Writing on every continent

This civilization lived by the water. On the shore of Lake Edward, some twenty thousand years ago, people fished, gathered, and made harpoons of bone. One of them took a thin piece of bone, set a chip of quartz at its end, and began to cut.

The cuts are small and deliberate. They run in three columns along the shaft, gathered in groups, as if the hand had paused between each set and started again. Someone was keeping something: a count, a sequence, a record of days. We do not know which. The order of the groups looks intended, and that is almost all that can be said with certainty.

A man is told in a dream to tear down his house and build a boat. He does it. He loads it with silver and gold, with his family and kin, with the animals of the field and with craftsmen. The storm comes; for six days and seven nights the wind and the flood flatten the land. Even the gods cower like dogs.

When the waters sink, the boat comes to rest on a mountain. He sends out a dove; it comes back. A swallow; it comes back. A raven; it does not return.

The priests who met at Memphis in the spring of 196 BCE did not mean to write a key. They meant to honour a young king, Ptolemy V, and so they ordered their decree carved in the temples of Egypt in three scripts: the sacred hieroglyphs of the gods, demotic for everyday writing, and Greek for the rulers who had come from Macedonia.

For centuries one of those stones, already broken, lay built into a wall. In 1799 French soldiers, repairing a fort near the town the Europeans called Rosetta, pulled it out. Two years later, after the French defeat, it passed to the British and was shipped to London.

This civilization kept its archives in its hands. A cord of cotton or llama wool was hung with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of other cords, dyed and twisted, and on each cord knots were tied at chosen heights. A knot near the bottom counted ones; higher up, tens, then hundreds. A skilled keeper could run the strands through their fingers and give back a census, a harvest, a debt.

The Inka state governed millions of people across the Andes without letters as others knew them. Messengers ran with khipus along its roads. Spanish officials, arriving in the sixteenth century, watched keepers read them aloud, and sometimes used them in court; later, many were burned as suspect.

In the spring of 868, a man named Wang Jie paid for a text to be carved into wooden blocks, inked and pressed onto paper, so that it could be given away. He did it, the last lines say, on behalf of his two parents. The text was the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist teaching on the passing nature of all appearances.

At its head, the carver cut an image: the Buddha seated behind an altar under a canopy, speaking to an old disciple kneeling on a mat, surrounded by monks, guardians and a lion. Every line of that crowd was cut away from the wood with a blade, in reverse.

Each character was cast. The printers of Heungdeok temple shaped the signs one by one, poured molten metal into moulds, and set the small blocks in a frame, line after line, to print a book of their teacher's selected sayings. Then they took the frame apart and used the characters again for other pages.

It shows. Some characters lean a little; some are inked more heavily or more faintly than their neighbours; the lines do not always run straight. These are the marks of separate pieces of type, not of a carved wooden block.

Before this, every book in Europe was written by a hand. Then, in a workshop in Mainz, a man of the city trained in metalwork found a way to make the hand repeat itself.

Johannes Gutenberg cast letters one by one in metal from a small mould, set them in lines, inked them with a sticky black made with oil, and pressed paper and vellum against them with a screw, like a wine press. The text he chose was the Latin Bible that the churches of Europe read aloud. Two columns to a page, forty two lines to most columns, some 1,280 pages in two volumes.

This civilization wrote at the edge of a desert. Timbuktu stood where the caravans from the Sahara met the boats of the Niger, and with salt, gold and cloth came paper and books. Families copied them, bought them, annotated their margins, and passed them down.

The pages speak of everything. How to read the stars to know the seasons. How to divide an inheritance. How to treat a fever with plants and minerals. How to add and multiply. How the soul draws nearer to God. Some are in Arabic, others in African languages written in Arabic letters. Kept in chests and in family rooms, they survived heat, dust and termites for centuries.

This civilization lived on atolls so low that a coconut palm showed above the horizon only some twenty kilometres out to sea. Its navigators did not look for land; they felt for it. A swell rolling in from the east bent around an island, struck its reef and sent back a fainter wave, and a canoe crossing these meetings of water rocked in a way the body learned to recognise.

What is kept here is how that recognition was taught. Thin sticks lashed with fibre: the straight ones for currents and regular waves, the curved ones for the great ocean swells, and small shells tied on for the atolls. It was never taken to sea. A learner studied it ashore, committed it to memory, then left it behind. The chart travelled inside the navigator.

On the evening of 29 October 1969, in a room at the University of California, Los Angeles, a student named Charley Kline began to type the word login to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, several hundred kilometres to the north. He sent the l, and the other end confirmed it. He sent the o. Then the distant machine crashed. The first message that this civilization passed across its new network was therefore two letters: lo. About an hour later the whole word went through.

The map kept here was drawn in March 1977. Its lines no longer join four sites but dozens: universities, government laboratories, military bases, a satellite link to Hawaii, another across the Atlantic to Norway and on to London. Each small circle marked a switching machine, each box the computers attached to it. A note at the foot of the sheet admits that no claim can be made for its accuracy. The network was changing faster than anyone could draw it.