Alphabet: The Story of Writing pt. 1 and 2 by Donald Jackson

[Music] [Applause] my so [Music] [Laughter] [Music] thank you wherever you look you're surrounded by words we don't even notice them because we're so used to them but they are all trying to tell us something communicate some sort of a message the message can be the name of a street what direction to take who to vote for or what's going on around us wherever we happen to be in fact our lives are ruled by words words made up of those 26 symbols which are the letters of our alphabet [Music] [Music] [Music] wherever we live or whatever our language the letters of our alphabet are the basic currency of civilization they enable us to store up information and to communicate over time and distance but man's ability to draw and write which separates him from the animal world didn't come quickly or easily modern letters were once no more than primitive pictures he grew thousands of years ago out of a basic instinct of man to make his mark but what with primitive man must have noticed when he dragged a branch across mud or sand it made a mark and that's almost certainly where the whole idea of communicating with marx began he could already communicate with gestures with sounds with primitive speech but marx would help him remember and record things [Music] human ingenuity soon found something more permanent than marks in sand clay and charcoal when mixed with animal fat produced cave paintings in southern france that have lasted 35 000 years long lasting but not the handiest form of record if you want to put something down make a record of how many sheep that you sold to somebody last week and you want to write it down somewhere or leave some kind of a mark what do you do well what you do is you pick up that which is most convenient to you for us it's a writing part and a ballpoint pen possibly for early man if he wanted to record something he had to choose those materials which were nearest to him and what better thing than mud made into clay and possibly a stick and so that he could actually scratch into the surface of it a number of scratches if he wanted to say that it was yesterday at noon time he could maybe put the sun high in the sky and make a symbol of it over a river make a story scratched into the surface of clay which would then be put into the sun and dried then it would become a permanent record of his thoughts or the records of what he wanted to record at that time now an extension of this scratching into the surface of clay rather primitive form of writing but nevertheless permanent a little unwieldy only had one chance you did it you baked it and that was it an extension of the idea of scratching into clay is to scratch into a portable little the beginnings of the book a little pair of tablets with wax coating on them now the beauty of the wax coating is that you can scratch into it with a little stylus anything hard and pointed would do and you could right into the surface of it a note to yourself or to a friend even a love letter which could then be sealed wrapped around so that nobody else could see it it's a very convenient form of writing and it continued for many centuries it influenced the form of the letters you can't have a very elaborate shape when you're scratching something into the surface so it made a shorthand form of letter another step forward towards the kind of alphabet we know today one of the nice things about the wax tablet is that once you had finished the message somebody had read it you then turned to the other end of the stylus and by rapidly rubbing over it you can actually with the warmth generated by friction you can smooth out the wax tablet and get rid of your message so that you can use it for another time it was the egyptians who took pictures or signs and turned them into a system how could they record their achievements and their mythology cave paintings might to some extent tell a story but a set of signs strung together could pass on a more complex message a more mature civilization needed more sophisticated communication the civilizations of the middle east grew from the rivers of the fertile crescent tigris euphrates and nile gave more to man than fertile soil from mesopotamia came the clay tablet writing cuneiform from egypt came the system of writing which was the beginning of the alphabet we use today [Music] the hieroglyphic writing of ancient egypt was developed by priests it was thought to be a divine art speech of the gods the egyptians called it at first the symbols the sacred ibis water the sledge the snake represented just the object itself then in a search for a way of expressing ideas the symbols were gradually adapted until they became associated with ideas the jackal for cunning an eye with a tear for sadness a goose because it was a prized possession stood for a child and the owl for wisdom [Laughter] carving in stone was laborious an egyptian scribe carver could work for hours to produce in written form an idea which today we would write down in only seconds for keeping records of the laws writing out wills and telling stories of the exploits of pharaohs and generals carving in stone was too cumbersome and slow for everyday use for writing love letters sending bills or issuing commands to a general in the field the egyptians needed something easier they found it very close to hand in the swamps of the river nile grew