Dear Mar Shiprim readers,
This month we meet Prof. Philippa Steele at the University of Cambridge who shares with us the goals and current activities of the VIEWS (Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems) project.
With warm wishes,
Pavla Rosenstein
Mar Shiprim Editor
VIEWS (Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems) Project
Can you please introduce yourself?
My name is Philippa Steele, and I am a Research Professor at the Faculty of Classics and a Research Fellow at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge.
Prof. Philippa Steele with her son. All images courtesy of Philippa Steele.
I started out in Classics, specialising in linguistics and then in the study of the Mycenaean Linear B documents before looking at the languages of ancient Cyprus for my PhD. That was transformative for me, because you cannot study ancient Cypriot languages without studying the writing systems in which they are written: in the Bronze Age the undeciphered syllabic Cypro-Minoan script, later continued throughout the first millennium BCE to write both Greek and at least one indigenous language, plus Phoenician written in its own alphabet. There is a particularly special relationship between Cypriot syllabic writing and island identity. I went on to explore that more when I was invited to give the Evans-Pritchard lectures at All Souls College, Oxford.
From there I found myself specialising in the study of writing systems, and I was surprised to find that there is still a great deal of work to be done from a theoretical perspective as well as in the study of specific scripts. I went on to gain a large grant from the ERC to run the CREWS project, Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems, which was intended to problematise the relatedness of different scripts. We often talk about writing systems as if they belong on a “genetic” family tree, in a similar way to how languages are envisaged, but once you really contextualise adoptions and transmissions of writing the picture becomes much more complicated. CREWS resulted in several publications as well as learning resources that are still hosted online and regularly used. Then more recently I received another grant to start up VIEWS.
An example of a CREWS online resource for Ugaritic.
Can you please tell us more about the VIEWS project that followed CREWS?
Back in 2021, an idea started to crystallise growing out of my previous research and some of the threads of the CREWS project. It was quite a big idea, really trying to rethink how we approach writing conceptually and theoretically, placing visual aspects at the centre of enquiry rather than privileging predominantly linguistic ones. From there I tried to design a project “architecture” around the central concept, designing case studies that mostly focused on and around the ancient Mediterranean with a comparative angle including Mayan. Now that we are beginning to publish the first parts of our research, it is very nice to see the ideas coming together but also growing in all sorts of unexpected ways.
I had submitted the proposal for VIEWS to the ERC in the Consolidator grant competition, and it was successful but at a time when the UK had not yet signed up for participation in Horizon Europe, so it was underwritten by the UKRI. Funding a project of this sort is really all about the idea, so it’s important to lead with that, and really make a case for the feasibility of studying it and the potential for learning something new. I was fortunate to be given this opportunity to put a great team together, with researchers working on Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs, multimodal and cognitive approaches to Mesopotamian cuneiform, Bronze Age Aegean writing, the “cursivisation” of Phoenician and minority scripts of southern China.
There are both individual and collaborative research objectives across the project. Each researcher’s individual project will contribute to their own field but will also demonstrate an important principle related to how we understand visual aspects of writing. Then in turn we plan to bring our individual research together to make a bigger picture – though the details of that picture are still emerging, as we’re only a bit over half-way through the project!
VIEWS focuses on the visual aspect of ancient writing systems. Why do you think this is particularly important?
The idea behind VIEWS centres around visual aspects of writing: why do we only concentrate on linguistic encoding when we describe and categorise writing systems, and generally overlook their visual properties like sign structure, iconicity/pictoriality, direction of writing/reading, etc? Pretty much every catalogue or discussion of world writing systems has language encoding as its underlying principle, dividing scripts into alphabets, syllabaries, morphographies and so on, depending on whether their signs represent individual sounds, syllables or morphemes. But once you begin to build a new taxonomy that takes visual principles into account, some very different understandings of writing begin to emerge – that’s what we are working on at the moment. Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs encode language in different ways, for instance, but share some very striking similarities in the way they exploit iconicity, and in their principles of text layout. Similarly, Mesopotamian cuneiform and Linear B are often both described as logographic, but logograms (a term that is actually quite contentious in grapholinguistics) are distributed in completely different ways in the two writing systems, with differences in textual layout playing a major role. So by pigeonholing these scripts based on linguistic features alone, we run the risk of overlooking other important contributory factors to the ways meaning is constructed in each tradition.
