Writing that Isn't Pseudo-­‐Scripts in Comparative View

1 Writing that Isn’t Pseudo‐Scripts in Comparative View Stephen Houston1 By common understanding, writing is a graphic means of recording sound and meaning. It is not language per se, but a selective expression of that basic human attribute, as leavened and mediated by writing itself.2 Other messages come through as well. Think of emoticons, which encapsulate facial features and emotional states, or, in Christian contexts, a cross affixed to the names of the dead. To most scholars, systems of writing do not just operate as mere vehicles for language. They shoulder a variety of meanings, some not directly accessible by phonic means; they also compel attention to the times, places, and people behind them. In Germany or southern Pennsylvania, for example, use of fraktur declared allegiance to ethnic identity and tradition; when rejected by the Nazis in 1941, its absence revealed their racist or aesthetic disdain for that font.3 To extract a script from its setting overlooks much of what makes it work as a communicative device. Seldom considered, however, are examples of pure form in the writing systems of the world. These are the pseudo‐scripts, “writing that isn’t,” which evoke the look of graphs but not their substance.4 No amount of effort will elicit clear sounds or meanings from their lines or shapes. Yet, despite a seeming failure to do much of anything, they are well‐documented in certain areas, if not widely studied. A fact: wherever writing exists, mimics can exist too. Writing may represent sound 2 and meaning. But these marks represent that representation, if in an allusive, indeterminate fashion. They do not function in isolation nor is their appearance entirely random. And, as with any stick insect or moth that looks like a leaf, they require a mimetic target—an evocation needs something to evoke, and for a reason. The insect would rather not be eaten. While stalking prey, it might wish to preserve an effective disguise. Similarly, for varying causes, a scribe or scribbler found it useful or opportune to create writing that isn’t (or wasn’t). Pseudo‐scripts are rather more than sidebars in studies of human notation. Their forms and motivations express what people thought central to the form, composition, and content of script, and to the value, efficacy, and authority of writing. They distill the formal essence of what graphs were believed to be. Their circumstances highlight why people felt them worth making. But another point needs emphasis. Reception and the intended audience are equally important. David Lurie puts it well.5 For an illiterate, any text is a pseudo‐text. The experience of spectatorship predominates, although, unlike pseudos, the words they see could, with training, release their sound and meaning. Two pseudo‐scribes open this account. Pseudo‐scripting as a whole is then dissected for its various features and parallels found with other forms of depictive simulation. Graphic learning among children offers its own linked resemblance to pseudos. A concluding section, attentive to the need for local detail, touches on two such traditions: the copious pseudo‐scripting of the Classic Maya, and the judicious and selective pseudo‐scripting found in Greece and its cultural and political affiliates during the first‐millennium BC. 3 Castle and Campin as Pseudo‐Scripters Two people help to isolate the theme of writing that isn’t. The first is James Castle (1899‐1977), a deaf, probably illiterate “outsider” artist in rural Idaho. Of the two pseudo‐scripters, Castle is the closer in time yet strikingly distant because of his personal isolation. It is unclear whether he ever mastered language, and his graphs reflect a heart‐breaking, almost absolute separation from society. Using salvaged materials and tools of own design, Castle made pigments by mixing his own spittle with soot. The monochromatic images resemble black‐and‐white printing or photography, which he must have seen in books and magazines, torn, collected, pasted up, then gathered into his own pseudo‐books. “Discovered” by art historians in the 1950s, Castle continues to intrigue that community (there have been several retrospectives of his oeuvre in recent years). In part, this is because of his compulsive level of artistic commitment. He also had a perceived ability to pose questions relevant to contemporary art: how perception cleaves from language; how copies function in relation to originals; and how the hand‐ and the mass‐made have an uneasy kinship.6 Whether these concerns, phrased as such, truly intrigued Castle remains as opaque as his own intentions. Yet, through daubs, smears, and drawings, he groped for meaning. That struggle did not succeed. Wrapped in murk, Castle managed only to imitate the communications that others took for granted. Castle’s mimetic target was the Latin alphabet, which he pseudo‐scripted in three ways (fig. 1). One set of graphs mimicked the layout or ordination of 4 alphabetic writing, as though composing the mock‐up of a printed page and interplay of texts and images. Another marshaled actual signs in the alphabet, either as isolated letters or strung into words. Some occurred in nonsensical sequence, while others formed legible terms but in non‐syntactic order (he was fascinated by sign segmentation and clustering). And, finally, Castle devised codes known only to himself, presenting, in certain images, “keys” or commensurations from one system to another. These, too, failed their purpose. The second pseudo‐scripter, a very different case, is the late Medieval painter Robert Campin (c. 1378‐1444), otherwise termed the “Master of Flémalle” (fig. 2). (The label is, in fact, an error, after a non‐existent abbey misidentified by the art historian, Hugo von Tschudi). Scandalous in life, Campin is known for, among other works, a set of luminous religious paintings, including the Mérode Altarpiece, a triptych now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (#56.70a–c).7 A close‐up shows two samples of illegible writing. The Virgin is intent on her reading, a book and scroll nearby flutter with wind, coming, perhaps, from an angel’s wings. The scene is likely an Annunciation, and the angel has just arrived with news of Christ’s coming. These Bibles or prayer books underscore the Virgin’s studious virtue. Yet, as depicted, the texts are illegible, a deficient facsimile of writing. On the pitcher, probably of Florentine majolica, is another script: pseudo‐Hebrew lettering or possibly some composite