Writing systems: A case study in cultural evolution

The history of writing, which is both a technology and a symbolic system, provides an informative case study of the evolution of material culture. Writing systems in various parts of the world display a tendency to develop from a semasiographic (ideographic) form, through logography (word or morpheme signs), to increasing use of phonography (sound signs). However, not all early civilizations developed written forms of recording, and increasing technological and social complexity is not accompanied by equal abandonment of logography in favour of phonography. This suggests that the technological advantages of phonographic, and in particular of alphabetic, scripts have been ethnocentrically overrated. Furthermore, while purely phonographic scripts require the prior existence of more logo‐graphic ones, they have never evolved directly from such scripts but were created on the margins of societies that used them. There is considerable evidence that stability and change in writing systems are influenced by religious, political, ethnic, professional, class, and cultural values to a much greater extent than by practical considerations. This suggests that in order to understand change in any form of material culture it is necessary to determine empirically the relative importance of practical and cultural considerations in bringing about such change. This may vary greatly from one category of material culture to another.