"Orality and writing in Cretan Hieroglyphic script"

The question of the reciprocal influences between oral and written discourses is long-standing, one of most vexed and fascinating topics that that runs through linguistic, semiotic, anthropological, and literary studies. Among the huge bibliography on the oral-written relationships, this contribution seeks to discuss some reflexions given by Giorgio Raimondo Cardona on this issue and verify their applicability to the grammar of communication of the oldest written documents of the Aegean, i.e. Cretan Hieroglyphic seals. Discussing about different kind of texts (interior, oral and written), in 1986 Cardona stated that «thought presents us cognitive nodes that are not yet verbal» i.e. «strenghts around which other elements are collected gradually according to a structure - radial, stellar, reticular? - not yet consolidated, not linear: there is no plan on which to project things, there is not even a before and an after» (3). The corresponding image is that of Leroi-Gourhan’s mitograms, in which everything is simultaneously present, without a reading grammar. In fact, though «cannot happen but in that exploded way», because «our brain works naturally according to those rhythms, sees images before words» (3). Closer to though is orality, taking shape from listening and from the interaction with the audience; the oral text can question and be questioned, answer and receive answers, being, as such, «tridimensional» (9). On the contrary, the written text has an ordered, linearized form, with a before and an after. Therefore, the difference between orality and writing would be a matter of “texture”: a matter of the grammar of communication. However, even if the introduction of the practice of writing brings about an irreversible change in a community, there is «a continuous and documentable exchange between the two worlds of orality and writing, which are not provinces remote from one another but continuously communicate, through dispatch riders and ambassadors» (Cardona 1983, 25). The structure of the texts incised on Cretan Hieroglyphic seals is very peculiar in these regards, showing – in our opinion – a complex intermingling of oral discourse and phonetic notation. These texts are not always linear, ordered but, in some cases, they offer a combination of signs with a defined phonetic value (most of all, syllabograms), along with signs that are probably not linguistic in nature (generally defined as emblems, icons, coat of arms, PIN codes). As such, their decoding seems to pertain to the domain of the orality. In fact, the definition of “written text” do not equate with glottic writing, but – as Harris (1995, 154) has explained – different forms of non-glottic writing (whose potential is virtually «infinite») may also be combined with other forms of communications in the graphic space. In our hypothesis, these probably non-glottic signs could be seen as Cardona’s «dispatch riders and ambassadors» between the two worlds of orality and writing. This, in at least two respects. On a synchronic plan, it seems that on the construction of meanings on these peculiar documents the Cretan Hieroglyphic seals are, two modes of perception (the linguistic and the iconic, the written and the oral one) are both simultaneous and contemporary in the same communicative act on the same graphic space. As in the Léroi-Gourhan mitogrammatic constructions, everything is co-present and each element (the oral and the written one) can become, according to the case, the focused one. Given the highly transparent iconicity of the written signs, in fact, on the Cretan Hieroglyphic glyptic surface a bundle of stimuli is thus manifested, co-felt without a binding order and perceived directly even before translating them into a conventional code. They would have been understandable only in the narrow circle of those who participate in that unrepeatable communicative act and not readable if not remembering the context in which they were produced. By themselves they do not mean, or if they mean, they only do it very imperfectly and ambiguously. They mean because of the (ideological, symbolic) values accorded to graphic support on which they appear and were possibly understood based on shared knowledge but without necessarily a linguistic transposition. On a diachronic plan, these special “grammar of communication” is even more interesting, because some of the glottic signs used in Middle Minoan II-III have their ancestors in signs used as non-linguistic devices on the pre-writing environment of Ancient Minoan II-III seals, thus posing a further question: not only how glottic and non-glottic signs relate each-other but when and how an icon (pertaining to the domain of orality) became a glottic writing sign?