Visible Language
ISSN: 0022-2224
Visible Language is a peer-reviewed design journal that advocates
the potential for the research and practice of visual communication to
enhance the human experience. Published by the School of Design at the
University of Cincinnati, Visible Language balances artfulness with
science, innovation with respect for human patterns of use,
evidence-based research with intuitive exploration,
and technology with
humanity.
Issues Online (3(?) year moving wall)
Visible language is not strictly speaking focused on Antiquity, but it has many articles on ancient writing including (but not limited to) the following (in no particular order):
Volume 36 | Issue 3 | September 2002
Our paper presents the work of the
Cuneiform Digital Forensic Project (CDFP), an interdisciplinary project
at The University of Birmingham, concerned with the development of a
multimedia database to support scholarly research into cuneiform,
wedge-shaped writing imprinted onto clay tablets and indeed the earliest
real form of writing. We describe the evolutionary design process and
dynamic research and developmental cycles associated with the database.
Unlike traditional publications, the electronic publication of resources
offers the possibility of almost continuous revisions with the
integration and support of new media and interfaces. However, if on-line
resources are to win the favor and confidence of their respective
communities there must be a clear distinction between published and
maintainable resources, and, developmental content. Published material
should, ideally, be supported via standard web-browser interfaces with
fully integrated tools so that users receive a reliable, homogenous and
intuitive flow of information and media relevant to their needs.
We discuss the inherent dynamics of the design and publication of our
on-line resource, starting with the basic design and maintenance aspects
of the electronic database, which includes photographic instances of
cuneiform signs, and shows how the continuous review process identifies
areas for further research and development, for example, the “sign
processor” graphical search tool and three-dimensional content, the
results of which then feedback into the maintained resource.
Volume 15 | Issue 4 | October 1981
Cuneiform was, from its inception,
not merely a collection of individual symbols, but a coherent system of
information manipulation for which written characters were the main,
but not the only, component. This system did not evolve by itself, but
was manufactured, developed, and implemented within the framework of a
bureaucratic organization which controlled the distribution not only of
goods and services but also of status and information. That institution
produced the demand for a control technology for which the cuneiform
writing system was the eventual realization. While the user institution
imposed specific, characteristic constraints and demands, it also
adjusted its own needs and goals to adapt to restrictions and functions
of the technology itself. We look at the early development of the
cuneiform writing system with special attention to the less well
recognized peripheral components and to interactions between the
technology and its user.
Volume 15 | Issue 4 | October 1981
On the premise that horizontal
Hittite scribal rulings be taken seriously as punctuation, this study
investigated their content and found that in fact they punctuate a
structure similar to the periodic sentence in older Greek and Latin. As
such they are to be compared with the oldest (alphabetic) Greek mark of
punctuation, the paragraphos, which begins to be replaced in Alexandrian
Greek by marks which segment the language on the basis of prosodic
features, as in English. Hittite “visible sentences,” moreover, signal
in visual form underlying differences in language structure and cohesive
basis which can be correlated with differences in word order type and
changes which the genetically related Indo-European (IE) languages have
undergone over a period of c. 4000 years of written attestation.
Volume 15 | Issue 4 | October 1981
The education and activities of
the Eanna temple scribe in sixth-century BC. Uruk varied little from
what they had been prior to the Chaldean era. The cuneiform writing
system was still in use, and Akkadian economic documents continued to be
composed and literary texts preserved in a manner not unlike that of
previous periods. These traditions, however, did not preclude the
scribe’s attending to his own private business affairs or prevent his
engaging in the collection or composition of literary documents that
reflect either his own personal interests or the necessity to prepare
materials with decidedly political overtones. The result of these
endeavors is a body of texts which, in many respects, indicates both the
influence of spoken Aramaic or written Akkadian and the everchanging
political situation (from both official and private perspectives) in
southern Mesopotamia in the Chaldean period.