with kufic, introduced into Florence at the time through contact with the Mamluks in Egypt. (Perhaps it also mimics capitalized Byzantine Greek—note the “K”). In this case, a secular, foreign message may contrast with the sacred writ on European books. The same workshop created a nearly identical 5 pitcher for another Annunciation, a painting in Brussels, at the Musée Royal d'Art Ancien. Infrared shows that, in the Brussels’ version, which contains no such lettering, the underdrawing left the pitcher’s surface blank. Presumably, this lettering appeared at the whim of the painter, and did not adorn an actual object.8 As Alexander Nagel notes, this pseudo‐script—sometimes Arabic‐tinged too—was, at the time, in Italy as well as in Flemish regions, “a realm of experimentation largely ungoverned by the oversight of patrons or ecclesiastical authorities.”9 It betokened writing both exotic and sacred, vaguely mystic—“a rapture of human utterance,” a speaking in tongues—and certainly oriental, redolent of the Holy Land. Nagel goes so far as to argue that notions of movement going back to Aristotle and beyond situated origins in terms of the direction of sunrise, “where things come from.”10 The pseudo‐script recalls a remote if exalted past when, to Campin and his patrons, Christ was made flesh. Pseudo‐Scripting Castle simulates English‐language lettering, Campin and his workshop allude to kufic or Hebrew. So very different in person and motive, they nonetheless share one feature: by definition, their pseudo‐scripts never reach their targets. They come close. But then, much like trompe l’oeil—an invitation to belief that ends in surprised pleasure or vexation—they swerve away in a kind of illusion. Yet trompe l’oeil differs in intended effect. It is a deception that shifts from two to three dimensions, or one that appears to replace one material or set of materials with another. That is not at the core of pseudo‐scripting. Nonetheless, pseudo‐scripting 6 and visual illusions do both draw on existential deceptions, purporting to be something they are not. They are impostures that can be merely fun or playful, unlikely to fool for long. An ambitious project with clear mimetic target is Xu Bing’s “Book from the Sky,” an installation evoking traditional Chinese block types (fig. 3).11 The quantity of strokes and their general disposition is like that of actual Chinese, but they encode no overt language. A comparable, equally sophisticated fabrication of non‐ sense is Luigi Serafini’s Codex Serafinianus.12 It presents recognizable linear sequences that recall the approximate length of words in analytic languages. But the internal complexity of the characters, especially those in the heading, far outstrips that of actual scripts. Both Serafini and Xu Bing build on a long tradition of asemic writing, one that dissolves away any pretense to meaning. Even legible writing, as in that of the great Chinese calligrapher, Zhangxu, requires enormous skill to read. His explosive scrawls were exuberant, virtuosic, and often drunken productions, a pure manifestation of élan. From this—writing as a vigorous eruption of internal states— comes, by long descent, the asemic writing of Paul Klee, Henri Michaux, Mirta Dermissache, and others: all creators of codes, but not ones meant to be cracked or made accessible.13 Pseudo‐scripts can go further in joyous play. Some instances operate in a depictive regress. They are the representation of a representation of a representation. A painter may show on a canvass (1st representation, a depiction) a pseudo‐kufic text (2nd representation, an illegible script) intended to evoke legible Arabic (3rd representation, of legible script). Or, as other examples: an illumination 7 in a Medieval manuscript of ceramics in an apothecary’s shop with pseudo‐Hebrew (fig. 4); and a white‐background Attic vase of the 5th century BC with an image of a funerary stela and a pseudo‐text to the deceased. All pass through the same chain of representation: they depict, in one medium, a pseudo‐script on another medium, which in turn simulates a legible text. Their mimetic targets have another feature. They can be internal or external in nature. Castle knew of English‐language writing, and lived in a time and place where that was the dominant notation. His pseudo‐script employed basic elements of alphabetic writing; his use was internal, if distanced in life by his circumstances of personal disability. By contrast, Campin and his workshop evoked external writing, convening, it seems, two separate scripts and reducing them to a system that was notably non‐local. In both examples, the precision of the evocation varied. Castle drew close through slavish copying, then devised a wildly variant form with discrete, segmented shapes and an imitation of non‐random syntax. Campin and his assistants abstracted what they took to be the essence of oriental writing—cursive forms, inflected with angularity, stroke‐based, and probably right‐to‐left or top‐to‐ bottom on the Florentine pitcher. Readers would have known that this was not Latin script, and conjectured or posited a non‐local origin for it. They would also have related the marks to the most common foreign scripts in their experience, Arabic and Hebrew, the latter at once internal and external because of its use by endogamous enclaves within European cities. In much the same way, Maya pseudo‐ glyphs of the 1st millennium AD, made for a few centuries in the Yucatan peninsula and environs, would be an internal example, as would an Arabic text in Islamic lands 8 so stylized as to be unreadable. Innately, a gold pseudo‐Arabic coin in 1st millennium England, far from Iberia or other zones where actual Arabic was written, has a different setting than pseudo‐kufic in 14th century Syria. For this reason, Richard Ettinghausen, building on an earlier observation by Eustache de Lorey, saw pseudo‐ kufic as conferring, among the faithful, a benediction to Allah, whatever the overt or surface legibility of the text.14 Ettinghausen at once focuses on and disregards context, however: Alice Walker, examining pseudo‐Arabic in Byzantine settings, points to their evolving reception as “mutable signs,” shifting from a “marker of alterity” to tokens of triumph and, under Muslim control, to prompts towards resistance as a Christian duty, and even, in doorways on churches, to their service as portals of liminality.15 The same divide of internal vs. external holds true for pseudo‐Hebrew on an amulet in Syro‐Palestine (internal) and a Dutch painting of Mary