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Wooden structures 476,000 BCE Sailing 100,000 BCE Drawing 73,000 BCE Counting 60,000 BCE Medicine 40,000 BCE … Writing 3,200 BCE Alphabet 2,400 BCE I fi

Wooden structures 476,000 BCE Sailing 100,000 BCE Drawing 73,000 BCE Counting 60,000 BCE Medicine 40,000 BCE … Writing 3,200 BCE Alphabet 2,400 BCE I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived.

v8xi 2y ago
Was going to say about the same - this is ~2500 years after construction of the pyramids. How do you coordinate something that massive without any form of writing?
- jaco6 2y ago
  The article is about alphabets. There was writing prior to alphabets, but it was done in hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and characters. Alphabets are easier to learn and therefore more widely used.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > Was going to say about the same - this is ~2500 years after construction of the pyramids. The first Egyptian pyramid known was built ~2780 BCE, the alphabetic writing in this article was from ~2500 BCE. That’s a gap of ~250 years, not ~2,500. > How do you coordinate something that massive without any form of writing? The Egyptians at the time of the Pyramids had writing, but it was logographic (symbols directly represent a word/concept), not alphabetic (a small inventory of symbols are combined in different ways to represent words/concepts.) An alphabetic – and also phonetic – script is a big advance not because of what you communicate with it, but because if you know a fairly small set of symbols and their phonetic interpretation, you can encode a spoken language in it in a reasonably intelligible way to anyone who knows the same script (and you can even encode different spoken languages in the same script intelligibly, if they have a similar-enough phonetic inventory.)
  - timschmidt 2y ago
    I'm no expert, but my understanding is that Coptic made use of hieroglyphs as an alphabet, and co-existed with their use for Egyptian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_language
danielheath 2y ago
We find lots of non-alphabetic writing from earlier periods that does survive, though. Surely if they had alphabetic writing, we'd find that when we find writing?
- StanislavPetrov 2y ago
  Virtually all of the writing we find from earlier periods has been carved in stone. Without finding the rare monument or well-preserved grave stone, a traveler that arrived here 10,000 years in the future would find just as little evidence that we knew how to write.
  - bjt 2y ago
    I've heard this argument before, and generally don't buy it. It really comes down to how hard they're looking. We have found many dinosaur bones that are hundreds of millions of years old. We have an Australopithecus skeleton (Lucy) from 3.2 million years ago. We have many examples of writing that would be similarly durable. Even if most things wither or decay or erode or get scavenged or build over, so 99% of it is gone in 10,000 years, there's still plenty that'd get buried and preserved. You give the example of monuments. They're not all that rare though. Every town has a few, usually right at the center, right where excavation would be most likely. I'm thinking of the world war memorials that every little English town seems to have, with the names of all their fallen soldiers. They're not ALL just going to turn to dust, right? There are temples in Egypt where you can still see not just what they carved in the stone thousands of years ago, but even the paint that they put on it. So if we're all gone in 10,000 years and that traveller just buzzes by and doesn't scratch the surface or even look very hard, sure. But if they're excavating at the level that humans are today, it will be hard to miss that we had writing.
AlotOfReading 2y ago
This is more an artifact of how we typically define writing than anything meaningful about the act of communication itself. Graphical symbolic communication is tens of thousands of years older than what the article discusses. Writing as typically defined is a complete system for encoding verbal language using specific, formalized symbols. That's much more sophisticated and largely unnecessary for "most" human activities prior to the invention of large, hierarchical societies.
- mmooss 2y ago
  > Graphical symbolic communication is tens of thousands of years older than what the article discusses. This article says that the earliest proto-writing is 10,000 years old - 3-d clay counters used for accounting. What was earlier? https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing/ https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing...
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    Proto-writing is still quite far along on the spectrum I'm talking about of contextually defined symbols. Lascaux and chauvet have plenty of examples generally agreed to be partially symbolic, just off the top of my head.
- consf 2y ago
  And that distinction is crucial
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    Can't say I agree, and I suspect you probably don't agree with the implications of that definition either. As a hypothetical example, do you think any of the following aren't writing: * a script which can represent taxes, histories, and religious texts but not the full range of verbal expression * programming languages * emojis The first of these is an actual scholarly debate about whether Aztec script can be considered "full" writing or merely proto-writing.
gregschlom 2y ago
Counter example: until relatively recently you had large segments of the population who didn't know how to read and write, but were very skilled at whatever their trade was.
reissbaker 2y ago
Agriculture started around 12k years ago. Prior to that, all of humanity lived in hunter-gatherer tribal bands. Why would you need writing, when you could just talk to the person who knew the thing you wanted to learn? Not to mention that prior to the invention of the printing press, writing was very laborious to produce at scale. Even as recently as the 1800s, nearly 90% of the world was illiterate [1]. We live in a hyper-literate society, so it's almost unimaginable, but it's really how the world worked! 1: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/09/reading-writing-global-literacy-rate-changed/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/09/reading-writing-glob...
- chalcolithic 2y ago
  It's not "why do you need writing?", it's "how do you discover writing?". Once it's discovered the new purposes will appear pronto.
- tastyfreeze 2y ago
  Enter the hypothetical ice age civilization that was destroyed 13k years ago in a global cataclysm.
  - namaria 2y ago
    Enter the hypothetical tea kettle in orbit around the sun
- 4b11b4 2y ago
  [flagged]
- Glyptodon 2y ago
  I think you have to assume that there's kind of an ambiguous continuum between art and writing. Obviously hunter-gatherer bands likely had reasons to communicate with band members, whether by sounds or visual signals. And obviously they made art, and humans being humans, presumably a lot of the art hat some kind of meaning. I think there are uses for using symbols to communicate well before you need ledgers or anything similar. But I don't know exactly where art turns into writing: Even when the world was mostly illiterate, it seems clear than lots of humans had some level of symbol literacy. And in some places that symbol literacy gets so dense you have Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs. And maybe in others you maybe have something similar but less preserved.
raincole 2y ago
How do we know humans did "counting" when there weren't no written text? Just a few marks on the stone? Does it not count as writing?
- mmooss 2y ago
  There is a matter of definition. IIRC, if you lookup some cave paintings from ~30,000 years ago, there is/was a debate whether marks near animals were intended to represent quantities.
- gus_massa 2y ago
  Quipu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu I remember an article about credit in stores in tiny towns in Spain. It was just a rod of wood with some simbol as a signature of the store. Each time you buy something ¿big? they add a mark, and when you get all the ¿10? marks you have to pay with real money. IIRC, the oldest number recorded was some kind of lunar calendar in a bone, wit marks like IIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIII Coincidence? (I don't remember the details, but the article was convincing.)
  - griffzhowl 2y ago
    You're probably referring to the Ishango bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishango_bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishango_bone
dyauspitr 2y ago
Why? The alphabet seems like a huge abstraction I don’t think I could come up with on my own. I could see myself coming up with structures, drawing, counting etc. on my own given enough free time.
- philipswood 2y ago
  A is for apple, B is for bear, ... And then you use the picture of an apple, bear, etc. It's one of those simple solutions that anyone could have, but not often do.
- mmooss 2y ago
  > The alphabet seems like a huge abstraction I don’t think I could come up with on my own. Given how many humans did come up with it, over all those millennia, I think we all can safely say that!
bentley 2y ago
Even within the last millennium powerful and accomplished civilizations like the Inca survived and excelled without writing. I think a better lesson to take from this is that though humans are inherently communicative and inventive, these characteristics don’t depend upon written communication, and that writing is not an obvious invention even if we can see elements of it in similar inventions like quipu.
- philipswood 2y ago
  The Inca had Quipu.
  - mcswell 2y ago
    The Quipu were definitely not an alphabetic system, and probably not a system for transcribing words.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    Quipo are amazing, but mostly accounting records?
  - bentley 2y ago
    Yes, I mentioned that.
WalterBright 2y ago
It's clumsy and inconvenient to have writing without paper and pen. There wasn't a whole lot of writing before the printing press. I've sometimes idly wondered if I was transported back in time to the stone age, could I help the tribe by teaching them to read and write? Sadly, nope. If I was transported to Roman times, I'd try to invent paper and a printing press. I bet it would catch on fast.
- int_19h 2y ago
  There are many reasonably convenient options depending on geography and economy. Palm leaves, birch bark, wax tablets... sure, they are not as convenient as paper, but good enough to write e.g. personal letters, diaries, and even doodles.