Volume 15 | Issue 4 | October 1981
“Origins” suggests that cuneiform
was invented in a short period of time around 3000 BC by a citizen of
the Sumerian city of Uruk and that it arises conceptually out of the
token system described by D. Schmandt-Besserat. “Direction of script”
agrees with S. Picchioni that cuneiform was written and read vertically
down through c. 2300 BC, but it emphasizes the use of reed patterns to
demonstrate the manner in which the stylus was manipulated and sees this
mode of manipulation at the motivating force behind the transition to
horizontal script. “Literacy” argues that cuneiform was not as difficult
as usually assumed, that the alphabet had no demonstrable effect on the
level of functional literacy, and that the superiority of the alphabet
over cuneiform has been exaggerated.
Volume 5 | Issue 3 | July 1971
Contemporary and earlier studies
of the Latin language have failed to present and discuss adequately
letter names of the Latin alphabet—in contrast, for example, with the
Greek alpha, beta, gamma, etc. Several theories, and their derivation,
about the letter names are presented. The ancient evidence—from the
third/second century B.C. to the seventh century A.D.—is rather scant
and not always clear. While the names of the vowels and of all the
consonants except the continuants (F, L, M, N, R, S, X) seem certain,
the names of these continuants seem to have undergone changes in the
course of history and to be clear only toward the end of antiquity (from
the fourth century A.D. on).
Volume 5 | Issue 4 | October 1971
Maya hieroglyphic writing was
carved on stone monuments, written in bark-paper codices, and painted
upon funerary pottery. The stone inscriptions, formerly thought to
record only calendrical information, have been found to contain dynastic
histories. The codices treat exclusively of ritual matters, while the
texts and pictures on the pottery are concerned with the perilous voyage
of the soul to the underworld. The script evolved from a highly
pictographic system into one that had a strong phonetic-syllabic
component. As calligraphy, Maya writing was a basically painterly art.
Volume 6 | Issue 1 | January 1972
The origin of the sexagesimal
system has been much debated, but all past theories have neglected the
linguistic evidence of the ancient cuneiform lexica. The problem or
origin is twofold: 1) the origin of counting with sixty as a base and 2)
the origin of sexagesimal place notation. The first problem is
linguistic and anthropological in nature and must be studied through the
ancient lexica. The second can be elucidated by a combined analysis of
the Sumerian number words and the symbols used to represent them. Such
an analysis indicated that sexagesimal place notation arose from an
interaction between the numerational framework of the Sumerian language
and the symbols used to write those numbers, but the sudden appearance
of place notation about 2050 B.C. indicates that the final step toward
the creation of place notation was an act of conscious invention.
Volume 20 | Issue 1 | January 1986
A poetological analysis of the
genre of pattern poetry is presented which distinguishes among various
forms of picture text composition, and attempts to classify the various
sorts of carmina figurata typologically while dealing with the question
of continuity and discontinuity of figured poems in ancient, medieval,
and modern times.
Volume 20 | Issue 1 | January 1986
The labyrinth, the mythical
structure conceived by Daedalus, has been a persistent motif throughout
the history of Mediterranean culture. We find it both in visual art of
all kinds as well as in literature, and also in the fascinating
noman’s-land between these two. In the area of word-image interaction
there exists a whole collection of texts that were given the name
“poetical labyrinths.” The origin of labyrinthine poems goes back to the
Rome of Augustus Caesar; the visual pattern of these pieces seems to
indicate the pattern of a magical dance, perhaps the ancient Greek dance
of the Grue. The idea of the poem in medieval times seems also to
encompass the idea of the city, of the heavenly Jerusalem. Medieval
poetical labyrinths have definite religious connotations, as is also
evident in the later works of this genre, influenced by the Jewish
Kabbala. This hermeneutic is still valid for the baroque in the case of a
number of works, yet more and more labyrinth poems appear in a
secularized, ornamental context. This article traces the most
significant of these lines of development of this form and its function.