Ultimately there are deeper biases behind these tendencies in scholarship too. The so-called narrow definition of writing insists that language has to be represented systematically, in practice meaning sounds at some level. Systems whose representation of language features are more difficult to establish tend to be excluded and labelled as symbol systems or similar: they are not “writing proper”. That’s a perspective rooted in “Western” thinking and has some quite problematic antecedents in the evolutionary theory of writing expounded by Ignace Gelb and others (which privileges alphabetic writing above all other kinds). I’m very interested in trying to restore indigenous perspectives and emic understandings of writing, though of course for the ancient world the quality of surviving evidence can sometimes make it difficult to try to reconstruct them.
The project explores all early writing systems from cuneiform to Linear B and Mayan. Can you tell us about the aspects of the project – current or planned – that will explore languages of the Ancient Near East, including the 90-degree directional shift in cuneiform?
Writing in the Ancient Near East occupies an important position among the case studies at the heart of the VIEWS project. One of our team members is an Assyriologist, Colton Siegmund, who had previously specialised in Sumerian linguistics. For VIEWS he has been looking at a number of issues in Mesopotamian cuneiform writing via cognitive approaches, for example pareidolia in astronomical texts, literacy among artisans and sign orientation errors. He is also developing a larger project conducting multimodal analysis of cuneiform royal inscriptions, to be published as a monograph in our open access series. This project integrates social semiotics, visual analysis, and historical context, in an effort to reshape how scholars understand rulership, audience, and the visuality of writing by establishing a new interdisciplinary framework for studying early media and material communication.
My own work touches on cuneiform too, as I am conducting a cross-cultural investigation into writing direction – the early 90-degree change in direction in cuneiform is of particular interest. It turns out that there are a number of parallels in other writing traditions, such as Old Uyghur (the “ancestor” of the Mongolian script) to take just one example. I’m very interested in the interplay of the choice of document type, the embodied interaction with it in both writing and reading, and at the same time the move from higher to lower iconicity in the script (i.e. the degree to which signs look like pictures of real things). Colton is also researching the 90-degree rotation phenomenon in the context of purposefully rotated text in later archaizing inscriptions, from cognitive and design perspectives.
Several other colleagues have related interests too. One member of the research team is Philip Boyes working on the ancient Levant: he is primarily focusing on the visual properties and contexts of Phoenician writing, but he has spent a long time working on the use of cuneiform in Ugarit in the Bronze Age, and is interested in how the writing landscape changes in the area over the long term. Likewise some of our visiting fellows have specialist interests in the ANE, including Jeiran Jahani working on animal signs in Sumerian and Nadia Ben-Marzouk looking at craft occupations like seal cutting in the wider Mediterranean and Levantine context of Bronze Age writing traditions. So cuneiform comes up regularly in discussion at our research meetings and seminars, in all sorts of ways.
What are the main goals for the VIEWS project at its completion?
The primary outputs will be the published research of each member of the core research team, in a series of open access books with De Gruyter as well as numerous shorter publications in journals and conference volumes. The ones that have already appeared can be found on our website. The case studies we’re each working on also lay the groundwork for our overarching goal to rethink the study of writing by placing the visual at the forefront, which we will revisit in our third and final conference. We have also written a Cambridge Element together on the topic of the spread of writing across the Mediterranean in the Iron Age; we were originally tasked with recounting the development of alphabetic writing, but it soon transformed into an account of the diversity of writing traditions around western Asia, northern Africa and the Mediterranean itself.
Another important goal has been the creation of a global network of researchers with interests in visual approaches to writing, fostered through our visiting fellowship programme and our conferences. Most of the seminars and conference papers held through VIEWS can be found on our YouTube channel and upcoming seminars are available to view on our website. That wider network has been hugely inspirational as it has allowed fruitful exchange across a very broad range of disciplines and areas of expertise, inside and outside of academia, and I hope it will have a longer life beyond the project.
Another aim, for me, is to create a corner of academia where the atmosphere is inclusive, safe and human-focused. Academia can be pretty brutal for those trying to build a career and pursue the research they love, and it can be really quite inaccessible too. I’m determined to build a space where the research is stimulating and yet where people feel welcome and supported, and where people both inside and outside of academia can share their insights with each other.
Can you tell us more about the VIEWS Visiting Fellowship?
The VIEWS Visiting Fellowship is intended as an opportunity for outstanding researchers at any stage of their career to develop their research profile. We hold occasional competitions for funded fellowships, as well as a rolling call for anyone able to fund a stay with us from another source. Visiting Fellows usually stay between 2 and 12 weeks, and during their stay they are integrated into the VIEWS project team and benefit from access to the resources of the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge. The fellowship is non-stipendiary, but we try to offer a supportive and stimulating atmosphere, and most Visiting Fellows remain part of the VIEWS “family” long after their stay.
