Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet.

• Author: Daniels, Peter T.

Six of the British Museum's 64-page pamphlets in the "Reading the Past" series have been gathered into hard covers: Cuneiform, by C. B. F. Walker, pp. 14-73 (1987); Egyptian Hieroglyphs, by W. V. Davies, pp. 74-135 (1987); Linear B and Related Scripts, by John Chadwick, pp. 136-95 (1987); The Early Alphabet, by John F. Healey, pp. 196-257 (1991); Greek Inscriptions, by B. F. Cook, pp. 258-319 (1987); and Etruscan, by Larissa Bonfante, pp. 320-78 (1990). Runes, Maya Glyphs, and Mathematics and Measurement are omitted. They are repaginated, their indexes are combined, and the color covers deleted--otherwise they stand unaltered. Even the tables of contents have not been collected or even reset (only the new page numbers are dropped in), and their varying typography--not to mention the differing sizes and faces of the type in the six sections--is intrusive. The book is a good buy at half the price of the separate pamphlets (each, $9.95), but the format rather defeats the purpose of a booklet with which to wander the halls of the British Museum. This (like Gaur 1984) is very much a British Museum document: half its authors are keepers, and the great majority of objects seen in photographs (except in Linear B) are from the British Museum's collections.(1) But (except for the introduction) this is a far more reliable volume than Gaur's.

The introduction (all references to Cuneiform need to be reduced by two pages) tries to cram too much into eight pages, including a one-paragraph summary of the Chinese cultural area. This leads to several incorrect or misleading statements. Ideogram and logogram are not equivalent terms; they reflect profoundly different understandings of the nature of a script and of writing in general. It is completely wrong to say that the Ugaritic and Old Persian scripts used signs "selected" from the (Mesopotamian) cuneiform inventory; there is no relation between the shapes of any of them: the Ugaritic characters are cuneiform adaptations of the linear alphabet, while no antecedent of the Old Persian characters has been convincingly suggested. The statement that the Roman alphabet "does not prevail everywhere, partly because it is inadequate for the representation of certain languages (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese), partly because other languages (Greek, Russian) already have adequate alphabets of their own" is absurd. It suggests that the members of other cultures would do well to exchange their heritage for uniformity with...