Magdalene from 1530 (external). Pseudo‐Chinese on Dutch Delft ceramics were intended to recall exotic trade goods and appeal to those craving Chinoiserie as an attractive decorative program.16 For Lothar von Falkenhausen such signs on Delft ceramics and in Chinoiserie come to signify “China” as a collective concept.17 Some of this knowledge could be direct yet still confused. The discovery of Mongol script (‘Phags Pa) on a now‐destroyed painting of Saint Jerome in the Upper Church of San Francesco demonstrates a typological understanding of distinct oriental scripts, that there were several, not an indiscriminate mass of foreign squiggles (fig. 5). As Rosamond Mack observes, however, the script at Assisi is deployed incorrectly, its customary top‐to‐bottom orientation switched to a lateral order consistent with 9 Western practice.18 Inherently, pseudo‐writing is contextual. The very property of being “internal” or “external” requires that setting, and its concrete expression on a particular object or building. This also means that where it appears—Hebrew on a hem or inscribed on a talisman—it signifies broader intentions about why pseudo‐ script was involved. A key observation: obscurantist writing, which allows the possibility of communication but with difficulty and with spiritual interlocutors, is not logically the same as pseudo‐script. The “bird script” of the mid‐first millennium BC in China, used to embellish elite items, revels in its elaboration, its embrace of ornamental flourish, and what was presumably the pleasure of its decoding by knowledgeable readers.19 They accentuate the exclusionary quality of writing, requiring a second level of literacy limited to the discerning few. Islamic stylization, as in affirmations of faith compressed into symmetrical diagrams, offer, with effort, legible script. (That effort echoes the struggle for virtue and may also offer protection through sacred writ.) Nor is it the angelic or celestial letters devised from Hebrew by Cornelius Agrippa in the sixteenth century or the script‐like Fu talismans that commanded spirits after the 6 Dynasties period in China.20 These permit, as does, perhaps, a Roman curse tablet, a form of communication that transcends language and passes to it mystic messaging. Magical speech requires, perhaps, magical signs. Curse tablets may have functioned in the same manner, at least notionally, or they enhanced their malevolent effect by their inversion of customary communication: a babble that upended productive speech in favor of its opposite, a malediction (fig. 6). In China, this feature could account for the illegible marks of writing in Hell.21 10 Pseudo‐writing may also signal fraud. When forged, and the present‐day buyer gullible or undiscerning, a text may not need to be legible. Indeed, it may lie beyond the skill of the faker. An example of this even dates to the Roman period, the notorious Bembine Table used by Athanasius Kircher to “decipher” Egyptian writing.22 A piece of decorative art, it records nothing but nonsense yet managed to fool early scholars of hieroglyphs. Learning and Pseudo‐Scripting An unexplored link is that between emergent writing, script being learned and applied by children, and pseudo‐scripts. Specialists in development, working on nascent alphabetic literacy among the young, find the following: an initial scribbling of “universal features,” namely, “linearity” (sequencing of signs), “discreteness” (perceivable segmentation), and “lack of iconicity” (signs are abstract or non‐ pictorial).23 The earliest legible spellings are often of personal names, especially the first sign of that nominal sequence. Challenges presented themselves when children needed to spell out phrases, at which time they might write “random letters or…pseudoletters.” That is, the writing was, in developmental terms, highly “task dependent,” contingent on what was being asked, at what time of life. The relevance here is that, at an early stage, children inventoried, in mimetic fashion, a compendium of the graphic essentials of a script (fig. 7). That they first attended to personal names strongly recalls, in a curious echo of individual learning, the origins of many writing systems as single words, often of personal labels. Pseudo‐writing slips along that continuum of vague resemblance, to the pictorial essentials and a 11 sense of the “container,” a book‐like form, to selective use of legible signs, to complete words, and then finally to syntax. Early on, they discover and implement an understanding that shapes repeat, that varied combinations achieve a more effective mimicry, that the systems are not infinite in such variation, and that they exist in correct disposition on surfaces.24 There is a sense, too, not only of gradients, but of “thresholds,” in which legibility advances considerably, an incomplete or erroneous spelling still yielding some retrievable meaning. Since some of the pseudos are hieroglyphic, and thus attentive to iconicity, a more useful attribute might be to emphasize not only their linearity and segmentation, but their systemic, sign‐based properties. There is also a strong likelihood that this act of mimesis informs the development of some “secondary scripts,” as in the debt that Sequoyah’s syllabary owes to Latin letters; another example might be the debt of 2nd millennium BCE Cypro‐Minoan to well‐established neighboring scripts of the Aegean and the Levant, such as Linear A and cuneiform. As with emergent writing, secondary scripts are aspirational, imbued with a directive to refine, make consistent, improve through practice, and expand in operational service. There is no implied infantilism in the comparison but, rather, an assumption that both represent considered analytical responses to target or “parent” scripts. To be sure, secondary systems contrast with their parent yet still owe fundamental debts to them—in Sequoyah’s case, the mimesis is skewed, pictorially semblant to the alphabet but, as a syllabary, structured distinctly. In origin, secondary scripts bespeak a perceptible ambivalence of creation, drawing on a stimulus system of writing but departing from it self‐ 12 consciously.25 Emergent writing involves decided evidence of frustration but, over time, a reduced level of ambivalence. Localizing Pseudo‐Script To a surprising degree, pseudo‐writing is studied within particular traditions, not as a comparative phenomenon. Yet, logically, writing opens the door to pseudo‐ writing. The latter “parasitizes” the former, coopting graphic features of writing, relying for its existence on that unwitting “host.” As mentioned before, a system of writing is one with mimics, but, on empirical evidence, pseudo‐scripts do seem selective in appearance, and their specific features respond to, and arise from, local conditions. As one general pattern, pseudo‐scripting clusters at temporal, cultural or social margins, in times and places where literacy is known but restricted or debilitated in practice. In Roman Egypt, magical objects, such as small “Stelae of Horus,” became incrementally less legible, if no less effective ritually (fig. 8).26 From Bronze Age Troy come examples of crude pseudo‐cuneiform, also inscribed with hieroglyphic Luwian. These underscore the authoritative prestige of the wedge‐ script tradition well away from the cuneiform heartland in Mesopotamia (fig. 9).27 Several late Maya stela, as at Yaxhom, Yucatan, are more public in display but no less unreadable. Marginality may also account for the abundance of pseudo‐glyphs on “Copador” ceramics made in El Salvador in the 8th century AD, well away from the locations where full graphic literacy is evident Enough knowledge existed to recognize writing but not enough to execute it in any surviving, readable form. 13 Maya pseudo‐glyphs. Maya pseudo‐writing correlates precisely with a period in which royal courts effloresced across the Maya Lowlands of the Yucatan peninsula and environs. Almost none are known prior to about AD 550; earlier texts are potentially legible if incompletely deciphered and do not belong in this category.28 Long‐noted in Maya writing, these “texts” were first labeled formally as “pseudo‐glyphs” by John Longyear, a ceramicist working in the area (the Maya southeastern zone).29 A doctoral dissertation by Inga Calvin, along with a subsequent essay, offers by far the more comprehensive and thoughtful treatment.30 She confirmed the limited temporal range of such pseudo‐writing, refuted a test hypothesis that they recorded an alternative script (from their cursory nature, never a likely possibility), discerned that they occurred in the same sites as legible texts, and found them to be more frequent on smaller ceramics. Calvin suggested something of an aide‐mémoire theory, that a single glyph, often part of a longer formula tied to vessel use and offering, served to abbreviate that string of signs. Assigned by Calvin to three categories, most pseudos were mere ovals, while others exhibited legible signs in disorder or they accreted to illegible ones (fig. 10). A final set presented some sense, in syntactic sequence, but included examples with repeated or illegible signs. Variants occurred within each of her categories, as deduced from a sample of 116 ceramics with known provenance. (The sample without provenance was far larger, but Calvin elected, on advice from her doctoral committee, to maintain an emphasis on pots of known origin.) Repeated use of signs on several pots correlated strongly with single sites, suggesting the operation of one painter inclined to such use. 14 Additional observations supplement Calvin’s study. The pseudo‐glyphs function in the same slots as legible ones, either in rim‐band texts or as spurious if correctly positioned captions for figures (fig. 11). This is almost the equivalent of lorem ipsum, a placeholder for typographers, with its own on‐line generators, that draws on a speech by Cicero.31 Indeed, this is a more general feature of pseudo‐ writing. Then there was the sheer opulence of pseudo‐glyphs. Conceivably a sign of wealth and refinement, they might be applied readily to many ceramics. The pictorial effect, the overall richness of ornament, meant more than any pedantic legibility.32 These would also be implied in the so‐called abecedaria, which are rarely studied as cultural phenomena (in a sense, these lists of letters, in sequence, capture all possible configurations of sound and meaning, reveling in graphic abundance but not in extractable words or phrases).33 Yet, for the Maya, several also occur in royal tombs, so a hypothesis that sumptuary privileges determine the use of pseudo‐glyphs is unwarranted. At a few sites, doubt clouds how to classify texts, as in a set from about AD 600 at Piedras Negras, Guatemala. The signs are legible on an individual basis, even syntax evident in systematic use of certain phonetic syllables. But the text has no retrievable meaning. Most likely, these were made by the same hand, so the experiment may have been a matter of personal caprice. Some pseudo‐glyphs could be scale‐dependent, being inserted into scenes too minute to permit ready legibility. Finally, there is what might be called less a pseudo‐script—it contains a pretense to meaning—than a “fantasy” or contrived script, a projection of what writing must be like in foreign parts. This is the extraordinary, pseudo‐biscript from the façade of 15 the summit building of Temple 26 at Copan.34 As reconstituted by Barbara Fash and David Stuart, it presents a perfectly legible Maya inscription but also, in pride of place, at initial placement in the paired text, a Teotihuacan‐style sequence of signs. Stuart has described this aptly as a “Teotihuacan font” for Maya signs, but the possibility also exists that it works as an imaginative experiment, devising a writing system that might have existed in that distant, and by this point destroyed, imperial city in Central Mexico. A copious tradition, perhaps the greatest concentration anywhere of pseudo‐ writing in proportion to legible script, Maya pseudo‐glyphs cannot be explained on a case‐by‐case basis. Often, the data are insufficient for that task. But they do occur in circumstances that must have encouraged their making. The courtly setting mentioned before was dominant, but also a vastly increased population, a likely condition of diglossia between elite speech and that of most non‐elite Maya—the disconnection in language parallels one between legible and non‐readable script— and an aesthetic milieu of ever‐more‐energetic experiments in visual illusionism. When literacy appears to collapse in the final centuries of the 1st millennium AD, all evidence of pseudo‐writing goes with it—in this respect, too, pseudos operate like parasites: when the host dies, so does the hanger‐on. Although not stressed by Calvin, another feature commands attention: pseudo‐glyphs behave as a highly‐ contrastive, internally varied set of “signs.” In relative measure, most of them do not remotely resemble legible graphs. The exceptions tend to be the most common Maya glyphs, as in the so‐called “kawak,” “imix” or “frontal‐ajaw” signs, all corresponding to day glyphs that could have been easy to memorize. Instead, 16 pseudo‐glyphs capture the “essence”—the basic features, as in emergent writing— of what Maya writing might be. Regular‐sized ovoids intersperse with smaller, rectangular, rounded ones. Sequences occur in the glyph‐blocks common to legible Maya script, yet here in unreadable manner. Thresholds between legible and unreadable writing are, with only a few counter‐examples, starkly delineated. The emphasis resounds with the pictorial properties of script, their decorous placement, with, in a sense, the demotion of writing to pleasing ornament. Pseudo‐writing on Attic Pottery. As noted before, pseudo‐scripts cluster at the margins. They may traverse vast distances or sensitive cultural divides, as in the case of Chinese on Delft ceramics or the many examples of pseudo‐Arabic in Byzantine contexts. They may also breach more proximate, even intimate boundaries, as sometimes occurs with pseudo‐scripts on pottery produced in ancient Athens for Athenian audiences. The sheer abundance of pseudo‐scripts on such vessels demands attention: about a third of all extant Attic pots bearing text are inscribed with so‐called “nonsense inscriptions.”35 That designation is a misnomer, for those pseudo‐texts, although linguistically empty, are charged with meaning.36 Speech is an act of communication involving several parties; so too is writing. How pseudo‐scripts were used in communicative interaction in Greek antiquity is best studied in specific social contexts, as in the highly regulated drinking party known as the symposium, where ceramic vessels bearing texts were not out of place.37 Inscriptions (and pseudo‐inscriptions) on Attic pots work at various levels: some texts record the names of the potters and painters that made the vessels or of 17 their owners; others label the characters depicted or quote those characters’ utterances; others yet proclaim the beauty of specific youths or of beauty in general. Many inscriptions directly address the participants in the symposium, inciting them, for example, to partake in the drinking: “Be merry and drink this [cup]” (khaire kai piei tende).38 Some pseudo‐scripts on vessels associated with wine and merriment seem to have been intentionally written to incite drunken revelers. The charge: to attempt the impossible act of reading nonsensical sequences of letters or letter‐like scratches.39 Upon arriving at a symposium, even a sober man would seem drunk if he were to attempt to read aloud those strings of signs. Pseudo‐texts, replete with unutterable phonetic values, sometimes work with their accompanying imagery to capture the utterances of speakers at the edges of language. On a drinking cup (kylix) now in the British Museum outbursts of pseudo‐ text have been written among naked wrestlers exercising vigorously (fig. 12). Those letters and letter‐like scratches mean nothing in ancient Greek, but they convey the physical exertion of attractive young men, some of whom, now rested, would have been enjoying themselves at the banquet. Pseudo‐texts accompany singing dancers on a wine cooler (psykter) made not in Athens, but in ancient Corinth (fig. 13). Other pseudo‐scripts have been interpreted by François Lissarague as the sounds of flutes or musical instruments: in a pot now in Munich a sequence of o’s rises from the mouth of the poet Alcaeus as he sings next to the poetess Sappho (fig. 14).40 What exactly those linguistically null o’s are meant to incite among symposiasts is unclear—perhaps participants were prompted to sing a favorite lyric song upon inspection of the pot. Whatever those o’s may have meant, nonsense syllables— 18 initially mere vowels, then consonant‐vowel combinations, both uttered and written out—continued to play a role in Greek music and magic well into the Byzantine period.41 The grunts of wrestlers, the clamor of dancers, and the melodious contours of song are exceptional forms of speech that could be evoked on vessels used for banqueting through letters that were not writing. Pseudo‐scripts also appear on Attic vessels used in contexts other than the symposium.42 As inebriated discourse and song stretch the limits of speech, so too does intense emotion. Pseudo‐scripts sometimes appear on lekythoi, elongated ceramic vessels sometimes used in funerary ceremonies to store oil to anoint the dead. When speaking figures are shown on lekythoi, pseudo‐scripts, alphabetically coherent but sequenced into nonsense, may cue the dark impossibility of addressing the deceased, or the broken, sobbing speech of lamentation. In a lekythos now in the University of Mississippi Museum the messenger gods Hermes and Iris are surrounded by signs that approximate Greek letters, but prove to be mere squiggles upon further inspection (fig. 15). Hermes and Iris may be speaking, but the content of their message is beyond alphabetic reckoning. In Athens as elsewhere pseudos also traversed more distant geographic and cultural boundaries. A peculiar body of Athenian nonsense inscriptions involves strings of letters with no apparent linguistic content that occur on pots adorned with characters dressed in foreign garb, usually identified as “Scythians,” or with Amazons. Such texts are often composed of actual Greek letters arranged in bizarre sequences. A recent article proposes readings of thirteen such inscriptions. Its authors claim that some of those “nonsense inscriptions” are encoding languages 19 such as Persian, Abkhazian, Circassian, Ubykh, and Georgian.43 Perhaps there are resonances of the poorly understood ancestors of those Iranian and Caucasian languages in the thirteen pots in question. What seems much more probable is that something else is being captured: the very fact that Scythians and Amazons spoke shockingly foreign languages, languages beyond the limits of the comprehensible for Athenians. Scythians and Amazons, or rather, the people of central Asia with whom Athenians had occasional contact, uttered sounds that rung like nonsense to them, sounds whose very strangeness could only be partially captured by the Greek alphabet. Pseudo‐scripts on Attic pots allow us to speculate about the various meanings and intentions of writing that isn’t in a highly literate environment. Those inscribed on drinking vessels and on lekythoi may be crossing close, almost personal boundaries. Thwarted Content The use of illegible text, writing that isn’t, can be understood as fundamentally similar across its varied appearances—a