The Hidden Language of Graphic Signs Cryptic Writing and Meaningful Marks

"Spanning continents and millennia, this book explores the zone between picture and text. In doing so, it probes the social worlds and identities that enveloped them. Individuals made these marks, but communities sorted out their meaning and orderly use. There is yearning too, be it a commitment to graphic economy and clarity or to a bettered world. At times, there is sheer joy in cleverness and visual games which only some are invited to play. Being material, these graphs are not just communicative. They may exert talismanic power on their own. By their formal intricacy, some graphs deflect attention from language. Others target meaning by direct entrée, without passing through records of sound. The long persistence of these systems suggests that: (1) graphic notations coalesce and endure because they are useful; (2) writing, as a graphic representation of language, can exist companionably with other notations, each with its own history; and (3) graphic notations can be ad hoc, employed for a single use only; more often, they operate with learned rules of engagement and interpretation. Humans are sufficiently resourceful to devise and deploy many forms of graphic communication"--