Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and the

Formation of World Literature

David Damrosch

T hrough most of recorded history, literature has not been written

within an integrated global system. “World literature” has meant
different things in different parts of the globe, and only a very few
writers have truly had a worldwide audience. At least through the eigh-
teenth century, most literary works have circulated within fairly dis-
crete fields, whether framed in regional terms (the East Asian world),
in political terms (the Roman Empire), or in linguistic terms (the Ger-
manic and Romance traditions). My purpose in this essay is to explore
a term missing from most discussions of regional and global literatures:
the crucial role of global scripts. Often thought of only in relation to
their original language or language family, scripts that achieve a global
reach extend far beyond their linguistic base, with profound conse-
quences for literature and for cultural in general. Alphabets and other
scripts continue to this day to serve as key indices of cultural identity,
often as battlegrounds of independence or interdependence. A global
script forms the basis of a broad literary system — what we might call a
“scriptworld” — in which works that use that script are composed.
An emblematic modern instance of the cultural-political role of
scripts was Kamal Atatürk’s wrenching Turkish away from Arabic script
to a Roman-derived script in 1928, part of his effort to realign Turkey
away from its Ottoman, Middle Eastern past and toward a European
future. To dramatize this effort as a patriotic assertion of a newly cho-
sen identity, Atatürk had himself photographed giving instruction in

Modern Language Quarterly 68:2 (June 2007)

DOI 10.1215/00267929-2006-036 © 2007 by University of Washington
196 MLQ June 2007

the new alphabet, with Turkish flags prominently displayed behind his
open-air blackboard (fig. 1). Struggles over scripts continue today in
various borderland regions. Chechnya has changed its script twice dur-
ing the past century. Long written in Arabic characters, the Chechen
language shifted over to Cyrillic during the period of Soviet domina-
tion, then went to the Roman alphabet when Chechnya achieved inde-
pendence in 1997. The Berbers of Algeria and Morocco, never having
achieved an independent national status, have used Arabic and Roman
alphabets during different periods — when their languages were not
suppressed outright. Currently, there is a movement among Berber
nationalists to escape this either-or choice by reviving the long-dead
Tifinagh script, derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Often important in cultural politics, scripts have had a particularly
far-reaching impact on the production and circulation of literature,
not only in today’s globalizing world but throughout literary history. My
starting point for thinking about the issue of script has been The Epic
of Gilgamesh, arguably the first true work of world literature. Gilgamesh
is the earliest literary text that we know to have had a wide circulation,
well beyond its Babylonian origin, and it is also the earliest literary text
for which we have recovered translations into several foreign languages:
portions of translations of the Akkadian original have been found in
Hittite and in Hurrian, and this “original” is itself an expansive adapta-
tion of an earlier Sumerian song cycle. Gilgamesh appears, in fact, to
have been the most popular literary work ever written in the ancient
Near East; texts have been recovered from no fewer than fourteen sites,
not only all over Mesopotamia but as far away as Hattusa, the Hittite
capital in what is now Turkey, and Megiddo, some fifty miles north of
Jerusalem.
What is striking is how fully the circulation of this most famous
Mesopotamian text was bounded by the spread of cuneiform. Every ver-
sion of Gilgamesh that we have, in four languages and several dialects,
is in cuneiform. The fragment found at Megiddo had reached roughly
the farthest point of cuneiform’s daily use south of the Syrian city-state
of Ugarit, a meeting point of cultures where both Akkadian syllabic
cuneiform and a local alphabetic cuneiform were employed. Despite
the epic’s immense popularity for more than a thousand years after it
was composed around 1600 BCE, there is no evidence that Gilgamesh
Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 197

Figure 1. Kamal Atatürk teaching his new alphabet, 1928

198 MLQ June 2007

was ever translated into any noncuneiform script. In this respect it is

typical of all literary texts written in cuneiform: they vanished when
cuneiform fell out of use.
Gilgamesh’s name continued to be known to some Hellenistic writ-
ers, and the Homeric poets most likely knew the epic at least in oral
form. The many striking similarities between Gilgamesh and the Iliad
and Odyssey indicate a direct familiarity, transmitted either through
Anatolia or else, as M. L. West argues, through bilingual traders, set-
tlers, or itinerant poets in Syria and Cyprus.1 Yet these very parallels
indicate that Gilgamesh enjoyed at best a shadowy half-life in Greek: the
illiterate Homeric poets may well have adapted elements from the story
of Gilgamesh after hearing it performed, yet no scene or even passage
in Homer can be called a direct translation of any scene or passage in
Gilgamesh. As A. R. George concludes, after examining evidence for the
epic’s transmission beyond cuneiform sources, “The epic that we know
died with the cuneiform writing system, along with the large portion
of the scribal literature that was of no practical, scientific, or religious
use in a world without cuneiform.”2
Political and economic affairs could be conducted in cuneiform
even beyond the regions where it was at home. A large cache of cunei-
form documents found at Amarna, in northern Egypt, shows that the
pharaohs had scribes trained to read and write Akkadian, Hittite, and
other languages in cuneiform. Yet no literary texts in cuneiform have
been discovered at Amarna. Throughout the ancient Near East, lyrics,
narrative poems, and prose stories seem to have found written form
largely within the script system in which they were first composed. If
so, it may be better to speak of Gilgamesh as circulating around “the
cuneiform world,” rather than in the smaller unit “the Mesopotamian
world” or the overly large unit “the ancient Near East.”
The Near East contained three principal literary systems, each
based in a different script or family of scripts. Apart from the cunei-
form tradition, there was the Egyptian hieroglyphic system, and several