coding system that promises linguistic meaning, only to fail in that capacity. Yet a gathering of test (text?) cases exposes their divergent and contextual meanings. A maker launches with a certain intention that, in reception, may shift substantially to future viewers. Context matters, as shown by multiple examples, whether targets are internal or external. There can be the fervid impulse behind a curse and its scrambled text—arguably, its meaning could be understood by malevolent forces or the asemicity itself energize a 20 projection of ill‐will. The lack of readability makes such interpretations impossible to prove. But that does not mean those meanings failed to operate: the “asemic” may, indeed, have always connoted some ancillary meaning, the lack of semantic freight being itself a statement about the properties of script. Other pseudos were probably scale‐dependent, especially in second‐order representations, when painters offered a representation of a representation of a representation. The easiest explanation, that pseudo‐scripting reflected limited access to literacy, both by makers and readers, would explain aspirational usage: this corresponds to the example of John Castle (a personal disability) or the Delft tile‐painters (a lack of interest in the details of a writing system of distant origin). This view may apply, if only in part, to Maya pseudo‐writing. In such settings, pseudo‐writing arose when the script was high‐prestige, and production of writing and skilled responses to it were highly restricted. Ironically, it may reflect a condition in which writing has become desacralized, its functions more varied. Pictorial and aesthetic values came to dominate their production. 21 REFERENCES Aanavi, Don 1969 “Islamic Pseudo Inscriptions.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Fine Arts, Columbia University. Adler, Jeremy 2010 “Paul Klee as ‘Poet‐Painter’. In Art, Word, and Image: Two Thousand Years of Visual/Textual Interaction, edited by John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas, and Michael Corris, pp. 178–201. London: Reaktion Books. Aichele, K. Porter 2002 Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Auld, Sylvia 1986 “Kuficising Inscriptions in the Work of Gentile da Fabriano.” Oriental Art 32 (1986): 246–65. Barasch, Mosche 1989 “Some Oriental Pseudo‐inscriptions in Renaissance Art.” Visible Language 23: 171–87. Barnes, Laurie, Elizabeth B. McGraw, and Bangjin Fan 2008 “Spirit, Brush, and Ink: Dong Qichang's Tribute to the Wild Cursive Calligraphy of Zhang Xu.” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 82: 46‐59. 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Houston, Stephen D., and Felipe Rojas 2014 “Sourcing Novelty: On the ‘Secondary Invention’ of Writing.” Paper presented at the Signs of Writing: The Cultural, Social, and Linguistic Contexts of the World’s First Writing Systems,” Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago, Nov. 9. Immerwahr, Henry B. 1971 “A Projected Corpus of Attic Vase Inscriptions.” In Acta of the Fifth International Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, Cambridge, 1967, pp. 53–60. Oxford: Blackwell. 26 1990 Attic Script: A Survey. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2006 “Nonsense Inscriptions and Literacy.” Kadmos 45: 136–72. Jacobs, Lynn F. 2012 Opening Doors: The Early Netherlandish Triptych Reinterpreted. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Latacz, Joachim 2004 Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery. Oxford University Press. Ledderose, Lothar 2001 Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lehrich, Christopher I. 2003 The Language of Demons and Angels. Leiden: Brill. Lissargue, François 1990 The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquest: Images of Wine and Ritual (Un Flot d’Images). Trans. Andrew Szegedy‐Maszak. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lurie, David B. 2011 Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Harvard East Asian Monographs 335. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Louis, François 2003 “Written Ornament—Ornamental Writing: Birdscript of the Early Han 27 Dynasty and the Art of Enchanting.” Ars Orientalis 33: 10‐31. Longyear, John M., III 1944 Archaeological Investigations in El Salvador. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 9(2). Cambridge: Harvard University. 1952 Copan Ceramics: A Study of Southeastern Maya Pottery. Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 597. Washington, D.C. Mack, Rosamond E. 2001 Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300‐1600. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mayor, Adrienne, John Colarusso, and David Sanders 2014 “Making Sense of Nonsense Inscriptions Associated with Amazons and Scythians on Athenian Vases.” Hesperia 83: 447–93. Morley, Simon 2003 Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. Murray, Oswyn 1990 Sympotica: A Symposium on the Symposion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nagel, Alexander 2011 “Twenty‐five Notes on Pseudoscript in Italian Art.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59/60: 228–48. Pappas, Alexandra 28 2012 “More than Meets the Eye: The Aesthetics of (Non)sense in the Ancient Greek Symposium.” In Aesthetic Value in Classical Antiquity edited by Ineke Sluiter and Ralph Rosen, 71‐111. Leiden: Brill. Parish, Nina 1994 Henri Michaux: Experimentation with Signs. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi. Pope, Maurice 1999 The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script. Rev. ed. London: Thames and Hudson. Puranik, Cynthia S., and Christopher J. Lonigan 2011 “From Scribbles to Scrabble: Preschool Children’s Developing Knowledge of Written Language.” Reading and Writing 2011: 567– 589. doi: 10.1007/s11145‐009‐9220‐8. Robson, James 2008 “Signs of Power: Talismanic Writing in Chinese Buddhism.” History of Religions 48: 130‐69. Serafina, Luigi 2013 Codex Seraphinianus. New York: Rizzoli. Schachner, Andreas, and Recep Meriç 2000 “Ein Stempelsiegel des späten zweiten Yahrtausend v. Chr. aus Metropolis in Ionien.” Studi Micenei ed Egeo‐Anatolici 42: 85–102. Sloboda, Stacey 2014 Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth‐ 29 century Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sparkes, Brian A. 1991 Greek Pottery: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Spittle, S. D. T. 1954 “Cufic Lettering in Christian Art.” Archaeological Journal 111: 138–58. Stadler, Martin A. 2008 “On the Demise of Egyptian Writing: Working with a Problematic Source Basis.” In The Disappearance of Writing Systems: Perspectives on Literacy and Communication, edited by John Baines, John Bennet, and Stephen Houston, 157–181. London: Equinox. Sternberg‐el Hotabi, Heike 1994 “Der Untergang der Hieroglyphenschrift: Schriftverfall und Schrifttod im Ägypten der griechisch‐römischen Zeit.” Chronique d'Egypte 69: 218–48. 