photo: David Hewitt
We are utterly reliant on our alphabet, but do you know where it came from and how it developed into what we use today? I was so fascinated by a brilliant article on the subject by Caroline Brothers recently published in The Author that I felt compelled to share a short summary.
The origin of writing
Experts reckon that writing was invented independently in four places: before 3000BC by the Sumerians (who lived around the river Euphrates) and by the inhabitants of Southern Mexico, then by the Egyptians in 3000BC, and later by the Chinese in 1300BC; all occurring independently.
photo: Thomas Picard
However, in those days, when the focus was on food and trade, the earliest forms of writing were limited to symbols (pictographs) that bore a resemblance to the nouns they represented. Who needed a word for ‘joyful’ when the overwhelming priority was to gather enough to eat and keep warm? ‘Ox’, ‘water’, ‘fig’, ’fire’ etc. were the necessary words.
Representing Intangible Words
Brothers explained that subsequent centuries saw forty different writing systems evolve from those four roots, but it was the Sumerians who, again, took the next big step forward in the written form. They realised that abstract words could be depicted by combining nouns that sounded the same when put in juxtaposition. In her article, Brothers demonstrates this with the example of the word ‘belief’, which could be constructed by joining the symbol that represented a bee to the one for a leaf and adding a mark to indicate that the resulting word was to be taken in that way.
Now writing could progress from the constraints of agricultural lists to stories and poems: the tool for “real” literature was born.
Inventing an Alphabet
Meanwhile, the Egyptians were developing their own writing system and added signs for consonants to their pictograms and associated symbols. At one point, they had over a thousand different symbols! However, it was the Semitic race of Syria and Sinai in the
photo: Mira Pavlakovic
second millennium BC who are credited with the biggest disruptive step forward—the invention of an alphabet. They experimented with adding vowels, and devised a system from which can be traced the Greek alphabet. The Greek system gave rise to the Roman one, which is recognizable as the source of today’s modern Western alphabet.
A recent exhibition of writing at the British Library, which Brothers visited, traced how the alphabets’ individual characters changed over time. Taking the example of our letter ‘A’, it demonstrated how the Phoenicians took the Egyptian symbol that represented an ox head and turned it on its side; the Greeks later rotated it, before the Etruscans in ancient Italy adopted it, from where it found its way into the Roman alphabet.
A Smile and a Wink
Writing and the characters used have come a long way over the last 5,000 years. Perhaps our twenty-first century addition to this continued evolution is the introduction of emoticons, which provide a mechanism for representing the tone in which something is spoken. If the human race is still around in another thousand years, perhaps historians will see it as the next significant step in the development of writing. Or maybe we’re just craving a return to the hieroglyphs of our early forefathers!
Thank You to the Ancients
Without the Sumerians and Semites and all the others who strove to create a system for the written word, we would be without this fantastic medium for sharing emotion-generating stories. We would be without the power of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens, Austen, and all the others who have provided entertainment across the centuries, the masters of taking the written word and using it to wring tears, sadness, fear and joy from our minds.
Here’s a big “thank you” to our ancestors.
Ian Coates is the author of a thriller, Eavesdrop, first published by Bad Day Books, the suspense and thriller imprint of Assent Publishing. He worked in the high tech electronics industry for 30 years, where he specialised in the design of radio communication equipment. His intimate knowledge of that environment always triggered his imagination to think about the mysterious world of spies, and allowed him to bring a unique authenticity to his thriller. Ian is proud to support the British Science Association and donates a proportion of his book proceeds to that charity. He lives and writes in Worcestershire, England, and is a member of the Society of Authors and the International Thriller Writers Association.
Amazon: www.amazon.co.uk/Ian-Coates/e/B00R66BWLM
Audible: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Eavesdrop-Audiobook/B07K6R3R85
Website: www.iancoatesthrillers.co.uk
Facebook: www.facebook.com/ThrillersByIanCoates
Twitter:www.twitter.com/Ian_Coates_
To mark the launch of Audible’s edition of the spy thriller Eavesdrop, there’s a competition running on the International Thriller Writers’ webpage to win the audio version of this fast-paced novel. Free to enter. Just go to ITW’s “thebigthrill” Neverending Book giveaway page, scroll down to the entry for Eavesdrop, click, and simply reply to the post.
Eavesdrop (originally published by Assent Publishing) is a thriller of assassins, modern-day smugglers, and high-tech spies. Who ruined Customs Investigator James Winter’s career, and what’s their link to a Middle East assassination plot?
Finally signed the contract today. Had a few questions, which Audible answered very efficiently, and they made a small change at my request. The “paperwork” is all electronic—one of those pdf files that works with e-signatures. I sign it with a text string. Now need to do the tax questionnaire: because money comes from the USA, it will be taxed there as well as here unless I have the necessary forms in place. Fortunately I already have income from the USA and have the requisite American ITIN (Individual Tax Identification Number) that allows me to avoid double taxation. I provide the Audible database with my number, send them an invoice for the advance, and all is set.
notes. It’s a Word document and we’ve agreed to use its ‘review’ feature to track each suggested change. It’s rewarding to see how few edits he’s proposing—little more than minor word changes here and there.