1 M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 626 – 27.

2 A. R. George, ed., The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition,

and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1:70.
Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 199

societies along the eastern Mediterranean coast shared a West Semitic

alphabetic system, comprising Hebrew, Aramaic, alphabetic Ugaritic,
and Phoenician. The separations between these groups were hardly
watertight; scribes were often competent in more than one system,
and the alphabetic systems actually derived from a highly simplified
alphabetic version of cuneiform. Yet even fairly modest transformations
give writing a distinctly foreign cast and discourage the unpracticed
eye; tF @ S>μπLH TRANSL>TERATE QI6 FRhSE, an English speaker’s eye is
likely to pass right over these words, even though the Roman alphabet
is directly derived from the Greek and I have simply transliterated the
phrase “if I simply transliterate this phrase.” A reader trained only in
the two dozen signs of alphabetic cuneiform would have no way at all
to read the six hundred signs of syllabic cuneiform, the standard script
used for Sumerian and Akkadian literatures.
The literatures of these groups tended to stay in their respective
scriptworlds. There are close relations among Hebrew, Aramaic, and
Ugaritic literatures (no Phoenician literature survives, so there is no way
to know about those links), but relations between these and cuneiform-
based literatures are much more distant. Egyptian literature remained
self-contained in hieroglyphic writing, and as a result no Egyptian
poems or tales survived the eclipse of hieroglyphics and the derivative
hieratic and demotic scripts, even though there were many opportuni-
ties for contact with other systems. The Song of Songs shows close simi-
larities to Egyptian love poetry, and the episode of Potiphar’s wife in
the Joseph story reworks an Egyptian narrative known as “The Tale of
the Two Brothers.” As with the Homeric epics and Gilgamesh, however,
what we find is an echoing of motifs rather than the translation and
preservation of integral foreign texts.
No doubt direct literary translations were sometimes made across
Near Eastern writing systems, but none survives that corresponds to the
translations we do find of political and economic documents. Some bib-
lical proverbs read like translations of proverbs known from Egyptian
wisdom texts, but no extended stretches of any of these texts survive in
the Bible. The book of Job has a clear antecedent in a Babylonian poem
known as “The Babylonian Theodicy,” in which a despondent sufferer
complains that the gods have treated him unjustly while rewarding
wicked men; his complaints alternate with replies from a friend who
tries to comfort him and justify divine ways. Yet this poem served only
200 MLQ June 2007

as a general inspiration for the author of the book of Job, which does
not translate or even directly paraphrase any of the poem’s passages
and which differs from it significantly in formal terms. Whereas the
Babylonian poem consists of twenty-seven orderly eleven-line stanzas,
neatly alternating between the sufferer and his friend, the book of
Job uses an old prose story as a frame tale and develops its argument
through long, free-form speeches by several speakers. All in all, then,
it appears that each writing system constituted a significant boundary
against literary circulation — no doubt often a permeable membrane,
but a boundary or even a barrier nonetheless.
Conversely, as Gilgamesh’s impressive distribution shows, a wide-
spread writing system could penetrate boundaries of other sorts, eas-
ing a work’s entry into a new region and even a new language. A script
also has subtle but far-reaching effects on what is written to begin with.
Scripts may illustrate the classic Sapir-Whorf hypothesis better than
language does: writing systems profoundly shape the thought world
of those who employ them, not for ontological reasons grounded in
the sign system as such but because scripts are never learned in a vac-
uum. Instead, a writing system is often the centerpiece of a program
of education and employment, and in learning a script one absorbs
key elements of a broad literary history: its terms of reference, habits
of style, and poetics, often transcending those of any one language or
country.
Here again, cuneiform provides an exemplary and well-documented
case. Developed by early Sumerian settlers in southern Mesopotamia, it
was soon taken up by their more numerous Akkadian-speaking neigh-
bors. By the time they began to record extensive texts beyond prayers,
financial memoranda, and short chronicles, the Sumerians had been
absorbed politically and socially into Akkadian culture. Yet the Sume-
rian language retained high prestige as a literary, religious, and philo-
sophical medium. During the second and first millennia BCE, students
were trained in both languages, whether they liked it or not. As one
student lamented, in Sumerian, in a Babylonian school text:
The door monitor said, “Why did you go out without my say-so?”
and he beat me.
The water monitor said, “Why did you help yourself to water with-
out my say-so?” and he beat me.
Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 201

The Sumerian monitor said, “You spoke in Akkadian!” and he beat

me.
My teacher said, “Your handwriting is not at all good!” and he beat
me.3

The sheer difficulty of learning syllabic cuneiform, with its hundreds

of clusters of tiny wedge-shaped marks, no doubt increased a scribe’s
disinclination to read widely outside that script, and it certainly would
have discouraged outsiders — as it does still — from taking up cunei-
form studies for pleasure. Even the Egyptian hieroglyphic system,
largely phonetic in character and far easier on the eyes, was daunting to
learn. “Your heart is denser than an obelisk,” one Egyptian instructor
complained to his pupil; “though I beat you with every kind of stick, you
do not listen. . . . Though I spend the day telling you ‘Write,’ it seems
like a plague to you. Writing” — the teacher sternly concludes — “is very
pleasant!”4
Much as a nonnative speaker today may learn minimal “business”
English or Japanese for commercial purposes, many scribes would have
mastered enough cuneiform to get by with letters or bills of lading,
but they would never have had the skill to enter into the rich liter-
ary world of complex cuneiform or hieroglyphic texts. Those few who
had survived the long apprenticeship, however, possessed a rare and
prestigious knowledge and seem to have taken little interest in the lit-
eratures of the smaller and poorer societies that employed alphabetic
scripts. The very simplicity of the alphabetic scripts, foundation of their
eventual victory over cuneiform and hieroglyphics, probably seemed
to the cultivated Egyptian or Babylonian scribe to be a mark of lesser
refinement and weaker expressive power. Cuneiform had more than lit-
erary prestige: not unlike Latin in early modern Europe, it had political
value as an elite language, available only to people of substantial educa-
tion and social standing, its complexity shielding messages from com-
moners’ eyes. When a provincial governor asked Sargon II of Assyria
around 710 BCE if he could use the more convenient Aramaic, Sargon