1999 Untersuchungen zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der Horusstelen: Ein Beitrag zur Religionsgeschichte Ägyptens im 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. Ägyptologische Abhandlungen 62. 2 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Stroo, Cyriel, and Pascale Syfer‐d’Oline 1996 The Flemish Primitives I: The Master of Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden Groups. Brussels: Brepols. Stuart, David 2005 “A Foreign Past: The Writing and Representation of History on a Royal 30 Ancestral Shrine at Copan.” In Copán: The History of an Ancient Maya Kingdom, edited by E. Wyllys Andrews and William L. Fash, 373‐94. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Tanaka, Hidemichi 1984 “Giotto and the Influence of the Mongols and Chinese on His Art.” Art History (Tohoku University) 9: 221–24. 1989 “Oriental Script in the Paintings of Giotto’s Period.” Gazette des Beaux‐Art 113: 214–26. Temple, Charles, Ruth Nathan, and Codruta Temple 2013 The Beginnings of Writing. 4th edition. Boston: Pearson. Tolnay, Charles de 1959 “L’autel Mérode du Maître de Flémalle.” Gazettes des Beaux‐Arts 53: 65–78. Touliatos, Diane 1989 “Nonsense Syllables in the Music of the Ancient Greek and Byzantine Traditions.” Journal of Musicology 7: 231–243. Von Falkenhausen, Lothar 1999 “Inconsequential Incomprehensions: Some Instances of Chinese Writing in Alien Contexts.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 35: 42– 69. Walker, Alice 2015 “Pseudo‐Arabic ‘Inscriptions’ and the Pilgrim’s Path at Hosios Loukas.” In Viewing Inscriptions in the Late Antique and Medieval 31 World, edited by Antony Eastmond, pp. 99–123. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yetts, W. Perceval 1934 “’Bird Script’ on Ancient Chinese Swords.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 3: 547‐552. 32 FIGURE 1. James Castle and modes of pseudo‐scripting: a) layout and illegible “text”; b) legible letters in word‐like sequences; and c) novel codes and attempted commensurations. Source: http://jamescastle.com/genres/, accessed July 22, 2015; © James Castle Collection and Archive. FIGURE 2. Campin’s Mérode Altarpiece, central panel, detail. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection, 56.70a–c (http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/cl/original/DP273206.jpg, accessed July 22, 2015). FIGURE 3. Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky, Xu Bing 1987‐1991. British Museum, 1993.0709.0.1. FIGURE 4. North Italian apothecary's shop, from a manuscript of a translation of Ibn Sina/Avicenna’s Canon Medicinae, c. 1450‐75, detail. Bibliotheca Universitaria, Bologna, Italy, MS 2197, fol. 492. FIGURE 5. ‘Phags Pa, now‐destroyed painting of Saint Jerome in the Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi, Italy. Public domain. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Jerome_1296_1300_Church_of_Sa n_Francesco_Assisi.jpg, accessed July 15, 2015). FIGURE 6. Greek amulet, 5th‐6th c. CE, Syro‐Palestinian. FIGURE 7. Emergent writing; http://mommyme‐ thewonderyears.blogspot.com/2011/03/journal‐drawings‐age‐4‐5.html, unlicensed image, accessed July 22, 2015. 33 FIGURE 8. Magical stela of “Horus on the Crocodiles,” Roman period, Egypt, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum 1886.809 (Sternberg‐el Hotabi 1999:74 and pl. LIX). FIGURE 9. Drawing of metal seal with pseudo‐cuneiform (outer ring) and Hieroglyphic Luwian (inner ring). Late Bronze Age Troy, Turkey (public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Troja_Siegel_Luwische_Hieroglyphen.jpg ). FIGURE 10. Maya pseudo‐glyphs: (a) illegible signs, Structure J‐11, Piedras Negras, Guatemala, 7th century AD; (b) legible signs, Uaxactun. Photographs by Inga Calvin. FIGURE 11. “Slots” for pseudo‐glyphs, Ceibal, rollout by Inga Calvin. FIGURE 12. Naked youths wrestling amidst pseudo‐text, Foundry Painter, ca. 490‐ 480 BC, British Museum 1850,0302.2 (Creative Commons license). FIGURE 13. Dancers singing on Corinthian wine cooler (psykter), ca. 550‐570 BC. FIGURE 14. Sappho and Alcaeus on krater by Brygos Painter, ca. 470 BC, Munich 2416, Staatliche Antikensammlungen München. Drawing by Valerie Woelfel. http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/2197, accessed July 22, 2015. FIGURE 15. White‐ground lekythos of Hermes and Iris by Diosphos painter, ca. 495‐ 480 BC, Mississippi 1977.3.82. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/image?img=Perseus:image:1991.01.0920, accessed July 22, 2015. 34 a b c Figure 1 35 Figure 2 36 Figure 3 37 Figure 4 38 Figure 5 39 Figure 6 40 Figure 7 41 Figure 8 42 Figure 9 43 a b Figure 10 44 Figure 11 45 Figure 12 46 Figure 13 47 Figure 14 48 Figure 15 49 1 I thank Christopher Woods and Edward Shaughnessy for their invitation to present at the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, and Xiaoli Ouyang for her hospitality at Fudan University in Shanghai. This essay was written in part by Houston, with input at an earlier stage from Felipe Rojas of Brown University, while Houston was the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. Welcome comments and leads came from John Baines, Stephen Chrisomalis, David Lurie, Guolong Lai, Haicheng Wang, Matthew Stolper, Jeffrey Tharsen, Niek Veldhuis, Pascal Vernus, and Marc Zender. 2 “Writing” and “script” are used interchangeably here. “Writing system” corresponds to a set of related practices and products, seen by its users as coherent and learnable. Another view, not followed here, is more Saussurian in tinge: that an underlying system, “writing” (much like Saussure’s langue, “language”), must be separated analytically from its performance, “script” (analogous to Saussure’s parole, “speaking”). The complexity of the interaction between the two blurs their clear separation, and their categorical distinction becomes cumbersome: as a descriptive, “writing system” suffices to emphasize structural features of such notations. On non‐phonic elements in writing: Bodel 2012, pp. 65–69. 