Not merely scribble
to record the selling of cows
the first writing
made to track the moon
inscribe spirit
praise for the great mother
text by Cari Ferraro, 2004
I was inspired to create this work by the books of archeologist Marija Gimbutas, whose theory was that the first writing actually predated Sumerian businessmen by a few thousand years, and instead grew out of symbolic marks on ritual objects made to venerate the Great Mother in Old Europe. The idea that writing came out of a spiritual place rather than a commercial one appeals to me as a calligrapher. I invented an alphabet style based on Gimbutas’ catalog of marks in The Civilization of the Goddess, and in the background of the paste paper used symbols found in the 5000-year-old passage grave Newgrange in Ireland, whose meaning has never been fully understood.
The painting from which this print is created was made as a study in advance of the book, which was later made into a limited edition available here. It uses an early version of the poem; later I revised it to remove the specific reference to cows and substituted livestock and property.