3 Quoted in The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation, trans. A. R. George (Lon-

don: Penguin, 1999), xviii.
4 Papyrus Lansing, in Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings, trans. Miriam

Lichtheim, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 168 – 69.

202 MLQ June 2007

sharply reproved him: “[As to what you wrote]: . . . ‘if it is acceptable

to the king, let me write and send my messages to the king on Ara-
maic parchment sheets’ — why would you not write and send me mes-
sages in Akkadian? Really, your message must be drawn up in this very
manner — this is a fixed regulation!”5 Bilingual but monoscriptural,
Babylonian scribes freely translated back and forth between Sumerian
and Akkadian, and as Akkadian became the lingua franca across the
Fertile Crescent, scribes throughout the region developed multilingual
abilities based in a single script. The scribal culture grounded in cunei-
form created a strong bond across the Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hittite
empires, whose leaders were often at each others’ throats. As a result,
even though Mesopotamia and the broader Fertile Crescent were politi-
cally fragmented under various regimes, it is appropriate to speak in
literary terms of a single “cuneiform world.”
It was a world that not everyone wanted to join. As cuneiform
extended its reach, some cultures chose to resist absorption by develop-
ing or maintaining a local script. This element of resistance to a threat-
ening or hegemonic power may help explain why we see little evidence
of direct translation from one scriptworld to another in Near Eastern
antiquity: writers were more likely to adapt, parody, or even deliber-
ately mistranslate material they were reading in the unwanted script.
In the Bible, for instance, writers adapted Babylonian texts in a mode
of polemical rewriting or mistranslation rather than in the modes of
translation and expansive adaptation that were more common in the
cuneiform world itself.
The biblical story of the Flood famously resembles the flood story
told to Gilgamesh by his ancestor Uta-napishtim in the eleventh tab-
let of Gilgamesh, and, given its wide distribution, it is entirely possible
that the Hebrew writers knew the epic. Alternatively, both stories may
derive from a common Babylonian source, The Atrahasis Epic. Yet like
the echoes of Gilgamesh in Homer, the relation to the Bible is one not
of translation but of a pointed retelling from a very different perspec-
tive. The Bible puts the moral burden on sinful humanity, whereas the
Babylonian works assign it to the fickle gods. Disturbed in their sleep by

5 Manfred Dietrich, ed., The Babylonian Correspondence of Sargon and Sennacherib

(Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2003), 5.

Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 203

the noisy human race, the gods impulsively decide to wipe them off the
face of the earth and then are horrified when they realize what evil they
have unleashed. Belet-ili, the goddess who has brought on the flood,
cries out in bitter regret:
How could I speak evil in the gods’ assembly,
and declare a war to destroy my people?
It is I who gave birth, these people are mine!
And now, like fish, they fill the ocean!
(Epic of Gilgamesh, 92)

The Bible rejects the Babylonian conception of a polytheistic divine

court whose members are subject to all-too-human impulses and mis-
judgment, and so the Noah story can be told only from a radically dif-
ferent point of view. While they apparently picked up the outlines of the
Flood story and various details from the older texts, the biblical writ-
ers turned the story upside down — and they retold it in prose rather
than in verse, a change that further muted any resemblance to outright
translation.
The book of Job also has a Babylonian source, and we might expect
it to have a less polemical relation to it. After all, the book of Job is a
far less orthodox work than the book of Genesis: its characters are not
even identified as Hebrews, and it disturbingly questions the justice of
God. Yet it too departs dramatically from the terms of its source, “The
Babylonian Theodicy.” The Babylonian poem displays an orthodoxy of
its own, inscribed in the very form of the poem, an extended acrostic.
Within each of its twenty-seven stanzas, all eleven lines begin with the
same sign (fig. 2). Together, the twenty-seven signs spell out a ringing
endorsement of the religious and political order: a-na-ku sa-ag-gi-il-ki-
i-nam-ub-bi-ib, ma-aš-ma-šu, ka-ri-bu ša i-li ú ša-ar-ri, “I am Saggil-kinam-
ubbib, incantation-priest, adorer of the gods and the king.”6 Not a
translation at all, the book of Job explodes its source both formally and
conceptually; setting the texts side by side gives an effect not unlike a
juxtaposition of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot with Milton’s “On His Blind-
ness,” so very different in its hard-won faith that “they also serve who
only stand and wait.”

6 See W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960),

64.
204 MLQ June 2007

Figure 2. The first three stanzas of “The Babylonian Theodicy,” whose opening char-
acters spell out anaku (“I”). As redrawn in Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature
Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 205

The general relation of the Bible to Akkadian sources, then, is one

of wary distance at best, resulting in fundamental transformations and
deliberate mistranslation. In Genesis, for example, the Yahwistic writer
claims that Babylon took its name from Hebrew balal, “to mix up”
(11:9). This satirical jab at the Hebrews’ oppressive, polytheistic neigh-
bors and periodic overlords ignores the obvious derivation of “Baby-
lon” from Akkadian bab-ilı̄ “gate of God,” meaning Babylon’s patron
god, Marduk, whose ziggurat dominated the city. Less flamboyant than
the Yahwists, the Priestly writers who composed Genesis 1 were equally
insistent on avoiding a clear translational link between Hebrew and
Babylonian culture: when God creates the sun and the moon, the text
denies them their plain Hebrew names, shemesh and yareah, instead
speaking awkwardly of ma’or gadol and ma’or katin (big light, little light
[1:14 – 18]). In this way the Priestly writers avoided naming the Babylo-
nian sun god, Shamash, or the divine moon (Akkadian irihu, cognate
of Hebrew yareah). The entire story of the Tower of Babel, seemingly a
tragic tale of linguistic loss and dispossession, may have conveyed an
almost opposite valence: it is a story of resistance, an account of how
Akkadian lost its claim to be spoken by everyone, thanks to the Baby-
lonians’ impious pride.
During their long exile in Babylon, and the much longer period of
cuneiform prestige across much of the Near East, the Hebrew scribes
deliberately chose to nurture their own culture not only by preserv-
ing their language but also by refusing to shift into the cosmopolitan
script of the more powerful cultures to their north and east or the
magnificent hieroglyphics of imperial Egypt. When the psalmist sings
of the Hebrews hanging their lyres in the willows al naharoth Bavel, “by
the waters of Babylon,” too sad to sing, the scene does not portray only
sorrow, still less an inability to sing, conveyed as it is in some of the most
moving verses in the Bible. Rather, the scene describes the Hebrews’
stubborn refusal to sing for their foreign masters:
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
206 MLQ June 2007

How shall we sing the Lord’s song

in a foreign land? (Ps. 137:2 – 4)

In that climactic line, eik nashir et-shir-Adonai al admath nekhar? the term
nekhar, “foreign,” is aptly chosen for its Babylonian setting: it is cog-
nate with Akkadian nakarum, “enemy” or “rebel.” The psalmist ends
with a stark appeal for revenge against his hated hosts: “Happy shall
he be who takes your little ones / and dashes them against the rock!”
(Ps. 137:9). Though these lines apostrophize the Hebrews’ captors,
the psalmist certainly did not want any actual Babylonians to get this
message. Little wonder that the Hebrews sang nothing like this for the
Babylonians — and little wonder that they clung to their uncouth script,
a further shield from prying eyes.
In the book of Daniel, the foreign script baffles the evil king
Belshazzar when God writes his punishment on the wall. Admittedly,
Belshazzar himself probably could not read (Near Eastern monarchs
rarely bothered to learn), but when he calls his wise men to interpret
the writing, none of them can understand it, either. This portion of
Daniel is written in Aramaic, a language commonly spoken throughout
Mesopotamia by Belshazzar’s time, and the Aramaic terms that God
uses (mene, tekel, parsin) have cognates in Akkadian as well. But these
common words mean nothing to the Babylonians, whom the biblical
writer portrays as incompetent outside the boundaries of their pre-
ferred script. Indeed, the wise men cannot even read the words: “Then
all the king’s wise men came in, but they could not read the writing or
make the interpretation known to the king. Then King Belshazzar was
greatly alarmed, and his color changed; and his lords were perplexed”
(Dan. 5:8 – 9). The king is forced to call for the young Hebrew captive
Daniel, who can read the words and explain the king’s fate to him.
With divine irony, God makes Belshazzar an offer he can’t refuse in a
script he can’t understand.

The early case of cuneiform and its Near Eastern rivals shows a pattern
that can be found in the spread of more fully global languages since
then: the leading edge of a global language is its globalizing script,
which can far outrun the spread of the language itself. Once adopted,
a global script often functioned in two quite different ways at once.
On the one hand, the new technology for writing became a powerful
Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 207

force for cultural cohesion in its adopted territory, for it gave a com-
mon literacy to groups that had had differing scripts or none at all. On
adopting the Roman alphabet in colonial New Spain, for instance, the
Mexica, Zapotecs, and Maya gained a common writing system far eas-
ier to learn and employ than their incompatible hieroglyphic systems.
They could more readily learn and read each others’ languages, and
over time literacy spread far beyond the elite circles that had mastered
the old hieroglyphics. On the other hand, more complex scripts had
advantages of their own. The early cultural and political consolidation
of China was fostered by the widespread adoption of the pictographic
writing developed by the Shang people along the Yellow River during
the second millennium BCE. Nonphonetic at base, the Chinese charac-
ters could be used by peoples of widely different languages or mutually
incomprehensible dialects, such as the Cantonese to the south and the
Muslim Hui to the west, far beyond the system’s Mandarin-speaking
base. Over many centuries China has had a national script rather than
a national language.
Sometimes local groups have welcomed a powerful foreign script,
but from Hellenistic times onward indigenous peoples have often had
good reason to beware of Greeks bearing Greek. Even when the gift
was only an alphabet and not the full-scale imposition of a foreign lan-
guage, it came with cultural strings attached. When Saint Cyril adapted
Greek letters to create the Cyrillic alphabet that became ubiquitous in
many Slavic countries, the new alphabet was certainly useful for local
purposes, but it also provided a powerful conduit for scripture — Cyril’s
direct concern — and fostered a broader connection to Greek Ortho-
dox culture. Cyrillic both gave visible form to the Slavic languages and
enclosed them within certain limits. “While the Slavs besieged Con-
stantinople in 860 A.D.,” writes the Serbian novelist Milorad Pavić in
Dictionary of the Khazars, Cyril “was setting a trap for them in the quiet
of his monastic cell in Asia Minor’s Olympus — he was creating the
first letters of the Slavic alphabet. He started with rounded letters, but
the Slavonic language was so wild that the ink could not hold it, and
so he made a second alphabet of barred letters and caged the unruly
language within them like a bird.” To force the Slav’s language into
the cage of their script, Cyril and his brother Methodius “broke it in
pieces, drew it into their mouths through the bars of Cyril’s letters, and
208 MLQ June 2007

bonded the fragments with their saliva and the Greek clay beneath the
soles of their feet.”7 Thus the Slavic language is first caged and then
cemented with “Greek clay.”
Pavić was dead serious in describing Cyrillic as an embodiment of
violence. His novel was published in Cyrillic script during the waning
years of the Tito regime, in the language then known as Serbo-Croatian.
As Yugoslavia broke apart after Tito’s death, Serbia split away from
Croatia and the language was torn apart. Serbian and Croatian had
been virtually indistinguishable except in script (the former written
in Cyrillic, the latter typically in the Roman alphabet), but they were
now declared distinct languages, and Pavić took the opportunity to
have his book “translated” into the Roman alphabet. Though for most
books it would have been a simple transliteration, for the alphabetically
arranged Dictionary the new version acquired a new order of entries,
so the reading process changed. In this way Pavić’s Cyrillic °»Â»ËÌÅÃ
«ÀÒÈÃÅ became his Romanized Hazarski Rečnik, almost every word of it
identical to the original but almost every letter changed.
In and of themselves, scripts convey little cultural content, but they
are never simply learned “in themselves.” Often a new script is used to
convey first a scripture and then a whole complex of values, assump-
tions, and traditions. These soon include secular as well as religious
stories and poetry, and as a result even writing composed in the indig-
enous language finds itself in dialogue with the religious and literary
traditions that follow in the script’s wake.
It is insufficient, then, to speak only of language in thinking of “the
Latin Middle Ages” or of global Arabic. These languages exist in a pen-
umbra of the even more global scripts that come with them and extend
beyond them. Often an imported script’s “home” language is learned
and written by the same people who will use that script to compose
work in their native tongue, as when Akkadian speakers were trained
in Sumerian as part of their scribal education, or when medieval Japa-
nese poets composed Chinese as well as Japanese verse. The vernacular
works of such bilingual poets are likely to be infused with values taken
over from the foreign language that they also use. But even writers

7 Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words, trans.

Christina Pribićević-Zorić (New York: Knopf, 1988), 63 – 64.

Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 209

who use the new script only for their native vernacular frequently show
deep awareness of the culture that brought forth the script, sometimes
appropriating its stories, sometimes parodying or contesting them,
often doing both at once.
Good examples of this complex relation can be found in Iceland,
which produced one of the richest vernacular literatures in medieval
Europe. In converting to Christianity and making a parallel shift from
runes to the Latin alphabet, eleventh-century Icelanders set the stage
for prolific vernacular writing of sagas and skaldic poetry in the ensu-
ing three centuries. Sometimes Icelanders wrote in Latin, usually for
religious purposes; sometimes they translated French romances into
Icelandic; yet more often they composed their own poems and tales
in Icelandic, using a version of the Roman alphabet adapted to local
speech. The Norse sagas are not part of Latin literature, yet they are
very much part of the Latin scriptworld.
A subtle but far-reaching orientation of local lore toward Chris-
tian and classical traditions can be found in Norse texts where one
might least expect it, such as in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (ca. 1240).
Snorri says that he has assembled it, the fullest medieval compendium
of pagan Germanic myths, as a resource for poetic allusions and tropes.
He is anxious for young poets to know the stories behind the epithets
and metaphors traditionally used in skaldic poetry, lest the old poetic
language die out. Yet in his preface he does much more than present
the myths as a poetic repertory; instead, he boldly connects the north-
ern gods to classical history, treating them as legendary heroes who
were later taken for gods and even offering linguistic analyses to link
them to Troy:
Near the center of the world where what we call Turkey lies, was built
the most famous of all palaces and halls — Troy by name. . . . One of
the kings was called Múnón or Mennón. He married a daughter of
the chief king Priam who was called Tróán, and they had a son named
Trór — we call him Thór. . . . he traveled far and wide exploring all the
regions of the world and by himself overcoming all the berserks and
giants and an enormous dragon and many wild beasts.8

8 The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson: Tales from Norse Mythology, trans. Jean I. Young

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 25 – 26.

210 MLQ June 2007

Having given Priam a son named Tróán (perhaps derived from

Troas, the region of Troy), Snorri then gives Tróán a son whose name
he naturalizes by affixing to it the typical r-ending of a Norse noun.
Snorri then has only to substitute a þ for the initial tr to turn Tror into
the Norse god Thór. Snorri relates that Thór’s descendant Óðin jour-
neyed north with his family and began to rule in Germany and then
in Sweden: “There he appointed chieftains after the pattern of Troy.”
Snorri even claims that the collective name for the Norse gods, the
Æsir, derives from that of their homeland, Asia (27).
Iceland provides a fascinating case of a country choosing to enter
a new scriptworld as an independent nation, and the process was well
documented even at the time. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
Icelandic scholars freely experimented with the alphabet, adapting it
to the sounds of Norse and theorizing the relation of speech to writ-
ing. Most of the surviving manuscripts of the Prose Edda, in fact, are
bound together with one or more grammatical treatises; the Codex
Wormianus includes no fewer than four of them, inventively known
today as the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Grammatical Treatises. The
writer of the Second Grammatical Treatise draws a musical analogy for his
script, inviting the reader to play the sounds on his chart as if it were
an instrument: “The mouth and the tongue are the playing-field of
words. On that field are raised those letters which make up the whole
language, and language plucks some of them like harp strings, or as
when the keys of a simphonie are pressed” (fig. 3).9 (Recently imported
from France, the simphonie was a kind of fiddle with strings that were
stopped with keys to sound a given note.) The grammarian presents his
chart of vowels and consonants as a sort of keyboard:
Here there are eleven vowels crosswise on the page and twenty conso-
nants lengthwise; the consonants are placed as keys in a simphonie,
and the vowels as strings. There are twelve consonants which have a
sound both when the key is pulled and when it is pushed; but the eight
which are written last have half a sound as compared with the former;
some make a sound if you pull towards you, some if you push away from
you. (Raschellà, 73)