Volume 7 | Issue 1 | January 1973
One of the most unusual coinages
in antiquity was the coinage of the Parthian empire, largest of the
later Hellenistic empires. The Parthians were a non-Greek people who
used Greek as their first official language of state and as the
predominant language on their coins. Their most common denomination, the
silver drachm, bore Greek legends for almost half a millennium, and the
letterforms underwent a significant transformation in the process.
Since the coinage constitutes the largest body of primary source
material extant concerning ancient Parthia, that transformation is of
significant interest to the classification historian.
Volume 7 | Issue 2 | April 1972
Focusing on archives in Greece,
Rome, Egypt and Meopotamia, the article compares archival criteria with
the present day practice and finds similarities including: 1) law, 2)
administrative action, 3) accounting, 4) land records and ownership, 5)
control over people with regard to servitude and taxation and 6)
business transactions.
Volume 24 | Issue 1 | January 1990
A brief description of the
historical approaches to the decipherment of ancient Maya writing is
presented in order to provide the background for a description of our
current knowledge of the nature and structure of their system. Maya
hieroglyphic writing is recognized as a true writing system in that it
represents the sounds and structure of spoken language. The writing
system is defined as a mixed logographic system containing both
pictographic and phonetic elements.
Maya hieroglyphic writing appears in the latter part of the Late
Preclassic Period (ca. 150 B.c.-A.D. 100) and is primarily associated
with documenting political history and legitimacy. Writing was used to
record the events of a ruler’s life, validating his right to the throne
by documenting his parentage, his accession to power, his conquests, and
his performance of important ritual and ceremonial acts. Calendrical
information also comprises a major component of Classic Maya
inscriptions. Historic events are documented by means of a complex
system that both fixes events in time and ties them cyclically to the
mythological past.
Volume 24 | Issue 2 | May 1990
For a thousand years before the
alphabet, the scribal schools in Mesopotamia and Egypt had studied and
taught their scripts, cuneiform and hieroglyphics, but no record of the
original alphabet or any reference to it has been found among the
hundreds of thousands of tablets from scribal archives. The silence in
which the origin of the alphabet is shrouded invites comment but
receives none. Among the ancient tablets of Sumer are numerous wordlists
containing, for instance, the names of animals or of plants or of legal
terms and many others. Some word lists are bilingual given the Sumerian
words with their Akkadian or their Eblaite translations. Their
classified lists of words were used as reference sources in early
proto-science and as teaching material in the scribal schools. Scholarly
exchange between Ebla and Mesopotamia has been established by more than
a hundred word lists in Sumeria found at Ebla that are identical with
word lists from cities in Mesopotamia.
Volume 24 | Issue 2 | May 1990
There is neither record of nor
reference to the invention of the alphabet in any known source. That in
itself may say something about the invention—that it probably did not
take place in the scribal community. The alphabet grew out of the
syllabaries which precede it, of which the most widespread were
cuneiform and hieroglyphics. It probably emerged from the commercial
communities of the ancient Near East but owed its consonatal principle
to the Egyptians. A Canaanite in north Syria around 1800 B.c. is the
most likely inventor, and the city of Ebla is taken as a hypothesis. The
early Mesopotamian scribal tradition of which Ebla was part is
outlined. Opinions about how the alphabet was invented are considered,
concluding that it was probably a single “giant leap,” and by one man.
The inventor’s necessary background, creation of letter shapes, the
writing medium and direction of script are reviewed. For the tricky
problem of initial acceptance and diffusion, for which these is no
evidence, a possibility is postulated. At the end, the whole process is
encapsulated in a brief story.
Volume 27 | Issue 1-2 | January 1993
Ancient Mesopotamia was the
birthplace of the earliest known writing system. It was also a land of
ethno-linguistic diversity, that included Sumerians, who invented
cuneiform writing, and an increasingly large number of speakers of
Semitic languages. As cuneiform spread throughout Mesopotamia and into
neighboring regions, it was adapted to write Semitic and other
languages, and bilingual and even trilingual cuneiform tablets were
produced, containing Sumerian texts and their translations, usually into
Semitic Akkadian. Various formats were developed to set off the
translation from the original, and the practice, which began around 2400
B.C., continued almost to the beginning of own own era.
