Writing as Technology and Cultural Ecology

Writing is unanimously regarded as a marker of civilization in the sense of ‘civilization as high culture’. This insight has never been seriously questioned. What makes writing a marker of civilization is more than its mere function as an information technology. Those who possess writing have always been aware that, beyond the practical use of rendering ideas and words in the written code, it constitutes the realm of symbolic values that make writing an ingredient of cultural ecology. In order to perceive the magnitude of the art of writing as a communicational tool designed by the inventive mind, it is necessary to shed light on the cultural conditions in human communities that further the motivation of early writing. The present outline therefore does not only focus on a formal description of the ancient scripts as an information technology but also on the evolution of human symbol-making and on an inspection of the sociocultural conditions which made the elaboration of a system of visual communication – of first writing – possible.

Harald Haarmann, PhD, born in 1946, is a linguist and cultural scientist living and working in Finland. His publications include more than forty books in German, English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Hungarian and other languages. Among his recent English-language titles are Foundations of culture (2007) and Interacting with figurines (2009). He has contributed ten chapters to the CLIO encyclopedia Popular Controversies in World History (4 vols, 2011). Since 2003, he has been the Vice President of the Institute of Archaeomythology (Sebastopol/California, USA) and the Director of its European branch in Finland. Among his awards are the «Prix Logos», 1999 (France), the «American Medal of Honor», 2002 (USA), and the «Plato Award», 2006 (UK).

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