The invention of writing and the mysteries of undeciphered scripts

Описание: When was writing invented? Can we really talk about invention, when it comes to the earliest scripts? Why do the first signs have the shapes that they do? How do these shapes interact with the way we see the world? Why are there still undeciphered scripts from the ancient world? Can we decipher them and can AI help us in this quest?

The invention of writing is an opaque phenomenon, as are all origins, as are all things remote and detached from the present, embedded in the deepest recesses of time. To understand how it was born we must go back more than 5000 years, and travel thousands of kilometers between China, Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Mayan civilisations, and end our journey on Easter Island, where a writing system seems to have been invented from zero. But not even that is enough, we have to go even further back in time, to understand how the first signs were created, and how these tell us about our imagination, our visual perception and the relationship with what surrounds us. Writing is not only the greatest invention in the world, but also a kaleidoscope to understand it and to better understand ourselves. However, there are still ancient scripts that we cannot read and decipher, and we will discover how state-of-the-art research can solve these problems and by doing so, reconstruct the history of the written word, globally.

Silvia Ferrara is Full Professor at the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies at the Bologna University. She studied Archaeology and Classics at University College London and Oxford. She was Junior Research Fellow in Archaeology at St John’s College, Oxford (2006-2010). Specialised on ancient writing systems, Silvia Ferrara has developed multi-stranded techniques on the decoding of the Aegean Bronze Age scripts, the earliest in Europe, and published the results on international peer-reviewed journals. She is also an expert on the invention of writing in the world, Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica and Egypt. She has published two monographs with Oxford University Press, and a wide array of articles in the top-end tier journals in the field. Her latest monograph, Writing and Cognition, Harnessing Shapes into Signs is in the works with Cambridge University Press and will be out inlater 2024. She is Principal Investigator of the ERC CoG Grant INSCRIBE, "Invention of Scripts and their Beginnings".

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