the papyrus it is a type of plant called a sedge reed-like with a flower at the head and a thick stem and it grows up to ten feet in height about four thousand years ago it became the egyptian wonder plant from it they made the thatched roofs of their homes they planted it to make rope and cloth and sandals and they even sailed across the oceans in papyrus boats today it still grows wild in parts of egypt and it's cultivated in london at kew gardens here it is still harvested just as egyptian paintings show us that they carefully reap their papyrus on the banks of the nile when they discovered that with special preparation papyrus would make paper botanist nigel hepa i'm now going to prepare one of the stalks and taking a lower part um it needs necessary to to cut a suitable length it doesn't need to be very long otherwise it would take too long to prepare the the paper outside there's the green rind here and that contrasts with the inner pith which is white now this is very tough and it needs to be cut away like that and so on all the way around the three angle stem it's very clearly three angled on this being a sedge one really needs it as thin as possible and then the strips are not too puffy and uh including a lot of air well now the first lock that i uh cut i arrange those like fingers of a hand together like that and then i can get the other layer i can put those at right angles on top now that essentially is it never more than two layers now having got the two layers then it's necessary to join them now this is where one has to be very careful by taking a heavy wooden implement such as this or a mallet or or a stone even it's necessary to blend together that's excluding the air and also breaking the the cellular structure within the strips and releasing the juice which will ultimately uh stick them together and the two layers then become one and after pressing overnight or for a day or two they've coalesced and dried the wonderful thing about the egyptian civilization was that as far as we're concerned it produced two elements it produced the first paper papyrus and in combination with the read and a little ink revolutionized the whole history of recording any form of written language or of recording pictures you just a simple read like this which has been drawing sucking from the water or from the damp soil if we chew it on the end very simple chew it on the end just like anybody chewing on a piece of grass fine that makes a beautiful little brush and the structure of the reed sucks the ink up into it and keeps it flowing just like a pen today the same principle dip it into the ink the ink was a mixture of carbon which is soot little water and some gum so that the powder doesn't brush away when it's used and the magic thing is that it works just like a regular pen nowadays so i mean the combination of a pen like this ink and papyrus was magic if you can imagine it enabled the transmission of messages over long distances very easily i mean imagine what it would be like for a postman if you had a sack full of rocks i mean if you wanted to actually deliver letters which have been carved onto stone or into clay tablets but you could roll up this stuff which is very light and you could carry it long distances store it very conveniently the ease with which you can write with this ink gives you a lovely fluent mark which in turn after drawing the pictures which were the early sort of beginnings of language of the written language the first thing you find yourself doing is to take shortcuts because it's so quick so neat to paint with and one can quite easily see that after writing the ox is of the full oxy's head 900 times uh in a month you talk to be tempted to take a shortcut and before long you do it in two or three quick strokes which is the beginning of the abbreviations from the picture language of the egyptians to the sort of alphabet we have today that impulse to find a quicker way to write changed the shape of the marks made by the egyptian scribes their pictures became less realistic more simplified and all the time they were coming nearer and nearer to painting letters then came another refinement the pen one of the earliest writing instruments was the read pen or column it's a tube shape and it's keeps the ink it's rather hard it still has a sort of hollow center and it's far too hard to write with and you'll see how i make it first of all i'll take a scoop from underneath here to reduce the tension in the material ink will only flow in a pen if it has a certain amount of flexibility you see i clean out the pith from in there and you can see that it's a hollow tube there is a little inner lining which is a little bit furry or what's called pith which i'm just removing because this under surface i will be writing with shortly see what happens now i've reduced the thickness of the breed down you start to see something happen it's narrower and narrower and narrower towards the end and it also because it's thinner becomes more flexible now what i'm going to dutch in itself will not sustain a steady flow of ink to the tip so i'm going to put a slit in it which will help feed the tip as i ride now i'm going to introduce the knife which will immediately put it slit in there there we are so that now when i press the pen will open up and the ink will flow down it to the tip i then make sure to have a very beautifully finished clean cut