Baines/Disappearance of Writing Systems, 10. The Small Deaths of Maya Writing

Death happens once to any organism, which lives and expires, not to be reborn unless by miracle. Whether writing systems ‘die’, finally so, was the question posed from various angles in a recent paper by the author and two colleagues, John Baines and Jerrold Cooper (Houston et al. 2003). The topic had seemed overlooked, so our essay probed the twisting fate of writing systems in extremis. We came to the conclusion that diminished functions of script, linkages to obsolete knowledge with which a script had become identified, and the physical expiration of script-users from the effects of war or disease led systematically to the obsolescence of certain writing systems. Most defunct scripts were replaced by writing systems regarde —at least at the time—as facilitators of a wider variety of uses. Histories differed: a few scripts, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, enjoyed long ‘lives’, decrepit only after three millennia; others, such as Rongorongo, travelled along much shorter paths.