Desecrating signs: ‘hieroglyphic’ writing systems and secondary script invention

This piece is a short teaser for a longer forthcoming contribution that has as its focus the development of a theoretical model for the creation of writing systems of the second millennium BC in Anatolia and the Aegean. Two examples will be considered as case studies for the modelling frame. They have been spuriously termed ‘hieroglyphic’ as they are taken to substantially reproduce graphemes through, or derivative of, picture writing, by analogy with, but not stemming from, the Egyptian hieroglyphic script. The scripts in question are the Cretan and Anatolian ‘hieroglyphic’ systems, which come from a wide area, albeit comprising somewhat proximal regions, of the Mediterranean. While they do not belong to the same chronological horizon (Cretan shoots off in the first part of the second millennium BC, and Anatolian by the middle), they share, I think, some common structural traits that may be significant in explaining how scripts were created in the second millennium, as a result of exposure to pre-existing literate cultures.