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4 Texts before Writing Reading (Proto-)Egyptian Poetics of Power ludwig d. morenz Introduction: On Readability The idea of reading is much older than writing. Mesolithic hunters read footprints of animals and Neolithic farmers interpreted the sky as well as various other phenomena such as the flight of birds to predict the future. A more specific sense of reading is preserved in various divinatory practices. For example, sacral specialists in various cultures predict the future by reading the stars and their movements. While we can date this concept to the middle of the 3rd millennium BC in Mesopotamia, this practice is probably much older than its recording in writing. Another conceptionalization analogous to writing is the oracular reading of cracks in animal bones we know particularly from China (Keightley 1978). Early in human history people developed hermeneutic strategies with a view to helping them protect themselves from danger, supplying sufficient foodstuffs, or predicting the future. Furthermore, it may be more than pure chance that in China a substantial amount of early writing is closely associated with the oracular bones just mentioned. In the modern era this concept of reading lost something of its magic but at the same time dramatically changed when Galileo wrote: “Nature’s great book is written in mathematical symbols.” According to an inscription of Gudea (the ruler of the ancient Mesopo- 122 Ludwig D. Morenz tamian city-state Lagash ca. 2100 BC) not only are the gods stars in heaven, but heaven is specifically conceptionalized as a tablet of blue stone on which the world is written. This Borghesian transposition of culture into nature is an expressive metaphor on the power of writing and celestial prototypes for life on earth. Furthermore, we know the Greek etiology of Palamedes inventing writing by graphically imitating the flight of the birds or the Chinese myth of the cultural hero Cang Jie, who invented letters after observing the footprints of wild animals. These are just mythological motifs and not simple historical memories, but they point out remarkable associations of letters important for a philosophy of writing. Every development of writing—be it in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, or Mesoamerica—has its own specific cultural setting. Thus, various culturally specific components played a distinctive role in this very complex process. Nevertheless, the very ancient and even pre-human idea of a certain readability of the world (Blumenberg 1979) was an essential mental precondition for the development of writing. In all cases of evolving significatory systems, we can see a long path from natural signs—such as the footprints of wild animals—via partially altered signs—such as the cracks in oracular bones thrown into the fire—to consciously created iconic and symbolic signs. In the late 4th millennium BC a certain de-iconization of the sign generated a new technology of communication. This transition from pictures to script is marked by stressing the phonetic aspect of various signs via the rebus principle. Some signs were transformed into semiographically empty designators of the sound—i.e., phonograms. This development was probably a small step for a man but a giant leap for mankind, which seems to have taken place first around 3200 BC in the Nile Valley (Morenz 2004). Writing was of great importance for ancient Egypt from the late 4th millennium BC onwards, generating a substantial part of the Egyptian cultural identity. Pictures and Narratives. Reading Proto‑dynastic Semiophores Reading, in terms of understanding the message of a cluster of images in a fairly precise way, predated writing. Thus, the ceremonial palette from ancient Hierakonpolis (Fig. 4.1; Oxford, Ash. E.3924) is understandable not just as a pictorial composition, but also as a distinct “royal” narrative exploring the metaphorical power of the images.1 In this chapter, I will pres- Texts before Writing: Reading (Proto-) Egyptian Poetics of Power 123 ent an archaeo-semiotic case study of this remarkable object to understand the relationship between semiotic systems and power in late pre-dynastic Egypt. This way of encoding messages can be seen as “familienähnlich” (L. Wittgenstein) to writing. The palette under discussion belongs to a group of objects classified as semiophores—objects of meaning (Pomian 1987)—which includes ceremonial palettes, maces, combs, knives, or sickles (Asselberghs 1961). These objects gradually developed during the 4th millennium BC from being purely functional to primarily representative of meaning (Figs. 4.2 and 4.3; Morenz 2005a). They are typically prestigious products of the (proto-) Egyptian elite culture of the later 4th millennium BC...

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