- gostsamo 2y ago
  They had paper though not as durable as the modern one. Papyrus had the same function, but it decays over few decades and things written on it should be rewritten. If you have a few centuries of war and low literacy like in the western parts of the Roman empire, there is noone to renew the pagan texts and they get lost. The eastern empire bothered only with the texts compatible with christianity while the arabs kept those compatible with islam. The printing press might've been useful though.
- mmooss 2y ago
  > I'd try to invent ... a printing press I sometimes wonder if the development of the printing press relied on technology that hadn't been available previously - like many/most innovations. But what? Paper? There were ink-retaining sheets long before the printing press. A durable mechanism for the roller? They made wagon axles, I assume, that supported much more weight. Durable letters? Even sans metal, I'd guess that carving wood letters would still be worth the effort.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Gutenberg's press was a modified wine press that was based on a screw. The Romans had screw wine presses. The precursors were available to the Romans. He used lead letters. Lead was readily available in Roman times - after all, the water pipes were made of lead (and poisoned the people who used them). The lead letters would quickly wear out, but it was easy to melt and recast them as needed. I've seen a demonstration of it. I think the Chinese did wood block printing, but it didn't get very far.
sapphicsnail 2y ago
Humans are able to pass on an incredible amount of knowledge without the use of writing. There are oral, epic traditions 100s of years old that we only know about because they were eventually written down. People were able to do things like recite the Iliad from memory. I don't know about other ancient languages but the oldest Greek texts of significant length are all metrical poetry. We know and have scientific works that were written in meter. There are probably all sorts of things that were passed don't orally that we can't even imagine.
- philipswood 2y ago
  A book that gives a nice view of these some of these memory technologies is The Memory Code by Lynne Kelly I can't get myself to link to the marketing blurb inspired summaries, but I love the book. This wikipedia heading gives a less breathless overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Kelly_(science_writer)#Research_on_primary_orality_and_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Kelly_(science_writer)#R...
- stevenwoo 2y ago
  I think this was on here in prior story but Australian Aboriginal stories about changes in ocean level were shown to reflect conditions about 10000 years ago. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-...
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Hadza have oral stories of "ancient ones" who did not know fire or tools.
webdoodle 2y ago
Book burning has been a major issue many times by people trying to control history. The library of Alexandria, one of the oldest known book burnings, may have had some of the evidence your expecting. Then there are the cretins like folks trying to unroll the Dead Sea Scrolls. The modern day equivalent are the internet censors deleting our comments and posts on social media.
tivert 2y ago
> I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived. What's so hard to believe? Everything you can write you can say, and you can show quite a lot that's difficult to describe in writing.
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  >Everything you can write you can say That's easy to say if you've never written C++ or Perl. One of the unique golden rules of FORTH is that every word definition must have a well defined pronunciation in the documentation, so you can discuss FORTH code over the telephone without confusion. That's because FORTH words have no syntax except space as a delimiter, so can mix arbitrary punctuation with letters in any way, so you have many weird words like @ (fetch) ! (store) +! (plus store) ' (tick) ['] (bracket tick) >R (to r) R> (r from) etc. So you could define an emoticon in FORTH like: : ;-) WINK NOSE SMILE ; // Pronounced "winkie".
  - ehecatl42 2y ago
    Writing Perl is easy; reading it a few weeks later is the hard part. CPP I don't know much about… I was a sysadmin, not a programmer <@:) # clown-hat-curly-hair-smiley-face… or, part of a regex
tastyfreeze 2y ago
Written on what? There are very few materials that will last 10s of millennia. Aztec, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and their contemporaries all used some type of paper. Sumerians seem to be alone in their use of clay for writing.
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  > Sumerians seem to be alone in their use of clay for writing. I think we have more Assyrian and Hittite tablets that have survived? Also they were used as fast Crete and Greece and even in the Danubian civilizations (although they probably didn't develop a full writing system).
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  Paper was only one written medium. All of the cultures you've listed constructed stone stelae with writing, like the Rosetta stone. South Asian cultures used palm leaves instead of paper. Maya used fig bark. Europeans and Nahuatl often used animal hides instead of paper. There's a long list.
  - tastyfreeze 2y ago
    Ok. Maybe I should have been more generic. Organic thin sheet material... velum, parchment, papyrus. The bulk of writing is done on material that is gone in a few thousand years at most.
