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But writing didn't (IIRC) start with writing down speech. It started with accountancy, with recoding taxes payed and owed. So it arises with agricultural states

by iguy 7y ago

But writing didn't (IIRC) start with writing down speech. It started with accountancy, with recoding taxes payed and owed. So it arises with agricultural states, it's part of what lets a king rule so many peasants that merely having his brothers remember who owes how much doesn't work anymore. Figuring out that it could be used to write sentences took a few millennia after that. And only after that came enough simplification for people other than palace/temple employees to learn it.

n4r9 7y ago
Interesting. I looked this up and there's a Wikipedia page listing the earliest written accounts [0]. Looks like joint earliest are Egyptian hieroglyphs in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen [1] and ancient Sumerian tablets [2]-[3]. It seems like a lot of early writing was also concerned with religion although a lot of the slightly later writing did cover economic and administrative records. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_first_written_accounts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_first_wri... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth-Peribsen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth-Peribsen [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_of_Shuruppak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_of_Shuruppak [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesh_temple_hymn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesh_temple_hymn
- iguy 7y ago
  These seem to define writing to mean only things with which you can write sentences, which is fair enough, but excludes earlier use of symbols for counting (of taxes!). I have in mind things like [1], or this from [2]: "The original Sumerian writing system derives from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millennium BC, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using a round-shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers. This was gradually augmented with pictographic writing by using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted. Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing were gradually replaced around 2700–2500 BC by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the term cuneiform), at first only for logograms, but developed to include phonetic elements by the 29th century BC. About 2600 BC, cuneiform began to represent syllables of the Sumerian language." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ancient_numeral_systems#Clay_token https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ancient_numeral_sys... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing#Proto-writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing#Proto-writi...
  - n4r9 7y ago
    Ah, yes I failed to pick up on that distinction in your last post. Now I almost want to add "sophisticated trade system" to the list of written language prerequisites.

by iguy 7y ago

n4r9 7y ago

Interesting. I looked this up and there's a Wikipedia page listing the earliest written accounts [0]. Looks like joint earliest are Egyptian hieroglyphs in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen [1] and ancient Sumerian tablets [2]-[3]. It seems like a lot of early writing was also concerned with religion although a lot of the slightly later writing did cover economic and administrative records. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_first_written_accounts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_first_wri... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth-Peribsen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth-Peribsen [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_of_Shuruppak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_of_Shuruppak [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesh_temple_hymn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesh_temple_hymn

iguy 7y ago
These seem to define writing to mean only things with which you can write sentences, which is fair enough, but excludes earlier use of symbols for counting (of taxes!). I have in mind things like [1], or this from [2]: "The original Sumerian writing system derives from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millennium BC, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using a round-shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers. This was gradually augmented with pictographic writing by using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted. Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing were gradually replaced around 2700–2500 BC by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the term cuneiform), at first only for logograms, but developed to include phonetic elements by the 29th century BC. About 2600 BC, cuneiform began to represent syllables of the Sumerian language." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ancient_numeral_systems#Clay_token https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ancient_numeral_sys... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing#Proto-writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing#Proto-writi...
- n4r9 7y ago
  Ah, yes I failed to pick up on that distinction in your last post. Now I almost want to add "sophisticated trade system" to the list of written language prerequisites.