So my copy of the TLJ artbook hasn’t arrived yet, but thanks to @ashesforfoxes I was able to stare at the concept art of the pages from the Jedi texts and ramble some.
Seems to be an alphabet of 30+ letters. The actual letters seem to take inspiration from several more or less ancient writing systems. I don’t know how it was designed, but a good half of the letters have simple shapes for which it’d be easy to find correspondences in a bunch of real writing systems. It’s a pretty good choice, gives an air of familiarity but not too much.
Some of the symbols associated with the illustrations do not occur in the text. Could be a set of numerical or symbols, astronomical, zodiacal, something something?
The dots between the letters are interpuncts I think. Interpuncts are word dividers, signalling the boundary between one word and the next (the use of spaces is far from universal – some writing systems are scriptio continua, they don’t use word dividers at all, a bunch of ancient scripts just used vertical lines, in some latin texts there can be multiple interpuncts to indicate the length of the pause, etc). Some of the pages in the Jedi book do use spaces instead, which is interesting.
It’s not fully random. There’s repeated words (one no less than seven times) and letter associations, but it really doesn’t look like a text in English with swapped letters + a few more phonemes either. I don’t think it’s meant to be deciphered anyway.
A note on the hand / calligraphy style – it’s relatively thick and kind of blocky, and probably an aesthetic choice considering there’s a lot of thinner lines in the illustrations.
The other books are probably written in different scripts (well if there’s anything inside the props - maybe they only did one book?); this is the best picture of the spines I could find and it’s still crap but there’s two decently visible scripts and none looks like the one in the concept art pages.
Generous use of space. Either the Jedi of old weren’t worried about their paper supply and/or its cost, either it’s a statement.
Not in so bad a state, considering the age it must have and the fact that it’s been kept in a damn tree for a number of years.
Most of the text in in black, fading to brown, so in our-universe it’d probably be some kind of iron gall ink. Checks with the state of the manuscript as seen in the movie (brittle pages). But who knows what weird shit the Jedi of old used for pigments?
Red ink seems to be used for rubrication - it’s mostly a medieval thing, scribes would use red ink to write a header, signal the beginning of a section, emphasize something, etc. In The Book it seems to be mostly used in this way - the sixth page’s framed text is not rubrication but the goal is the same, emphasis.
Blue and gold (ink or paint, not actual gold leaf) are also used to emphasize parts of the text, words or standalone letters. Some seem to be initials, but others stand apart from the text. Both colors are also used for the illustrations, along with a bit of white. The red ink is only used in one illustration.
The gold is also used at the top of some pages or in-between paragraphs, with series of rectangular shapes, seemingly to mark different sections. Or it could be for the aesthetics. For a moment I thought it looked like Morse code, but i don’t really think it’s carrying meaning of its own.
The blue and gold illustrations seem to be cosmological/astronomical in nature. The red one on the final page is… different. The use of colors in illustrations may be codified somewhat, though the sample is too small to know for sure.
The first page is the one seen in TLj, without the “spent thousands of years in a tree” option. Looks like some kind of star chart to me, without the actual stars and with the Jedi Order’s symbol slapped on top. Or something like zodiac quadrants maybe. Compare to:
The design of the Lothal Temple grounds (x)
According to the artbook, Hidalgo and Chee shared a six-pages PDF of “ancient symbols” of the Jedi with the TLJ creative team, which informed “the shape of the library tree; the Jedi text covers and page designs; the temple’s celestial carving; and the reflecting pool mosaic.” I have no idea whether this was included - but both the TLJ symbols and this are informed by the same preexisting worldbuilding, so have it nonetheless.
But really, five pages out of six have space-themed illustrations, most of which seem to deal with lunations. Second and fifth page’s illustrations seem to represent the waxing and waning phases of a moon. The little one at the bottom of the second page has a Nebra sky disc feel to me, stylistically, but it clearly represents moon phases. The other, bigger illustration of the second pages features another moon phases pattern, inscribed in a circle divided in two (maybe more moon imagery, a full one and a half one). The pattern of thinner lines could be random but they could also be more star-charty stuff or zodiac thingy. It could be some kind of representation of astronomical observations with a more symbolic representation slapped on top. Third page is in the same vein, and fourth page seems to represent orbits? Or more phases stuff.