9 Fabrizio D. Raschellà, The So-Called “Second Grammatical Treatise”: An Orthographic

Pattern of Late Thirteenth-Century Icelandic (Florence: Le Monnier, 1982), 55.

Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 211

Figure 3. Codex Wormianus, “symphonie” diagram from the Second Grammatical Trea-
tise, late thirteenth century
212 MLQ June 2007

Writing around 1170, the author of the First Grammatical Treatise

shows a sovereign freedom in experimenting with the newly imported
alphabet. Though it may appear that the Icelanders are giving in to
foreign ways, he asserts that the Norse alphabet is no mere adaptation
but a new creation: “As languages are all unlike, ever since they parted
and branched off from one and the same language, it is now needful
to use different letters in writing them, and not the same for all, just as
the Greeks do not write Greek with Latin letters, and the Latin writers
do not write with Greek letters . . . but each nation writes its language
with letters of its own.”10
The First Grammarian then describes how he has accepted some
Latin letters, “rejected” others, and invented new letters as needed,
particularly for vowels, “since our language has the greatest number
of vowel sounds” (Haugen, 13). He also uses small capitals to indicate
lengthened consonants; otherwise, he notes, it is impossible to scan
skaldic poetry correctly, and “the skalds are our authorities in all prob-
lems touching the art of writing or speaking, just as craftsmen [in their
crafts] and lawyers in the laws” (20). Having set out an alphabet of fifty
letters (counting those formed with diacritics as new letters), the First
Grammarian ends with a note of encouragement — or a challenge — to
the reader: “Now any man who wishes to write . . . let him value my
efforts and excuse my ignorance, and let him use the alphabet which
has already been written here, until he gets one that he likes better”
(29 – 30).
Snorri, then, was writing in a world of sovereign grammatological
adaptation, guided by poetry and by analogy to musical instruments
imported from France. His treatment of classical and Christian liter-
ary material shows a similar freedom. Though he is a devout Christian
and insists that Thór and Óðin were mortal heroes, Snorri opens the
body of the Prose Edda with a virtual parody of the Christian Trinity. A
Swedish king, Gylfi, goes to see the Æsir, who have created such a stir
in the region, and is admitted to their castle by a juggler of knives who
keeps seven in the air at once. This ominous juggler leads him to the
throne room of the Æsir, where Gylfi finds “three high-seats one above

10 Einar Haugen, “First Grammatical Treatise”: The Earliest Germanic Phonology (Bal-

timore: Linguistic Society of America, 1950), 12.

Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 213

the other, and a man seated in each.” Their names are Hár, Jafnhár,
and Thriði — “High One,” “Just-as-High,” and “Third” (30 – 31). This
parodic Trinity then answers his questions about ancient times, retell-
ing the great Norse myths about creation, the ash tree Yggdrasil that
holds the world together despite the dragon gnawing at its root, and
the coming end of the world, Ragnarök, the twilight (or judgment)
of the gods. Finally, the Æsir tire of all the questions and end the ses-
sion — not by dismissing Gylfi but by vanishing, with a final word of
admonition from High One:
“And now, if you have anything more to ask, I can’t think how you can
manage it, for I’ve never heard anyone tell more of the story of the
world. Make what use of it you can.”
The next thing was that [Gylfi] heard a tremendous noise on all
sides and turned about; and when he had looked all round him, he
was standing in the open air on a level plain. He saw neither hall nor
stronghold. Then he went on his way and coming home to his kingdom
related the tidings he had seen and heard, and after him these stories
have been handed down from one man to another. (92 – 93)

Writing two and a half centuries after Iceland’s conversion in 1000,

Snorri was making what use he could of the pagan myths in a Chris-
tian world, so his strategic linking of the old material to the classical
tradition can be seen as a fairly late stage in the development of the
medieval Latin scriptworld. Yet in texts written closer to the time that
the Roman alphabet was adopted, we find equally noteworthy adapta-
tions, even by writers in settings where pagan practices were still very
much in use. Intriguing examples come from sixteenth-century Mexico
and Guatemala, where Mayan and Mexica writers within a generation
of the conquest began to use the Roman alphabet to write down their
old stories and poems in their native languages. The adoption of the
Roman alphabet had an enormous effect on the shaping of the poetry
we can now read.
First, the Roman alphabet gave native poets a far easier and more
nuanced technology for recording their words. The hieroglyphic sys-
tems of the Maya and the Mexica (the Aztecs and their neighbors) were
highly effective for conveying mathematical and astronomical data, in
which the Aztecs and particularly the Maya were world leaders. Other-
wise, these systems seem to have served mostly as prompts to memory,
214 MLQ June 2007