3 Martin Bormann denounced these letters as Schwabacher Judenlettern, although it is widely thought that the real aversion to fraktur derived from Hitler’s purely aesthetic dislike of this typeface. For facsimile of Bormann’s memorandum: 50 http://www.ligaturix.de/bormann.htm, accessed June 26, 2015; also Hartmann 1998. 4 A phonic analogue would be, depending on language, “hubbub,” “gaya,” or “walla,” in which a group of people, usually actors, feign language by joint utterance of nonsensical words or sounds; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walla, accessed July 22, 2015. 5 Personal communication, 2015. Lurie explores the meaning of this encounter between literates and illiterates and of opaque writing in, Lurie 2011, pp. 21‐28. He further stresses that “no human artifact is ‘non‐communicative’” and that “[a]legibility’ is a heuristic concept, not a designation of a unified phenomenon,” Lurie 2011, pp. 29, 33. At the conference in Shanghai, Stephen Chrisomalis placed equal emphasis on the need to focus on reception. 6 Retrospectives, exhibits, and monographs of James Castle: Fer 2011, pp. 153–58, for comment on his meaning to Modern and Post‐Modern artists; also Bell and Umberger 2014. On‐line resource: http://jamescastle.com/. Accessed April 19, 2015. 7 Campin’s Mérode Altarpiece, a much‐studied triptych, may have been a collaborative effort painted in two phases, “the central panel manufactured for sale on the open market without prior commission and the wings made to order later, after the buyer was secured”: Frère 2007, pp. 56, 66, 70; Hahn 1986; Jacobs 2012, pp. 48–52, p. 49 for quotation; a classic study, Tolnay 1959. 51 8 Campin’s pitcher: Callmann 1984, figs. 3–4; cf. Stroo and Syfer‐d’Oline 1996, fig. 5. For Florentine context: Auld 1986, p. 259, who seems nonetheless too particular in her explanation, stressing, for several paintings, Florentine mercantile contacts with Tunis and Egypt. Barasch 1989, p. 172, notes the presence of kufic on public doors from the later 12th century AD in the Cathedral of Le Puy‐en‐Velay, France; see also Barral I Altet 2004. Barasch (1989, pp. 176–79) distinguishes between “disguised inscriptions,” which are legible but not meant to be read, and the completely unreadable “proper pseudo‐inscriptions.” 9 Nagel 2011, 229. 10 Nagel 2011, 233–34. 11 “Book from the Sky”: Erickson 2001. 12 Serafina 2014. 13 On Zhang Xu: Barnes et al. 2008. Word in image: Morley 2003. Asemic writing: Gaze and Jacobson 2013. As calligraphy: Dengo 2010, 24–7. On Klee: Adler 2010; Aichele 2002. On Michaux: Parish 1994. 14 Ettinghausen 1976, p. 34, who emphasizes the spread of pseudo‐kufic in the west during the later 11th and early 12th centuries AD, often as a cadenced “tall‐short‐tall” ornament (see p. 37); citing de Lorey 1938. Ettinghausen asserts, however, that the precise meanings were no longer evident, only their “religious aura” or blessing (p. 42). 15 Walker 2015, pp. 118–19. 16 Von Falkenhausen 1999, fig. 4, of Delft tiles, c. 1725. As Ernst Gombrich pointed out, many terms for styles began as a “vocabulary of critical abuse,” showing an 52 ambivalence towards such productions; Gombrich 1971, p. 81; also Sloboda 2014, p. 7. 17 Von Falkenhausen 1999, p. 63, “reduced to something like a trademark or a designer logo, signifying ‘China’.” 18 ‘Phags Pa at Assisi: Mack 2001, pp. 51–52. Mack believes the script came to attention in 13th century Assisi through a “souvenir,” perhaps paper scrip. Identification by Tanaka 1984, 1989. 19 Bird script: Yetts 1934, as the most readily available source, Louis 2003. Haicheng Wang drew Houston’s attention to this script. 20 On Agrippa: Lehrich 2003; also Drucker 1995, pp. 191—93. On Fu talismans: Louis 2003, p. 22, fig. 13, Robson 2008, fig. 8. Jeffrey Tharsen was helpful in pointing out a plethora of online sources for such talismanic writing. 21 This evidence is from Guolong Lai, citing Ledderose 2001. 22 Pope 1999, p. 33, fig. 17. 23 Puranik and Lonigan 2011, pp. 2, 9. 24 Temple et al. 2013, pp. 26–35. 25 Houston and Rojas 2014. 26 Houston et al. 2003, 445, 458, figs. 2, 8; also Stadler 2006, pp. 162‐63. 27 On the seal from Troy: Hawkins and Easton 1996, extended discussion in Latacz 2004, pp. 49–71. On possible pseudo‐hieroglyphic Luwian from Metropolis, also in Western Anatolia: Schachner and Meriç 2000. In a personal communication, Matthew Stolper notes the presence of a few pseudo‐cuneiform texts in the Persepolis Fortification Archive, housed for the moment at the Oriental Institute in 53 Chicago. Niek Veldhuis believes pseudo‐texts are relatively rare in cuneiform but does discern them in Lamaštu amulets of the second and first millennia B.C. and in magical or medical incantations that jumble poorly known languages; see Farber 2014, pl. 90. 28 On pseudo‐glyphic chronology: Houston 2000, Table 1. 29 Longyear 1944, 1952. 30 Calvin 2006, 2013. 31 The work is De finibus bonorum et malorum, although scrambled. The source was discovered by Richard McClintock, a professor of Latin, who traced its typographical use to the 1500s; http://priceonomics.com/the‐history‐of‐lorem‐ipsum/, accessed July 22, 2015. We thank John Baines and Stephen Chrisomalis for reminding of this convention. 32 Houston 2000, pp. 151–52. 33 Houston and Rojas 2014. 34 Stuart 2005, pp. 387‐90, fig. 10.6. 35 Immerwahr 2006, p. 136. As happens in the Maya case, Attic pseudo‐inscriptions exist in a gradient; Immerwahr 1971, p. 54, identifies “mock and near‐sense inscriptions, meaningless inscriptions, imitation inscriptions or letters, and blots or dots.” Such inscriptions are much more frequent on Athenian pots than on pots from any other region of the ancient Greek world, but they are also attested elsewhere. 36 Study of Greek nonsense inscriptions and pseudo‐texts has not been helped by the tendency of some scholars to imagine such inscriptions and their makers as part of a 54 rigid binary: either entirely meaningless or entirely meaningful, entirely literate or entirely illiterate. 37 On the symposium: Murray 1990. On nonsense inscriptions on pottery used at the symposium: Pappas 2012. 38 Lissarague 1990, pp. 59‐67, the quote (khaire kai piei tende) is from p. 61, but the translation is our own. 39 Beazley 1929, pp. 361–62; Immerwahr 1990, pp. 44–45; Lissarague 1990, pp. 126–29; Sparkes 1991, pp. 112–13. Hénin 2013, 24–5, proposes that some such texts encourage a kind of participation, serving as slot‐holders allowing readers to fill in the words they wish. 40 Lissarague 1990, pp. 125‐126. 41 Touliatos 1989. 42 See Pappas 2012, n. 7, for Attic pots bearing nonsense inscriptions associated with other events and spaces. 43 Mayor, Colarusso, and Sanders 2014.