I’d be surprised if any of it was, you know, scientifically accurate in any way.
The final page has something different, a geometric pattern in red. A six pages sample isn’t enough to know if it stands out in the books’ illustrations, but it does compared to the other ones we have. It could be purely for the pretty. Or not. It’s too abstract and symbolic and generic for me to hazard a guess. (If I was to, it kinda looks like cells)
Okay so that’s it for the basic observations. Now comes the real brainwank. Starting with the context. [Insert rant about context being key]
TLJ confirmed the Jedi originated on Ahch-to, which answers one question, but opens others - if this happened before the advent of space travel, it would most likely mean the early Jedi were indigenous to Ahch-to, i.e. a species that evolved locally, a cultural entity whose religious beliefs would later spread. If the Jedi started post-space travel, then it’s still possible they formed in relative isolation, but more likely that they either started out on a multicultural substrate and/or were in contact with other cultural entities. Very different origin stories.
We know there is a mythological or historical Prime Jedi. Probably a foundational figure, actual historicity but heavily mythologized. Could be the first (or recognized as such) to have used the Force, or the first to have explored it systematically and have explicited its rules, could be Space Jesus gathering disciples or Space Buddha of the balanced life
And how do the books fit in that? Were they written on Ahch-to? Later, after the Jedi started expanding? Do they predate the Sith Schism? We know they were foundational texts for the Jedi Order so they most likely do. We also know Luke recovered them during his quest for Force knowledge and brought them to Ahch-to. He does not seem to have actually read them in depth, if we believe Ghost Yoda, so the lessons he gives Rey are unlikely to be very representative of the books’ contents. That’s pretty much it.
Looking at the scripts and the bindings, they’re varied enough that they could come from different geographical and historical contexts. But then again it’s possible the texts themselves come from the same source and that the books Luke recovered are translated copies.
Another question would be: what are these texts, actually? Religious treatises? Religious cosmology? Histories of the early Jedi and their philosophies? A life of the Prime Jedi? Observations on the nature of the Force? Etc.
So back to the concept art pages we do have - they represents six pages of a much longer text, so it’s a small sample, and there’s no way to know how representative of the full book it is, even less of the full corpus of works in the Tree Library.
But due to the illustrations, and because this is fiction so I can just wildly speculate, I think this specific book could be some kind of a cosmological treatise, hinting to the influence the observation of the rules behind the movements of astronomical bodies could have had on the formation of the early Jedi’s beliefs.
Bear with me. TL:DR, religious and scientific thought weren’t always (generally accepted as) different realms of knowledge and rationality. Historically, they have the same roots, observation of the natural world and its cycles - observation taught us what to expect from the world, allowed early cultural groups and societies to find order and predictability in it. The divine comes in to explain the rules behind these cycles, because knowing what to expect is one thing, but we also need to know why, to make sense of the rules.
See: a fuckton of myths, early astronomy and astronomy being the same thing, alchemy and chemistry, thunderstones, the atomists and the presocratics, lbr literally anything before the Advent of Modern (Culturally Western) Rationality
Back to the GFFA, because otherwise I’m going to keep rambling, and the Jedi. And most importantly, the Force, i.e. what’s behind the rules in the GFFA. The Jedi never had a God Is Dead moment, because why would they? The modern Jedi Order was certainly not anti-science, and their understanding of the Force and its role in the natural world probably changed over time, but they would never have had reason to reassess its existence.
I’m losing the point - the art in the concept art pages, imo, illustrate observations of natural cycles, definitely lunations, maybe other space stuff. Chances are the Jedi would not only see the Force as the root mechanism behind it all, but also, at least in their early days, believe these observable, external manifestations of the cosmic rules held deeper meaning relative to the nature of the Force.
As a final note because I think I’m mostly done with the bullet points, the lunations and the waxing and waning moons that make up most of the imagery in the concept art pages (and the fact that Ahch-to has two moons maybe but I’m not going there today) could point to that type of waxing-waning cycle being important in early Jedi thought, even mean that their view of the balance between light and dark followed that cycle.
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