The VIEWS research group and visiting fellows taking part in a writing exercise.
Last year we initiated a new type of fellowship with an EDI focus: the VIEWS Remote Inclusivity Fellowship. I had the idea after realising that there were some people who simply didn’t feel able to apply for an in-person visit, for many different reasons such as caring responsibilities, health or job precarity. We put together a package to offer digital access to library resources and remote or hybrid meetings to discuss research and other aspects of the project. The first remote fellows are joining us this year, and the feedback so far has been very positive, which is really encouraging to see. I hope this can form a blueprint for a new way of doing research visits, one that is also kinder to the environment as well as more inclusive.
At the moment only our call for Visiting Fellows with their own source of funding is open. We hope to re-open the call for funded in-person and remote visiting fellows later this year and will announce it through our website and social media channels.
Can you tell us more about the Endangered Writing Network? How can scholars get involved?
I launched the network in 2023 – now the Endangered Writing Research Network, as our collaborations have developed. The idea behind it is to show how the kind of research we are doing on ancient scripts (usually attested over hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years) can inform the study and preservation of minority scripts today, by helping to show why writing traditions thrive and what factors lead to their loss.
Anyone can join the network by sending us an email (to views@classics.cam.ac.uk). We have an email list for sharing news and information as well as a thriving online community hosted through a Discord server.
We also work closely with Tim Brookes, who founded the Endangered Alphabets project and has really pioneered the documentation of endangered scripts. Together we have started up an initiative called Script Keepers, which aims to pair members of minority writing communities with people who have relevant skills to help them preserve the script by developing teaching or typographic resources, or providing other kinds of support. The response so far has been wonderful, as we saw for instance when we hosted a day of online events for World Endangered Writing Day alongside Tim this January.
What are your hopes for how VIEWS and the Endangered Writing Network can impact scholarship and language preservation today?
Writing is widely acknowledged to be a vital tool in language preservation and reclamation, but there is remarkably little research on what makes a given writing system an effective support for the language(s) written in it. I’ve argued recently that the key does not simply lie in representing the sounds of the language (which has been the main focus of research up to now) but also, crucially, in the visual and cultural fit of the writing system, such that it is meaningful for its users and provides motivation for continuing to write in it. In a world where linguistic diversity is shrinking and some 85-90% of the world’s distinctive scripts are in danger of loss, that motivation is crucial, because the transmission of a script to new generations is probably the most important factor in its survival.
Ancient scripts like cuneiform provide further important parallels for types of literacy, embodied practice and orthographic variation, all issues that are also relevant for today’s minority scripts. Many distinct scripts maintain indigenous traditions and consciously reject writing systems that are associated with coloniality and linguistic hegemony, in some cases meaning that they have features that are quite different from those of majority scripts. One area where we have seen significant difficulties is in typographic support for a script, especially Unicode encoding, and we have been working with the Script Encoding Initiative on these issues.
Finally, the most recent VIEWS conference focused on writing as visual engagement. What have been your takeaways and are there more conferences planned?
Writing As Visual Engagement was the second of three conferences planned for the VIEWS project. I was really delighted with how it went, with four days of really diverse papers and also nice long break times to give everyone time to talk to each other. There was a great atmosphere, which I think is so important and conducive to getting more out of the event. We had opportunities for people to try writing in a variety of scripts, design their own name badges and contribute to collaborative writing on the wall (on large pieces of paper!), and some colleagues were even kind enough to provide some live music one lunchtime. To some extent that helps to build rapport between the participants, but it also reflects the issues we were talking about, like the insights that practical and historical knowledge of a writing tradition can bring.
VIEWS conference 2026
It’s interesting how themes emerge that are not really intended but prove to be fruitful ways of thinking about the central topics. In our first VIEWS conference for instance, Writing As Visual Experience, almost every paper mentioned the body and the embodiment of writing in some sense. At Writing As Visual Engagement, diversity of practice turned out to be high on the agenda. Many of the papers emphasised the importance of understanding a given writing tradition on its own terms, in the context of indigenous epistemological understandings of the world. That is equally important for historical traditions as for ones in use today. A third and final conference will take place in 2027, date and title to be announced!
Useful links:
VIEWS website: https://viewsproject.wordpress.com/c
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxj3mZLZnwvYpmLrvzwVGjA
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/views_project_cambridge/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/viewsproject.bsky.social
X: https://x.com/crewsproject
Interview by Pavla Rosenstein