Volume 32 | Issue 3 | September 1998
A contemporary designer pays
homage to the ancient codex designers or Tlacuilo. “Tale of the origin”
is a Mesoamerican science-religion story of the beginning and end of
life. The myth is presented first as a Spanish language artist’s book in
a documentary style. Key moments and characters in the myth are
symbolically visualized. This document is then analyzed and interpreted
using rhetoric as a subtext or key to understanding the ideas of the
myth as well as the visual structure of the unfolding story and book.
Yet another subtext translates the myth into English.
Volume 8 | Issue 4 | October 1974
Written records together with
material remains derived from excavations form the main bases for our
understanding of past civilizations and their underlying language
systems. There is no systematic treatment of written records, and little
attention has been paid to the interrelationship between ancient
writing and language. Full systems of writing express language at two
levels—morphological and phonetic—which give rise to three basic writing
systems types—logo-syllabic, syllabic, and alphabetic. Four categories
of decipherment—based on our relative knowledge of the writing system
and the language—are discussed: known writing/known language; unknown
writing/known language; known writing/unknown language; and unknown
writing/unknown language. From a cryptanalytic point of view there are
two general decipherment methods: 1) utilization of external information
to determine probable contents (e.g., bilingual texts,) and 2) internal
information from an analysis of the text itself (structure and
typology). The assumption of the underlying language is critical for
deciphering procedures and provides the test of successful decipherment.
Volume 10 | Issue 3 | July 1976
Byzantine epistolographic concepts
are a natural development of the concepts of classical antiquity, and
especially of the Second Sophistic, that were adapted to fit the
requirements of Christian ontology. The surviving letters were intended
not always to convey information, for which the courier or “living
letter” was often responsible, but usually to fulfill the obligations
and genuine needs of friendship and to serve as much prized pieces of
literary art in their own right. In the one case the letter was deemed
an “ikon of the soul,” creating an illusion of the presence of the
writer and thereby demanding tokens of his individual characteristics.
In the other it was required to be original within the strict framework
imposed by the imitation of ancient models; and by adherence to changing
stylistic canons it came both to foster obscurity and to embrace
subject-matter not commonly associated with the letter.
Volume 14 | Issue 2 | April 1980
The concept of law is too often
treated as an a-historical category; similarly, the impact of writing
(when used as a medium of communication) on the conceptual order and on
the social structure of a society has been little analyzed. These two
problems are brought together in the context of ancient Greece to
demonstrate how the concepts “law” and “justice” developed in relation
to changes in the social structure of that society. The impact of
writing on Greek society not only produced the situation in which these
changes took place but also helped form those changes.
Volume 27 | Issue 1-2 | January 1993
Producing and reading a bilingual
text, much like creating and viewing a stereoscopic image, involve a
much more complex process of perception and decoding than do the writing
and deciphering of a monolingual one. Working with bilingual texts
creates both special problems and unique opportunities for the writer,
the graphic designer, the reader and for those of us who are fascinated
by visible language in all its forms. Most studies on bilingualism tend
to neglect the written manifestations of the phenomenon in favor of the
psychological, social and pedagogical dimensions of the problem as they
appear in the spoke language. This issue explores the practice of
bilingual writing in a wide variety of texts, from cuneiform tablets and
bilingual dictionaries to contemporary fiction and bilingual editions
of texts. “Texts” can be anything from polyglot bibles to advertising
slogans and brand names. The main objective of this issue devoted to
writing “in stereo” is to bring together specialists in a wide range of
fields, from graphic design and lexicography to text-linguistics and
literary theory, to study the practice of bilingual writing at the level
of the word (company logos and bilingual dictionaries), the sentence
(code-switching) and the entire text. The examples chosen involve both
visible and invisible bilingualism (depending on the reader/viewer’s
knowledge of the languages in question).
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