edge for the writing and this is what i'm about to do take a little sliver off each side which has the double purpose of thinning the point that i'm eventually going to write with and at the same time by taking off the very thin wafer edge that i had left from scooping it this way it makes it stronger a little off this side the final cut is to the tip make that nice and square this last cup is a secret because if that's blunt it will never write nicely proof of the pudding's in the eating let's see how if it writes the reed pen has been used in the east since egyptian times it has a slightly hard outside which means when it's cut it sustains a writing edge for many lines at a time and when you combine this kind and quality of the mark that you make which is wood and warm and sensitive to the touch with the rough papyrus texture you get a particular kind of letter form or hieroglyphic it didn't matter which which is immediately recognizable you can see it you can see the blobby character of the letter shapes or the uh pictures which have been drawn onto the papyrus and this of course has influenced the style of writing throughout the whole the east pen ink papyrus and ingenuity had turned pictures into letter shapes and that was not all the letter shapes began to mean not simply the animal they symbolized but the sound of its name the letter shape that stood for an ox an aleph in the language of the middle east began to stand not only for the animal itself but also for the sound aleph whenever it occurred in time aleph was shortened to a and the original ox is the letter a in the arabic alphabet today the letters of the modern arabic alphabet like the a have their origin in the basic hieroglyphic signs written by the scribes around the eastern mediterranean 4 000 years ago wow [Music] but the ox was to travel and change merchant men sailed from port to port along the coast of the eastern mediterranean and with them went their alphabet it was probably the phoenicians who sailed furthest west and first spread the letters of the fertile crescent to cyprus crete greece and north africa the aleph traveled to greece merged with the greek alphabet and became their letter alpha after breeding with the alphabet of the etruscans of northern italy it reached its final destination in rome here it became the roman a the letter we know today [Applause] [Music] and so pictures became letters from cave paintings had come our alphabet letters that are as characteristic as the national flag that were symbols of the order and precision of rome the rulers of rome competed with each other carved letter by carved letter to proclaim the glories of their own achievements there were few emperors generals or senators who did not dream of seeing their names up in stone this is the emperor vespasian making sure that posterity remembers him the skilled craftsmen who made the inscriptions were much in demand to carve a single letter worthy of the roman forum here needed careful planning if you look closely at the shapes of these roman letters you'll see that every one of them even the curved ones like this c fit into the shape of a square some of them like that c and this m fit into the hole of a square the t is also the same whilst other ones fit into half of it like you see this s fit into half of the square that's why some of the letters are wide some of the letters are narrow so when you look at a roman inscription like this what you're looking at is a pattern made up of a series of evenly spaced squares and half squares the carver didn't just start in the top left-hand corner and work his way down and hope that he was going to arrive at the bottom once you start to carve into stone there's no turning back the old cartoon about mister you've made a spelling mistake looking at the mason carving letters in stone isn't so funny if you're the one who made the mistake and so it always helps to have a very carefully planned series of marks as a guide for the carving and what more natural to the roman craftsman than to turn to his friend who is expert at painting letters to paint onto the stone itself the letter shapes which he can then follow with his chisel without worrying when he gets to the end of a line whether it's going to end up coming off the edge of the stone one of the bases of the very fluid beautiful sensuous curves which one sees in roman lettering and i believe it owes its origin to the fact that the brush is a very fluid mark-making tool but the actual carving that follows doesn't lend itself so fluently to the kind of sweeps that one gets to the brush the carver chose the simplest technique cutting away the least amount of stone to create the greatest effect the first thing i do is to try to very gently take out a little v right of the center of the letter because if i dig in too much at once the stone chips away i'm using the painted shape as a guide i'm going to try and get back into the center again there going slightly deeper as i go all the time take the tension out of the stone the mallet is rounded so that whenever i hit it the maximum amount of force is transferred down the chisel to the surface of the stone because if you are working away many hours a day on this you realize that you the every little bit of help that the chisel can give you um enables you to keep going with comfort if i hit that too hard i'm going to take a great lamp hunt at