The invention of writing in Egypt and China is the topic of an upcoming online lecture by Oxford Egyptology Prof. John Baines, through the SCRIBO seminar series.
The leading Egyptologist will lecture on “Pairs of Early Script Forms: Contrasting Aesthetics in Early Egypt and China” on Wednesday, July 8, 2020, at 4.00 p.m. (Italy time), via Zoom. You can watch the lecture directly by clicking here.
SCRIBO Seminars is the first-ever seminar series on the invention of writing, from its earliest records five thousand years ago (from China, Mesopotamia, Central America, Egypt, the Indus Valley, the Mediterranean), to more recent cases such as Easter Island.
Furthermore, the seminar focuses on the relationship between writing systems and icons, semasiography, and other symbol-systems (emojis too). It also addresses current trends in decipherment strategies and progress in understanding ancient undeciphered scripts.
Experts in linguistics, semiotics, archaeology, epigraphy, anthropology, cognitive studies, and cultural evolution, lecture and present the amounts of creativity, originality, and imagination lying behind one of the greatest inventions in the world.
SCRIBO is sponsored by the INSCRIBE (Invention of Scripts and their Beginnings) ERC Project and is held at the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies (FICLIT) at the University of Bologna. Seminars are delivered in English or Italian, depending on the choice of the speaker.