrence

and so muscle memory starts to fade.

The seductions of technology are leading even highly educated Chinese

to forget how to write their ancient script.

Could what's happening today in China

be the future of writing everywhere?

With new ways of creating text becoming ever more popular,

will there soon be any need to learn to write at all?

The Chinese artist Xu Bing has explored the future

and the past of writing in two remarkable works.

The Book from the Ground is a project in which Xu Bing

created a pictographic script from emojis and icons

and then wrote a short novel entirely in his new script.

His work explores the idea that modern life

has finally allowed the creation of a universal script of images.

The story, a comic tale of the day in the life of an office worker,

can be understood by anyone,

regardless of what language they speak,

because the icons are designed to be universally recognisable.

But The Book from the Ground suggests that a world

of perfect communication is also a world of cultural uniformity.

This connection between script and culture

is also the theme of Xu Bing's most famous work,

The Book from the Sky.

The Book from the Sky consists of thousands

of traditional wood block prints,

but the characters that Xu Bing carved were all made up by him

and have no meaning.

We think of writing as a means of communicating what we want to say.

Looked at in this way, all that really matters is efficiency.

But there has always been more to script than language.

For 5,000 years, scripts themselves have been a repository

of cultural and religious identities

that cannot easily be put into words.

This is the hidden power and value of script,

for when we write, we express who we are

in every word and in none.

The Book from the Sky says nothing...

..but nothing could be more expressive of Chinese culture.