the side of the letter so i have to gradually ease my way through you can now see why the romans were so pleased to think of a way of abbreviating a word if they possibly could they would always reduce a whole long word to a series of initials i'm shaping this up into a v shape so that apart from the certain amount of attractiveness of it it certainly means that the letters are going to last for many many years to come the people of rome created the latin alphabet the armies of rome spread it throughout the known world [Music] [Applause] so [Music] so [Music] for 400 years rome was the greatest power the world had known where roman armies marched roman customs stayed their rule and their thinking expressed in their precise and ordered lettering radiated to all the shores of what they called mare nostrum our sea and beyond to the most northerly outpost of all britain [Music] hadrian's wall once 15 feet high and 73 miles long stretched across the neck of northern britain it was the frontier of civilization hadrian built the wall said his biographer to separate the romans from the barbarians the men who built the wall came from all parts of the roman empire as far away as belgium france and spain but they brought with them the language and the alphabet of rome roman letters followed the sword and the roman soldiers left their marks on the stones of hadron's wall here are some letters carved by the soldiers of julius primus of the eighth cohort of the sixth legion see c o h cohort v one one one eight iul for julius p r i m i primus his men built this section of the wall and when they finished it they signed it these letters were crudely carved into the sandstone with an iron chisel in a kind of military shorthand abbreviated to save time and effort the lettering of the soldiers in their thoughts along the wall was not particularly elegant neither was the everyday writing on papyrus that served for engineers or administrators but the romans were capable of appreciating that lettering could be more than merely functional it could be beautiful these letters are not the clumsy scratchings of an ordinary soldier this is only a small fragment but we can tell that the man who carved these shapes was a skilled specialist if you look closely at this letter r you can see how it's cut with a specially sharpened chisel in a v-shaped group the letters are handsome enough to grace the walls of rome itself and they survived long after the roman empire passed into history the barbarians triumphed rome collapsed and in the dark ages man lived once again by the sword writing almost died in europe but at iona it survived to this remote island off the coast of scotland in the middle of the sixth century came some columba and his monks they came from ireland hugging the christian gospels that they would copy to spread their beliefs and keep their religion alive their god was glorious so must be his book in the book of kells the glory of their lettering reached its peak its celtic script was based on the lettering of rome but the shapes had changed over the centuries and the monks now added their own elaborate decoration [Music] christianity became the guardian of writing from arkhan came a new flowering of the art arkhan was the capital of charlemagne a barbarian a king and a christian [Music] [Music] charlemagne was a warrior who wanted to be a man of learning a king who rose by the sword but dreamed of the pen he taught himself to read but although he kept wax tablets by his bedside at night to practice on he never learned to write he dreamed of recreating the roman empire and on christmas day 800 he was crowned emperor in rome the pillars of his palace and arkhan came from rome and the marble of his throne from greece and from here he commanded alcuin monk of york to be his librarian and teacher and to copy not only religious texts but all the works of science and literature which survive from the greek and roman world [Music] alcuin's team of scribes used a new script but it still took its inspiration from classical rome with volume after volume to copy the impulse was to find a more streamlined script the shape of the letters changed [Music] [Applause] they revived formal capitals but evolved the small letters which we today call the lower case this was the style used by the scribes of charlemagne it grew out of the shapes of the roman capital letters it's based on an almost circular letter o and has strong handsome springing forms it's provided the inspiration for scribes for hundreds of years and the style is an open flat strong letter form with springing firm arches which has a liveliness and strength combined which is why it's still after all these years one of the finest most beautiful looking alphabets that has ever been made the scribes found new styles of lettering and new instruments to write with to the read was added the feather and soon the quill became the favored pen scribes today still use the same tools for writing with as they did in the time of charlemagne these are feathers taken from the wing of a goose i'm going to make them into a quill pen first of all i get rid of the water which is inside the tube where they've been soaking and you'll notice that they're quite milky in color and very flexible the soaking has made it flexible and soft now the next thing i have to do is to harden it so that it doesn't wear out too quickly when i'm writing