well suited for noting key facts about historical chronology and events
but not sufficiently developed to record a set of words to express those
events. Linguists are still deciphering the surviving hieroglyphic texts
(many inscriptions and books were burned by the conquistadores),
and so our knowledge of the preconquest corpus is limited. However, it
appears that the hieroglyphic systems did not lend themselves to full-
scale poetic or narrative expression.
The imported Roman alphabet gave native writers an opportunity
to record their literature in a form not dependent on the memory of
the text’s users. Yet this alphabet was imposed on the radically differ-
ent phonetic systems of Mesoamerican languages directly, without the
extensive additions and modifications that had made Cyrillic, for exam-
ple, almost unrecognizable to readers of Greek. Inevitably, what the
native writers could record was pervasively “normalized” toward Span-
ish and Latin phonetics. Variant spellings indicate that native words
were bent into the nearest approximations that the writer could achieve
within the limited resources of the new alphabet. The Nahuatl word
for “flower,” for instance, is usually spelled xochitl (with the x having the
sound sh as usual in sixteenth-century Spanish), yet some manuscripts
spell it suchitl. Quite possibly, the actual Nahuatl word began with some
distinct sound not fully captured either by xo or by su. At least ch is
common to both spellings, but there is really no telling how it should
have been pronounced. Over time some native words began to be
pronounced as though they were Spanish words; thus the Mexica city
of Cuauhnahuac, “where the eagle landed,” turned into Cuernavaca,
“cow’s horn.”
As recorded in the sixteenth century, hundreds of Nahuatl words
sound surprisingly similar to Spanish or Latin words: “god,” for exam-
ple, is teotl, a kissing cousin of deus (dative deo) or dios. Occasional com-
mentators over the years have therefore postulated some direct line
of transmission, as though an enterprising Aeneas had crossed the
Atlantic, dictionary in hand. Yet the similarity of teotl to deus is more
readily explained by the fact that most early colonial Nahuatl texts were
written by native informants trained in Mexico City at the Seminary
of the Holy Cross, established only a decade after the conquest, where
the language of instruction was Latin. The native writers were capable
of mixing Nahuatl, Latin, and Spanish in a single sentence, as in a
Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 215

marginal gloss to one Aztec poem: next to a reference to Moyocoyatzin

(“the one who creates himself,” an epithet of the god Tezcatlipoca), the
writer notes, “Yehuan ya dios glosa” — “This is to be read as ‘God.’ ”11
Even when they treat purely preconquest material, then, the earliest
colonial-era native texts are already profoundly shaped by their writers’
entry into the Latin scriptworld. This shaping extends beyond the lexi-
cal level, for few if any of these texts present “pure” preconquest mate-
rial, though commentators have often wished to read them as though
they did. The Mayan Popol Vuh, for example, has usually been taken as a
timeless mythic narrative. Although it is certainly “an invaluable source
of knowledge of ancient Mayan mythology and culture,” it is equally
a product of the colonial encounter.12 The Popol Vuh as we have it was
composed during the mid-1550s in the Quiché language but with the
Roman alphabet. The alphabetic Popol Vuh is based on a hieroglyphic
text now lost; written only thirty years after the conquest and focused
on ancient myths, it is already in dialogue with the biblical traditions
that were transmitted to the writers along with the alphabet.
From the start, the book’s authors openly allude to their present
setting:
Here we shall inscribe, here we shall implant the Ancient Word, the
potential and source for everything done in the citadel of Quiché, in
the nation of the Quiché people. . . . We shall write about this now
amid the preaching of God in Christendom now. We shall bring it out
because there is no longer a place to see it. . . . There is the original
book and ancient writing, but he who reads and ponders it hides his
face.13

The new technology of the Latin alphabet enables the Mayan authors to
give a new and probably much expanded version of their hieroglyphic
“Council Book,” which they claim to have already lost but which they

11 Angel María Garibay K., ed., Poesía Náhuatl, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Historia, Seminario de Cultura Náhuatl,
1964 – 68), 1:12.
12 The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., 30 vols. (Chicago: Encyclopaedia

Britannica, 1976), Micropaedia, 8:120.

13 Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glo-

ries of Gods and Kings, ed. and trans. Dennis Tedlock (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1985), 71.
216 MLQ June 2007

appear to consult as they retell their stories. From their references to it,
it seems to have been basically an aid to divination, devoted largely to
charting the movements of the sun, moon, and planets, with brief nota-
tions of the stories of divine activities thought to underlie the astral
order. So the alphabetic Popol Vuh is a much fuller literary work than
its hieroglyphic predecessor would have been. At the same time, it is
deeply marked by its authors’ fear of the loss of cultural memory threat-
ened by the invasion that has brought the alphabet to them.
A comparable concern over memory pervades Snorri’s Prose Edda.
In his prologue Snorri describes the early growth of the human race in
terms of a material gain but also a memory loss:
As the population of the world increased . . . the great majority of man-
kind, loving the pursuit of money and power, left off paying homage
to God. This grew to such a pitch that they boycotted any reference to
God, and then how could anyone tell their sons about the marvels con-
nected with Him? In the end they lost the very name of God and there
was not to be found in all the world a man who knew his Maker. (23)

Snorri is nominally talking about the ancients who forgot the true god
and fell into paganism, yet his own book is devoted to telling young
poets about the marvels performed by the pagan gods whose names
are now boycotted under Christianity. The anxiety for cultural memory
is expressed in the Prose Edda by no less a figure than the chief god,
Óðin:
Two ravens sit on his shoulders and bring to his ears all the news that
they see or hear; they are called Hugin [Thought] and Munin [Mem-
ory]. He sends them out at daybreak to fly over the whole world, and
they come back at breakfast-time; by this means he comes to know a
great deal about what is going on, and on account of this men call him
the god-of-ravens. As it is said:

Over the world

every day
fly Hugin and Munin;
I fear that Hugin
will not come back,
though I’m more concerned about Munin.
(63 – 64)
Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 217

Óðin’s concern for memory’s return is found among the ancient Quiché
gods as well. The second half of the Popol Vuh centers on the migra-
tion of the divine or semidivine Quiché ancestors from Tulan, in east-
ern Yucatán, to their new home in Guatemala. As they head westward,
they bewail the loss of their homeland, which they describe as first and
foremost a linguistic loss: “ ‘Alas! We’ve left our language behind. How
did we do it? We’re lost! Where were we deceived? We had only one
language when we came to Tulan, and we had only one place of emer-
gence and origin. We haven’t done well,’ said all the tribes beneath the
trees and bushes” (173). A later expedition retrieves their sacred writ-
ings, and with them the Quiché ancestors can establish themselves in
their new land.
The ancestral journey not only is shaped by indigenous cultural
memories but also builds on biblical themes. For example, the Quiché
ancestors reach their new homeland by parting the waters of the sea: “It
isn’t clear how they crossed over the sea. They crossed over as if there
were no sea. They just crossed over on some stones, stones piled up in
the sand. And they gave it a name: Rock Rows, Furrowed Sands was
their name for the place where they crossed through the midst of the
sea. Where the waters divided, they crossed over” (177). This account
combines two modes of crossing the sea, by a rock bridge or by the part-
ing of the waters. Very likely the rock bridge was the original means, as
reflected in the name Rock Rows, while the second has been adapted
from the story of Moses parting the Red Sea.
This identification of a biblical source might seem random, even
far-fetched, were it not for an explicit reference to this very piece of
biblical history in a related text, the Title of the Lords of Totonicapán. This
work was written in 1554, at approximately the same time as the alpha-
betic Popol Vuh, and quite possibly by the same person or people. In
the Title the native nobility of Totonicapán record their history to jus-
tify their retention of their lands in the face of Spanish efforts to take
them. The crossing of the Caribbean from Tulan is said to have taken
place under the guidance of their culture hero, Balam-Quitzé, who
“when they arrived at the edge of the sea . . . touched it with his staff
and at once a path opened, which then closed up again, for thus the
great God wished it to be done, because they were sons of Abraham and
218 MLQ June 2007

Jacob.”14 Clearly aware of the Spaniards’ speculation that the civilized

peoples of Mesoamerica are the lost tribes of Israel, the lords of Totoni-
capán frame their history in biblical terms to assert that the title to
their land was given them by the Spaniards’ god himself.

Both in the ancient “cuneiform world” and in the farthest northern

and western expansions of the Roman alphabet, literary production was
shaped as much by the spread of scripts as by the spread of particular
languages. The vast increase in translation over the past two centuries
has spurred tremendous movement across scriptworlds, but even now,
as the example of Pavić suggests, local cultures make important deci-
sions when they position themselves in relation to global scripts — or
when they have scripts thrust on them — and so this paradigm retains
its relevance today.
Observing the interplay of language and script in earlier peri-
ods can also give us a better understanding of the origins of modern
national literatures. When he was formulating the concept of Weltlitera-
tur in the 1820s, during the heyday of European nationalism, Goethe
spoke of world literature naturally as based on the interactions of estab-
lished national literatures, after which world literature was a secondary
or even future formation. “The epoch of world literature is at hand,”
he announced to his young disciple Eckermann, “and everyone must
strive to hasten its approach.”15 The spread of scripts in earlier periods
shows instead that literatures tend to develop in just the opposite direc-
tion: within — and often against — an existing regional or global world
literature.
It is a rare country that creates its own script and its own literature
in fundamental independence from other societies; ancient Egypt is
more the exception than the rule. More typical are the Sumerians and
the Phoenicians, whose pioneering scripts were quickly taken up by
more powerful groups around them. Most literatures are formed within
broad systems grounded in the power of scripts to cross the boundaries

14 TheAnnals of the Cakchiquels; Title of the Lords of Totonicapán, trans. Adrián Reci-
nos, Dionisio José Chonay, and Delia Goetz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1953), 171.
15 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann (1823 – 1832), trans.

John Oxenford (San Francisco: North Point, 1984), 132.

Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 219

of time, space, and language itself. Arising in a transcultural context, a

local or national literature must negotiate a double bind: the new script
that can give form to a people’s traditions brings with it the threat of
the local culture’s absorption into a broader milieu.
Works as disparate as Dictionary of the Khazars, the Popol Vuh, and
the Prose Edda show that writers repeatedly find creative ways to negoti-
ate these tensions. Noah’s raven finds nothing to bring back to him, but
Óðin’s ravens are more successful: they bring back news from around
the world. God of wisdom, Óðin is blessed — and cursed — with fore-
knowledge, and he knows that he can use the ravens’ reports only for
a time, until the gods enter their fated twilight and fade from mem-
ory: one day Munin will fail to return. Óðin is also the god of poetry,
however, and perhaps he foresees the day when poets will adopt the
script brought by the dispensation that will displace him. Resisting
the oblivion threatened by the advancing culture, these poets will use
the foreign script to celebrate their former patron and his marvelous
deeds, and their poems will keep alive the memory of the raven named
Memory.

David Damrosch is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia

University and is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Associa-
tion. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003) and The Buried Book: The
Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007). He is general editor
of The Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004).