The collaboration among Houston, University of Cambridge Egyptologist John Baines and Assyriologist Jerrold S. Cooper of Johns Hopkins University began at a meeting that Houston hosted earlier this year to discuss the origins of writing. What resulted was "Last Writing," an essay on script death published recently in the British journal Comparative Studies in Society and History. Its basic conclusion: Writing systems die when those who use them restrict access to them.
"The sociological and cultural dimension is crucial," Houston said. "Successful systems don't have these prohibitions. Once there's this perception that the writing is only for this function or that function, script death is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy."
On the surface, the disappearances of the three ancient scripts appear to have little in common.
Both Egyptian and cuneiform survived for 4,000 years, a millennium longer than the Latin alphabet that Westerners use today, and both died in the early centuries of the Christian era after long declines. Mayan, by contrast, lasted about 2,000 years and died relatively abruptly around 1600 because of active repression by Spanish conquerors.
Both Mayan and Egyptian served only one language, while cuneiform, invented by ancient Sumerians around 3500 B.C., was adopted by many different Mesopotamian peoples who spoke Semitic and Indo-European languages and other tongues completely unrelated to Sumerian.
Mayan and cuneiform took one basic form, while Egyptian was actually four related but different systems. Hieroglyphics, the lovely script that adorns the pyramids and monuments of the pharaohs, was the most elaborate.
Mayan never had a real competitor, while cuneiform eventually succumbed to rough-and-ready local Semitic alphabets -- principally Aramaic -- that better served the region. Egyptian endured centuries of onslaught from the Greek and Latin of its invaders before finally giving way.
Despite the differences, all three writing systems fell victim to some of the same mistakes: "There's discrimination against everyday use, so that while religion may help a script survive, it does not extend its reach," Baines said. "And when the people [or conquerors] begin to identify the religion and its script as something heretical or dangerous, there's nobody left to protect it."
For ancient languages, the margin for survival was always narrow: "We're so used to universal literacy that we forget that the whole Mayan [literate] population may have been a third of the number of people who go to a college football game today," said Pennsylvania State University anthropologist David Webster, a Maya expert. "I don't think most of us focus on just how limited literacy was in a lot of these societies."