and one of the things i do is to plunge it rapidly into hot sand which will bake and harden the quill now i'm going to fill up the coils individually here with hot sand so that it penetrates right down to the base of the barrel of the quill if the sand isn't hot enough the quills won't harden will still remain soft if it's too hot well then they'll burn and frizzle and frazzle on the ends then having got that right into the roots of it i spread them out and plunge them into the sand in out check it i can see at the moment it's burning on the ends so that means it's just nice in and out i can't leave them in too long and i see that they clear get rid of the sand and then quickly i'll take here and put a cloth a rough sacking and i'll polish up the quill by removing the last vestiges of cuticle or membrane which is on the outside of the quill something happens very dramatically to the quill itself the quills have become clear in contrast to the quill before it started you can see quite clearly the difference the quills have completely changed because now they're clear and hard against the milky softness of the quill which has been soaked this and i'll show you is still soft and flexible so flexible that i can bend it without fear of it breaking contrast it with the brittle quality of the hardened pen curing the goose feather to make it hard was only part of the process there was more to do yet first thing we do which is quite surprising having seen all those hollywood movies is to remove the fancy bit here for the very good reason i mean that and if we don't i mean we you know when we're writing can stick in our shoulders or in our eye or something of this kind and we take off the the barb by stripping it out because it's hard to hold we want to get rid of the fuzz fuzzy bit then i turn my attention to the end part of the quill which is the part we're going to make into an pen nib now the next step is to take a scoop from the underside of this tube like shape so that i can introduce a certain amount of balance to the flexibility of the writing instrument and then i take my pen knife we call it a pen knife for obvious reasons and you know that any small knife nowadays is still called a pen knife and the knife helps me because it's specially made so that it's curved on one side and flat on the other so that this curve fits comfortably into the curved shape that i make underneath the pin and having got that there the next thing to do is to put a slit into it put the knife up so and then apply a little pressure crack and there we have a very clean sharp slit in the center of the tube next step is to shape this into pen nib again the curve of the knife blade fits comfortably into the curve that i'm making and then i measure across and take an identical scoop from the other side because the quill has been cured and hardened then the hot sound has been tempered to the right consistency for the knife to cut through it with a certain crispness leaving me a nice hard pen then i'm ready for the final three cuts which will give me the shape of the pen itself so i put it onto a flat surface preferably something which isn't going to blunt the knife and very on a sort of 60 degrees shallow cap first and then two 90 degree vertical cuts little tiny click then the final tiniest of slivers to remove to make sure it's absolutely certainly crisp because that sharpness there it's going to be immediately reflected in the letters that i start to make the sharpness of the pen gives me beautiful sharp crisp letters so i dip it into the ink scribes have been writing with feathers for over a thousand years and even nowadays long after the invention of a steel pen i prefer to use one now there has to be a reason why that that i do and the main thing is that i make it for myself i can control the width the flexibility the flow of ink and it becomes part of me there's no weight it's totally light and it fits my hand beautifully and when i write with it it's possible to pour myself out through the pen onto the surface it's made out of the same substances as your fingernail it's very much the same thing and it becomes like a gramophone needle in your own hand so that when you write with it the music which it plays is that of your innermost self [Music] it was the monasteries of europe secure and impregnable like marseille michelle that yielded the finest medieval manuscripts labors of love for their god [Music] the scribes were not above taking just a little bit of the glory for themselves this one draws himself drawing a letter it was tempting to weave self-portraits into your work [Music] the copying and decorating of books became an expanding industry layman and women's scribes 2 learned the techniques perfected by the monks writing on vellum which was scraped calf skin they illuminated their texts with gold techniques of the illuminator haven't changed for centuries and so the way i'm working here is just the same way that a monk working 900 years ago would have worked and the first thing i do is to put down the gesso or raising preparation which is the base to which we apply the gold leaf which is where the meaning of the word illumination comes from the play of light on gold as the page turns so i put down this gesso which is made of a mixture of fish glue white lead plaster and sugar which when it's dried it remains slightly raised from the surface of the skin we