Being back with these old characters feels strange. Very glad I’m not being asked to add any more descriptions of them because I can’t remember the team well enough—that would end in continuity errors, I’m sure. Somewhere in the loft I’ve got my original notes from the book—I did character details for them all, and even had pictures clipped from magazines for people who resembled my characters—but I’ve got a horrible feeling some of those have been thrown away by now.
Feels like I’m in a black hole. I want to know the production schedule so I can plan my own publicity and press releases. You’re supposed to start at least six weeks before launch for e-releases (more for physical formats), and a launch of “quarter one” could easily mean we’re almost there already.
arrives out of the blue. The writer introduces herself as in charge of artwork and she has attached a jpeg of the cover they’ve created.
Time to check out the narrator. I’d hoped to have been introduced to him earlier, possibly even get a photo together for my publicity. Too late now. I Google him: IMDb tells me he’s best know for parts in the TV shows The Bletchley Circle, Silent Witness, and Call The Midwife. Sounds hopeful. I go back to the Audible site, search for other books he’s narrated, and listen to a few extracts. Impressed. And he is great at accents from the bits I hear. He’ll have done a great job, I’m sure.
It’s about 300 words in length—a little long, but I’m pleased with it and send it out to about half a dozen local papers and magazines, directly addressed to the relevant reporters and editors.
Release day today. Still heard nothing from Audible, which surprises me. Went to Amazon and clicked “hear sample”. Sounds good, but I’d like to hear the full version. I’m surprised Audible didn’t send me a copy once it was ready. I email the always-helpful and always-patient Alex, who rapidly puts me in touch with the “author-care” team; they will send me a code to get my free copy.
Our experiment was prompted when I started to think about blurbs for my latest thriller, The Rival. I eventually came up with 25 words that I felt effectively engaged the reader and I was pleased with the result. For a comparison, I re-read the blurb I’d created for Eavesdrop in conjunction with my publisher a couple of years before and realised that Eavesdrop’s blurb was missing something that the one I had just moulded for The Rival had somehow captured. But why did one feel so much more effective? I read and re-read them before I suddenly realised the difference was in the depth of emotional involvement.
To test whether my thoughts on this were correct, we then held an on-line poll among readers to get their view on 3 slightly different blurbs for Eavesdrop. We used the original one that had been so highly polished with my publishers, and put it alongside the one that maximized emotional engagement, and threw in a third that I made up in ten seconds. Here they are below in random order. Read them quickly. Don’t analyze them just yet, but simply read them as you would in a bookshop and see which draws you in most:
The hacker who stumbles over confidential government data, the virus creator who can infiltrate an organisation’s systems and extract sensitive documents, these all offer new plot lines that couldn’t exist in Agatha Christie’s day.
The James Bond films are a good example of this, which for many people veer into unrealism. Think of 007’s Aston Martin Vanquish in Die Another Day for example: it was a car that the touch of a button rendered invisible. The idea for this probably came from technology that even today is still in its infancy. Take an object you want to disappear and coat the side facing you with a full-size colour display. Next, fix a camera array facing away from you to its reverse side. Voila—you now have the ability to make your object disappear at the flick of a few trillion pixels: by displaying what the camera sees over the display, the item can appear to disappear because the user sees instead what is behind that object.
on technology. Wikipedia proposes Alastair Maclean’s The Satan Bug and Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October as good examples of this genre. Maclean dealt with the theft of germ warfare toxins to which there was no known cure; and Clancy chose to deal with an attempt to steal a highly advanced Russian submarine.
style stories harder to site in the modern day. Rather than leading to the death of the thriller, technology simply shifts the landscape that’s available to the writer.
ocal police station. The modern writer creating stories based in the 21st century must therefore work a little harder than their predecessors to make crucibles work.
For instance, hacking and virus generation are now sciences in their own right, and the author needs to be aware of what can be done. Think, for instance, of Israel’s scheme to destroy Iranian nuclear plants in 2008. They could have sent F15 and F16 fighters across Saudi Arabia from their Negev base to drop 2000lb bombs on the reactors as they did in 1981. However, twenty-seven years later they took a more subtle approach.
There are frequent cases of industrial espionage, where hackers have succeeded in getting their spying software installed on their victims’ computers. Some years ago, a London couple ran a profitable but illegal business selling trade secrets. Their main tool was a piece of highly sophisticated software (called a Trojan), which they embedded in DVDs containing business proposals, which they mailed to CEOs of a variety of companies. Because their software was so targeted at those individuals, the anti-virus programs failed to detect it, and the CEOs happily inserted the disks into their machines. The Trojan set to work and scanned the companies’ entire computer systems. Anything interesting was copied and sent back to the hackers, who promptly sold them to that company’s competitors.
how the NSA developed an innocent-looking USB lead with a tiny transmitter built into the connector. A spy just needed to break into an office and swap the cable with one already in use (for example to a printer), and they’ve got access to that computer’s data the moment its owner entered their password the next day.
Eavesdrop (originally published by Assent Publishing) is a thriller of assassins, modern-day smugglers, and high-tech spies. Who ruined Customs Investigator James Winter’s career, and what’s their link to a Middle East assassination plot?
