I have just seen the first episode of: "L'odyssée de l'écriture" (the odyssey of writing) on the French-German tv channel Arte.

https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/RC-020387/l-odyssee-de-l-ecriture/

It is extremely up to date and gives answers to a lot of questions not known to me, although I studied it yet in depth.

For instance the question: which is the oldest script. I thought the Assyrian one, but now it seems the discussion is not solved completely.

Second: The Kanaan origin of the alphabet: I thought the Libanon area...did some research for this board about a discussion between Israëli and other scientists. The Israëli said that the Hebrew was the oldest alphabet. In my research it was indeed another alphabet before the Jewish one. It now seems that the invention started in Egypt by inhabitants of Kanaan in plus minus 1850 BC. For me the Hebrews didn't yet exist? Just as in the French book "Aristote au Mont Saint Michel" the discussion if the Syriacs in the Arab Culture were already Arabs or still Syriacs dominated by the Arabs, so that the Rennaisance originated not by the Greek ortodox Syriac interference, but the Arabs themselves by their assimilated cultures melted together in their Arab culture. You can guess how nowadays political differences in nowadays France between the right wing and left wing historians and between a right wing French movement and a French Arab population can spoil honest history writing...

Third: It seems that the "rebus" help is nearly inherent to all humans and as such when one looks to the different writings all over the world, they all ressemble because they are all independently invented along the same human way of thinking.

Of course the three episodes are available in French and German with subtitles, but Arte has six languages, but clicking on English I didn't find these episodes even not with English subtitles.
But by the name David Sington I found that it was produced for Arte, but also available I guess on BBC Four
As "the secret history of writing". I can't verify while it is not available in Belgium.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mtmj

It seems also to be available on Nova and PBS.

I watched now the second episode of the mentioned trilogy

https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/RC-020387/l-odyssee-de-l-ecriture/

As I said you seem to be able to watch it in English too

Paul wrote:

But by the name David Sington I found that it was produced for Arte, but also available I guess on BBC Four
As "the secret history of writing". I can't verify while it is not available in Belgium.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mtmj
It seems also to be available on Nova and PBS.

The second episode again unbelievable good. If it is David Sington, who is responsible for this, alors "chapeau"...

some new insights that I had never heard before:

as that it was thanks to the alfabet that was written in apart letters as in merovingian times and later medieval times and needed only some very few letters and signs continuously interchangable in the words and texts that the Gutenberg project came to that widespread European "explosion".
http://medieval.stormthecastle.com/essays/medieval-writing.htm
Merovingian script:



Although the arab writing uses nearly the same amount of interchangeable characters the printed version of the ubiquous Coran/Bible was deleted for two centuries because the letters were written linked one to the other.

Another fundamental phenomenon for the spread of writing in society was the availability of the support of the writing and by that spread the avance of sciences and thoughts.
And I learned again a new insight from this episode.

Due to the cheap and big quantity of papyrus in Egypt and later in Rome, it was easy and cheap to write.
And in Rome at the head of an empire, where even the slaves could write (as scribe of their master) all knowledge of the world became centralised and thought about in every corner of the empire, a bit as the later evolution of the printing press.
The same later for the Arab culture during the Islam, far before medieval Europe.

A Europe that had the bottle-neck of "support" material, while they used parchment as the papyrus supply was dried up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchment
Now the available support to write was expensive and only for the rich. In the episode was a fragment about medieval Bruges as copy center of manuscripts for the whole Northern Europe and even by this big output, the circulation of books and texts was meager, if compared by the Arab culture.
As I recall it well the author states that it was due to this lack of cheap available support and hence difficult spread of the "writings" that the medieval science was far behind the Arab one.

And the lucky coincidence of cheap available "paper" due to the introduction from China and the separate alphabet letters in the medieval writing easy to transfer in lead letters to print, would at the end have provided the necessary output for the spread of science and thoughts, to lead to an explosion of science caused by the cross fertilization of ideas, made possible by the easy multiplying of writings.

Watching the third episode, I thought that it wouldn't be as interesting as the two firsts, but gradually I became more interested, as for instance the difference between pictographic and phonetic scripts.
https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/083905-003-A/l-odyssee-de-l-ecriture-3-3/

As I learned from this episode most scripts in the world are phonetic ones and all derived from pictographic writing, as Sumerian, Egyptian and later Chinese, Meso-American and Indus Valley cultures. The two last ones coming to a dead end.

When I was the second time in China, I learned from our Belgian guide, who was learning Chinese for some years, the advantages of the Chinese pictograms. There are that many dialects and even complete other related languages in China that they, although they have knowledge of Mandarin Chinese, due to  their dialects, nearly other languages, can't understand each other. But as the written sentence for each of their dialects is written the same as their respective language they can communicate with a written text. Even Europeans speaking the different languages of Europe could understand each other with such a pictographic Chinese system. As for instance water
Translations of water
noun
水
water, liquid, river
雨水
rainwater, water
泽
lake, benefit, water, benevolence, blessing, benefaction

But we can for each sign let say an Englishman, Frenchman, Dutch, German looking to these signs understand the same connotation but in his own language...
http://www.sfu.ca/~ramccall/Pictographsversusletters.pdf

What I also learned was that learning a pictograpic system is not that different of learning a phonetic script.
As the two systems in Japanese pictographic and phonetic. In the episode they tested Japanese people going through a brain scan alternatively reading pictographic and phonetic Japanese and there was not that much difference between the two, only for pictographic a bit more activity in the vision part, while with the phonetic a bit more with the audio part.

I don't know how it is with you, but as I read an English text and even typing it as now, I am thinking in English when I write or read a word, the same in German or in French. I nearly hear them in the respective languages. Can it be that it is that phenomenon that has to do with the audio activity when writing or reading a language in a phonetic way?

As they started with the pictographic script as a kind of a "rebus" as it was indeed in Egypt, they said that one could even do perhaps the same with emojis, even a novel written in emojis:
https://medium.com/@Jefnwk/3-books-written-entirely-in-emojis-can-you-read-them-fffe71119530
https://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/childrens-stories-translated-emojis-can-9123994

But as I see it the future will rather be for the audio translation in another language and then writing it down into Chinese, Japanese or any other phonetic language of the world or even direct audio translation into another language understandable for the owner of that language.

Did some further research for the BBC "The secret history of writng" I suppose the one I mentioned from BBC Four.
I see now that the trilogy of Arte is not the same as the trilogy of the BBC I guess.
And another question: Can people of New Zealand as Caro catch BBC Four TV?

https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/083905-001-A/l-odyssee-de-l-ecriture-1-3/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbmyXjqXlEY

MM?

And MM it is the same BBC Four and Arte and I found the three episodes in one on the BBC.

For the English language readers: