Writing is a recent invention on the timescale of human history: the Sumerian pictographic tablets of Uruk, the oldest known examples of the written word, were inscribed 5,300 years ago. Oral expression was established and refined over the ages in thousands of languages and dialects, most of which we will never know anything about. Writing systems only record a fraction of the words that human beings have whispered in each other’s ears, or shouted in each other’s faces. But the written word is permanent.

The distribution of writing systems chiefly reflects the spread of mass belief systems, and especially of major religions. The dissemination of Buddhist teachings promoted the use of Indian writing systems. In the first centuries of our era, the Roman alphabet spread once more with Christianity, this time in concentric circles rippling out from the Mediterranean. The Arabic script followed Muslim preachers who set out west and north from Mecca. The Great Schism of the Christian Churches divided European writing systems, with the Eastern Churches adopting Cyrillic, a variant of the Greek alphabet.

Later, colonial domination was made stronger by its claim to be bringing civilisation to peoples who might have orally transmitted wisdom, but did not have writing. In their zeal for conversion, missionaries were highly creative, inventing syllabaries (see Glossary) that allowed them to proselytise in the local language, though this was actually pointless because any written system can be used to transcribe all languages, no matter how different: Belarusian and Chinese can both easily be transcribed into Arabic script; Korean can be written with Chinese characters as easily as with hangul; Maltese, which derives from Arabic, has only ever been written in Roman script; and the peoples of Central Asia had to learn four different (...)