Placement Spotlight: Jade Cuttle

Today writing is most often imagined as black ink on a white page, or increasingly as pixels on a screen. Yet as the Museum of Writing (MoW) at the University of London’s Senate House Library shows, its history is far more colourful than this familiar format suggests. 

Across cultures and millennia, people have recorded meaning using a range of materials – from bone to bark, papyrus to parchment – inscribing, knotting, carving language into the natural landscapes around us. This is a rare and unusual collection of artefacts that reflects the culture and history of writing throughout the world from around 3000 BCE to 2010 CE. 

I am particularly interested in the ecological dimension of this history, a uniting strand that collapses any claim to separation through space or time. This is due in part to my doctoral research at Cambridge, supervised by Robert Macfarlane, and a growing awareness of the disconnect between thought and text. After exploring the relation between humans and the natural world through the prism of poetry, challenging the ‘belief that there is a “thing” called nature that is “out there” beyond us’, as Timothy Morton does in Ecology without Nature, I wanted to understand how this earthy heritage is etched into the material history of texts themselves, beyond any page-deep thematic concerns. 

The artefacts in a display I curated display at Senate House, as part of the placement, were selected according to organic material rather than chronologically, by time period or region, as is the case at comparable institutions. I was particularly fascinated by the crumbling payrolls and papyrus schoolwork, the bark calendars and clay receipts, the coffin labels and fire-cracked oracle bones. Together, these artefacts offer a broader understanding of writing, revealing a history that is not as black and white as it might seem: textual, but also tactile. Thanks to my time in these archives, I now see the black ink of language in a browner light, ancient echoes of earthiness wherever I go.

As a practising nature poet as well as a scholar my fondness for simile as a literary technique helped tune me into similarities across the museum collection. It inspired me to pair the Roman wax tablet and stylus alongside the Aiptek electronic tablet from 1999, as you will see in the exhibition. This poetic vision also steered me to see parallels between the Mesopotamian payroll registers and receipts on show, and the Excel spreadsheets in which I spent my days cataloguing the condition of these ancient objects.

Approaching the museum’s collection from a poetic perspective, I had to learn to put metaphor aside and state things simply as they are. A heart scarab is a heart scarab. An oval flat piece of basalt, unmarked on one side, with eight horizontal lines of hieroglyphs on the other. I might briefly note that such relics were placed, during ancient Egyptian burials, over the heart of the corpse to ensure the safe passage of the deceased. But I could not wax lyrical about binding a heart to silence while it was weighed against the feather of truth, or the mysterious tremble of an ancient hand rendered immortal through imperfect borders etched in stone. A symptom of sun-scorched exhaustion, perhaps? Stifled grief or a hurried deadline? The heart scarab guards its secrets through death and far beyond.

I had to honour a duty to discernible truth, a challenge for me when handling cuneiform. I had spent the last year writing a novel about the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, whose 30,000 clay tablets and fragments were consumed by fire – and thus preserved as if in a kiln – around 612 BCE. Knowing that each scribe would spend years in edubba, what you might call tablet schools, as they learned to chase the curve of the Akkadian script with a stylus, I arrived at the MoW with admiring preconceptions for the skill. I saw in each reed-stroke the spine of a wild horse a scribe must mount. Each shape had its own rhythm, its own resistance and paths of preference to tread. I knew how easily one could get carried away, riding deeper into delirious brown – if you push too deep, the stylus will splinter through. Yet a hand could not scrape too shallow, either, or else nothing of substance would hold. The angle had to be just right. 

As I discovered, when making a cuneiform handbag of my own, sometimes this script-horse will flip you to the floor and you will have to start again, knowing the real master is not the scribe, but the script one longs to tame. When it came to cataloguing the cuneiform for the Senate House Library archives, however, I had to settle with simple clarity: “Undated [c. 1800 BCE].  Rectangular cuneiform tablet of light clay, inscriptions on both sides in the form of grids, one side empty, the other side a quarter filled.”

Still, that did not prevent me from being fascinated by the realisation that as museum cataloguers, we hold death in the palm of our hands. I felt this sharply when handling objects like the 4th-century coffin label, Roman marble sarcophagus fragment, ancient Egyptian heart scarab, coffin planks and mummy cloth. The experience produced a peculiar form of vertigo. Not the dizziness of spinning through space, but something closer to time-sickness: the sensation of being abruptly pulled across millennia. I also held a quiet sadness, knowing that any tears — like the ink — had long since dried.

The lessons weren’t always so serious, weighing as heavy as stone. I was amused at how placing mini crowns on letters somehow made them royal – one manuscript I worked with involved special designs placed by a scribe on the upper left-hand corner in a mezuzah scroll (hand-written parchment). I couldn’t help but chuckle softly as I slipped on my rubber gloves to gently ease out a modern child's alphabet set from its plastic sleeve onto a protective foam mat: its mass-produced neon brightness contrasted starkly with the rest of the collection. The Romans who tossed their tablets into wells likely thought much the same: this is nothing of note. Yet the significance of any neon alphabet sets will surely read differently in decades to come, especially if our pervasive reliance on plastic one day lessens. Perhaps the blades of grass, coffee-stained napkins or crumpled shop receipts that many of us plug into books as hasty page markers will one day be studied with the same attention I found myself giving to the semi-circular scrap of paper within a medieval book.

The placement also inspired a playful set of creative responses in ways I never expected. Midway, I found myself designing and making a power-suit blazer with grass shoulder pads, worm-like tassels and soil coins for buttons (which I wear, below, while reading a concertina book-style whose pages are lined with grass and sand). While the suit I wear for the MoW documentary we filmed was more traditional (less grass, soil or worms), the collection prompted me to reflect on the pervasiveness of synthetic, screen-based communication, and the growing distance between these modes and the handmade, materially grounded practices from which writing first emerged. It is for this reason that my final creative response to the MoW collection resulted in a soil-based sculpture of a mouth – the wellspring of words before they gain their final mark – studded with stone teeth and a mossy flagstone tongue. After all, what isn't nature when everything we know begins and ends with the earth?

Read the exhibition highlights here or watch a documentary presented by Jade Cuttle here.