Guns, Germs, and Steel: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

The key agents of colonization, Diamond argues, are writing, weaponry, microbes, and centralized government. In Chapter 12, he’ll discuss the history of writing, and see why some civilizations developed writing while others did not.

All writing systems tend to fall into one of three different camps (with a certain amount of overlap between all three): alphabet, logogram, and syllabaric. An alphabetic system uses a combination of signs (letters) to approximate the sounds of words (English is an alphabetic language). A logogramic system, like Chinese, uses single signs to represent whole words. Finally, syllabaric languages use signs to represent different syllables—these languages are now very rare, but used to be common.

It’s known that the Sumerians, Mesoamericans, Chinese, and Egyptians developed writing independently, with the Sumerians being the first to do so (around 3000 B.C.). Sumerian cuneiform, the first language, combined aspects of alphabetic, logogramic, and syllabaric language. Individual syllables of Sumerian words were modeled with simplified pictorial images; images that could also stand on their own as words. To read Sumerian would be like an English speaker seeing a picture of a bee, followed by a picture of a leaf, and pronouncing the word, “belief.”

How does writing spread from civilization to civilization? There are two basic ways for ideas to spread: blueprint diffusion (replicating a specific idea) and idea diffusion (trying to imitate a more general idea). Often, languages spread through blueprint diffusion. For example, the Roman alphabet (A, B, C, etc.) arose because of blueprint copying of the Semitic alphabet. However, all new languages have modified previous languages in some way: the blueprint diffusion is never perfect. For example, the Romans modified the Semitic alphabet by replacing the third letter of the Semitic alphabet, “g,” or “gimel,” with the letter “c.”

There are also many cases of idea diffusion in the history of language. In the 19th century, the Cherokee developed a method for writing down their language based on their partial knowledge of the existence of a written English language. After experimenting with a pictorial language, they settled on a syllabaric language, using about 85 signs (each sign representing one syllable) to represent all spoken Cherokee words. There are many other examples of how civilizations have created languages inspired by the general idea of another civilization’s language.

The question remains, however: why did some civilizations develop languages while others did not? It’s important to recognize that the earliest languages, like cuneiform, were cumbersome and ambiguous by modern standards. Many of the words in cuneiform had multiple meanings, and were much more dependent on context than words written in modern languages. But cuneiform did not need to be more precise. Cuneiform was a tool for a small class of scribes and scholars, used to keep track of taxes and debts: which people owed what goods to people in power.

As we can see from the history of cuneiform, writing was largely invented in order to keep track of the “flow” of economic transactions in a large agricultural society. But while having a large agricultural society is a necessary condition for the invention or adoption of writing, it’s not a sufficient condition. There were plenty of large agricultural societies that lacked writing.

The vast majority of human societies acquired writing by interacting with other civilizations, not by developing it independently. Therefore, one major reason why certain civilizations had a written language while others did not is that they were close to other civilizations that already had one. Writing spread in an east-west direction faster than it spread north and south. North Africa acquired writing from Mesopotamia sooner than West Africa did, largely because West Africa is farther south and isolated by the Sahara Desert.