don't invent these things we copy from a manuscript which is in front of us and this is part of an of an illuminated letter when the gesso is dried make a few light scrapes along the surface just to get rid of any of the slight bumps which may still remain there once we scrape the gesso it's ready to apply the gold leaf to it we take the gold which has been beaten very very thinly out of its book and applied onto this leather pad so that we can ultimately cut it up to the right size that we that's convenient for what we're using and it's 23 karat gold of the purest kind it's so thin the slightest movement of air makes it move so we have to be very careful that there are no doors open or things of that kind no sneezes we've got it flat on the leather and then we cut it up into pieces which are going to be convenient for the size of the letter that i have made tiniest little grease on the end of my finger is enough to attach the gold to it so that i can control it so that when i get my burnisher which is made out of hematite or bloodstone which is polished on the end and made into a shape which is going to be able to help me press this gold onto the gesso after i've put on the gesso and scraped it smooth i then have to make it damp so that it the gold leaf can stick to it so i breathe on it through this little tube to introduce moisture from my lungs onto the surface timing is what matters here and i won't know until i start to burnish it what the situation is and it's it's okay to vary the technique according to the humidity that's present both in the gesso itself and in the uh room and press quite hard with quite a degree of force once i feel the surface of the gesso is right if it's too dry the gold leaf won't stick and if it's too sticky the gesso will be soft and will smear across the surface she did mess up a bit so once the burnishing is complete as you can see some of the surplus gold still adheres to the surface of the skin where we don't want it to so we have to clean that away with a knife so that when we have got that out of the way we are ready to apply color one of the things that we notice when we look at a page of an illuminated manuscript is the color the quality of the color we may not realize it but it's no accident that those beautiful reds sing like they do from the page one of the reasons is because the powder which most paints and colors are made of has been bound together with various mediums one of which is the yolk of an egg and i'm going to do that here i'm going to show you how we separate first of all the egg yolk from the white and then i take hold of the sack i pierce the sack to make sure that there's no skin in with the color i take some of this yolk and mix it into just a little spot of it the purest of the egg yolk then i add to it water one two three four five six seven eight drops with that little amount of yolk is quite enough to transform what would be simply red color into something which will sing from the surface of the page the color which i'm using here is a little cake of compressed mercuric sulfide or vermilion just the same as that which is used in the manuscripts going back hundreds and hundreds of years not only does the egg yolk add brilliance to the color but it also adds permanence if you've ever tried to clean egg off a plate you'll know just how permanent it is once we've got the egg yolk water and pigment mixed into a consistency which will allow it to be used freely in the pen or brush we're ready to add final details to the piece of work and i start by drawing with the quill as a thin line around the burnished gold this allows me to make a nice clean edge to what might be just a little imperfect the reason i use a quill pen is because gold being very smooth and shiny now tends to reject the ink and the slightly harder edge of the pen scrapes a little purchase for the ink along the edge to stop it from rolling back but i'm using a brush painting on with the blue because the shapes are and the area i'm trying to cover is larger and therefore i can spread out the hair of the brush and very quickly complete the manuscript one of the the most surprising things that we would find if we looked over the shoulder of a medieval scribe or illuminator would be the speed with which he or she worked and they worked as full professionals as quickly as they could after all the gold and all the broad areas of color have been added step by step it's only when the final details which are added by the pen or the brush last little stroke that the full beauty of the finished illuminated letter is revealed [Music] you

Channel: Luna Moon

Views: 118,289

Rating: 4.8302827 out of 5

Keywords: calligraphy, Donald Jackson, Alphabet (Language Writing Type), Tourist Destination, Book, Books, Reading, Writing (Interest), Story, letters, pen, reed, clay, cave painting, wax, hieroglyphics, papyrus, roman inscriptions, gold leaf, quill, ink, illumination, paper

Id: 7IUBglyvt8o

Length: 58min 8sec (3488 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 27 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Fhhyr3584]

I love history, and I’m bored, so thanks for this. :)

[u/Fhhyr3584]

https://youtu.be/zVaE1A9EzF0 Link to parts 3 and 4 of the show.

[u/Fhhyr3584]

Awesome! I love how the master calligrapher actually demonstrated the historical techniques.

[u/skins83]

This is great!

[u/russellii]

Yes, WOW.