3 ms·
I'm not sure what your familiarity with the literature is, but I'd strongly caution you against assuming too much about relationships between sedentism, writing
by AlotOfReading 4y ago
I'm not sure what your familiarity with the literature is, but I'd strongly caution you against assuming too much about relationships between sedentism, writing, and property. First of all, there's many thousands of years between the first widely recognized sedentary cultures and "true writing". Proto writing of various kinds existed long before and after that transition.
The relationship between writing and property has even more issues and they're usually circularly linked. Property rights are difficult to understand from the archaeological record alone, so the vast majority of work done has been at least partially based on literary sources. This in turn makes it look like "literate societies" (what a terrible term, ugh) are the ones who have property rights. At the same time, archaeologists have long used definitions that more or less guide what they consider a "civilization" to look like that has traditionally included criteria like writing. Certain philosophical schools (like Marxism) relate social/political/economic development to these stages, and thus implicate certain productive relations simply based on the presence of other features like writing, even if it remains untranslated. This is what's happened with Harappan archaeology for example.
They might have universal relations, but the currently available evidence is very unclear about that and I'd recommend against strong statements about either the nature or timeline of that relationship.
- AndrewKemendo 4y agoI never claim any correlation between them Sedentism and property started in my estimation 6000 years before writing So I think you're arguing with yourself