In recent years it has been popularized in books such as Robert Logan's The Alphabet Effect, complete with explanations of why the invention of the alphabet led to the superiority of Northern Europe. Logan writes that

many of the seminal ideas in Western science, mathematics, jurisprudence, politics, economics, social organization and religion are intrinsically linked with the phonetic alphabet. . . . Of all mankind's inventions, with the possible exception of language itself, nothing has proved more useful or led to more innovations than the alphabet. (17-18)

The narrative of alphabetic literacy assumes an evolution from pictographs to modern writing systems. This theory was first advanced by William Warburton, the future bishop of Gloucester, in his 1738 book Divine Legation of Moses. From his study of Egyptian, Chinese, and Aztec manuscripts, Warburton hypothesized that all scripts evolved from narrative drawings. His theory was widely diffused by Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and remained definitive for over two centuries (Schmandt-Besserat 4). Even though twentieth-century archaeologists have amassed a great deal of evidence to the contrary, the pictograph theory is still often repeated in popular accounts of the origins of writing (e.g., Claiborne, Gelb). Logan follows the underlying assumption of the pictographic theory in arguing that "the absence of Western-style abstractions and classification schemes in Chinese culture is related to the differences in writing systems" (47). In a chart of cultural patterns, he makes the following comparisons (49):

The two crux points in the narrative of alphabetic literacy occur with the inventions of the modern alphabet in classical Greece and Gutenberg's printing press in the mid-fifteenth century. Singling out the contribution of the Greeks to the alphabet seems at first a curious move because systems of writing as abstract signs existed long before Greek civilization. Greeks living in Phoenicia simply adapted the 22 Phoenician consonant characters to represent the Greek language. They converted a few of the consonants as vowels and added a few signs--phi, chi, psi, ksi, and omega--which were either borrowed, modified, or independently created. The earliest known alphabetic Greek inscription dates from about 730 B.C.E. and the earliest surviving commercial documents in Greek come 200 years later.

The Greek alphabet was transmitted to Latin via the Etruscans, who lived in central Italy from about the seventh through the first centuries B.C.E. Until nearly the end of the fifth century, the Euboean alphabet was used in Greece and hence was the script that the Etruscans imported and which later became the basis for the Roman alphabet. Had the Etruscans borrowed the later Ionian alphabet instead, modern European and Greek scripts would now have a much closer resemblance.

Greek inscription on an Etruscan funerary stele, fifth or sixth century B.C.E.

The tablet below was enclosed in the hollow clay envelope or bulla beside it and records the outcome of litigation between two men, both of whom claimed to own the same piece of land. A judge living in Nuzi in what is now Iraq ruled in favor of one of the litigants during the second half of the fifteenth century B.C.E. Two court officials rolled their cylinder seals across the tablet to certify its contents.

My colleague at the University of Texas, Denise Schmandt-Besserat, believes that the small clay tokens commonly found at archaeological sites in the Middle East are an important clue to the origins of writing. These tokens come in several shapes and extend over a long time span, from the ninth to the second millennium, B.C.E. The tokens were hand modeled out of clay. They are widely distributed over space--extending from Khartoum in the Sudan to mainland Greece to sites east of the Caspian Sea. Until a decade ago, however, archaeologists had few guesses about what the tokens were used for.

The crux of Schmandt-Besserat's theory, however, is how three-dimensional tokens led to two-dimensional symbols. Again, think of the example of the farmer with a grain surplus, eager to make futures trades for livestock and other goods. As this proto-agribusinessman wheeled and dealed his way up and down the Tigris and Euphrates, the bullae on his shelves piled up. After a while he didn't exactly how many sheep and goats he was going to acquire in the spring because the tokens were sealed in the bullae. Schmandt-Besserat thinks that some clever trader began impressing symbols of the tokens on the outside of bullae to indicate what they contained.

Eventually the convenience of noting the number of tokens on the surface of the bullae supplanted the system of tokens altogether. Schmandt-Besserat also hypothesizes that many of the tokens represent numerical signs rather than individual objects. Consequently, two-dimensional writing began not by representing reality through pictographs but by representing in two dimensions the previous recording system. If Schmandt-Besserat is correct, her theory helps to explain why the first tablets contain a surprisingly large percentage of symbols, why these symbols are abstract, and why they apparently were standardized at a very early date.

Even if she is not correct, the unearthing of large numbers of archaic texts dating from the fourth millennium B.C.E. and their subsequent deciphering disputes the assumption that writing evolved from pictures. True pictograms are relatively rare in the earliest Sumerian texts, representing "plow," "chariot," and "sledge." By 3,000 B.C.E. the Sumerians had considerably reduced the number of signs and had developed the cuneiform script which mixes phonetic signs and ideograms. Throughout the history of writing in the West, we find mixed systems continuing to the present. We have only to look at the top row of a keyboard to find words represented by single symbols: @, #, $, %, &.

The paradox of the narrative of alphabetic literacy lies in its claim of a cognitive divide between oral and visual cultures. In order to make this claim, a great deal has to be ignored about how information and ideas are stored and transmitted. The essential shortcoming in the narrative lies in its desire to provide a simple explanation of cultural differences by theorizing that writing systems shape cultures. The history of writing suggests just the opposite: that cultures freely borrow and adapt systerms for information storage when the need arises. Thus in its claim for the primacy of the visual, the narrative of alphabetic literacy not only effaces the material tools used in writing as Christina Haas has noted, but also visual cognition.