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      Which still leaves stelae as already mentioned. There's also petroglyphs, ceramics, and paints. The point I'm trying to convey is that writing has never been limited solely to paper or even organic materials.
lkrubner 2y ago
I agree that there must have been earlier writing, likely written on wood. Early systems could have evolved from markings on trees, like we still use on the Appalachian Trail, and other trails. Warnings for bears or tigers, symbols for different tribes on different paths. If you've hiked much then you're aware that even experienced woodsmen can get lost as the season changes and a valley changes, or after a hard storm washes away evidence of a trail. Children, in particular, would have been at risk, but would have almost certainly needed to do work over distances, in particular fetching water, which is something that even today children as young as 5 are asked to do. Notches on trees would have been a likely starting point for a system of symbols to communicate. When I was much younger I used to work as a hike leader for a summer camp in Virginia. We would take a small group of teenagers out for 7 day hikes, during which we could cover something between 70 to 90 miles (112 to 145 kilometers). At one time I knew that stretch of trail so well I thought I could walk it blindfolded. And yet, I only knew it in the summer. One year I went in the fall and I was astonished how different it was. I was helped by the markings on the trees. (This was before cell phones and GPS.)
- dachris 2y ago
  Exactly - there's probably a fluent transition between symbols and painting and writing and then alphabetic writing. Territorial animals that we are, I'd add "here starts the territory of the Saber-Toothed Tiger Clan" signs to path markings as likely candidates for earliest symbolic communication. Nice to see that the earliest examples of writing are still somewhat recognizable (as opposed to modern alphabets) - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing - a hand, a foot, a goat or sheep. Fun thing is, with modern technology we have regressed (advanced?) to a massive use of pictograms - a modern smartphone wielding human, in addition to the alphabet, knows at least a few hundreds or even thousands of pictograms ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    I'm so old that we didn't even have Emojis, not even letters yet, and we had to communicate with punctuation alone! ;)
nunez 2y ago
It's easy to believe when you learn that there are still parts of the world that struggle with literacy.
momoschili 2y ago
the distinction between writing and drawing seems to be a bit gray to be honest
asdff 2y ago
Literacy is a modern phenomenon.
foogazi 2y ago
> I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. Egyptian Pyramids - 3,800 BCE They were writing just not with an alphabet
- otherme123 2y ago
  Exactly. It seems that alphabet development is closely related to the regions more focused on international trading (the region we know as Phoenicia) rather than war and conquest of the neighbours. Maybe a system that represent sounds was useful to write words from sounds in multiple languages that were never heard before, unlike pictograms, hieroglyphs or cuneiform, that had to be adapted to each language.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    But also, Phoenicians did not develop the alphabet. The basic notion of encoding sounds with glyphs is a Egyptian invention, and the earliest evidence for true abjads (from which Phoenician script and other Semitic writing systems all derive) is also from that same area. Note that war and conquest of neighbors means managing (in particular, taxing) a large foreign-speaking population, whereby abjads and alphabets also come in handy. Not to mention the monuments - if you are a king erecting, say, a monumental stele to boast about having vanquished a mighty foreign ruler, it might behoove you to spell his name in a way that is sufficiently recognizable for people to appreciate the achievement.
- namaria 2y ago
  You're off by over a thousand years there
mmooss 2y ago
Many cultures never invent writing. From well-known 1969 research on 186 pre-industrial societies: [0] * 39.2%: No writing * 37.1%: Pictures only * 23.7%: Writing Also of interest (but also a bit dated): "... the making and reading of two dimensional maps is almost universal among mankind whereas the reading and writing of linear scripts is a special accomplishment associated with a high level of social and technical sophistication." [1] > I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived. It's an interesting question, but do I think that? That's the thing about science - we need evidence. Otherwise, what we think turns out to be especially unreliable. [0] George P. Murdock, D.R. White. Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). Ethnology (1969) [1] Edmund Leach. Culture and Communication. Cambridge U. Press (1976)
- mistercheph 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - mmooss 2y ago
    There's an old quote among lawyers: If you have the facts on your side, hammer on the facts. If you have the law, hammer on the law. If you have neither, hammer on the table. If I understand you correctly: You have no claim of your own or argument for it, so you are using what you do know, insults.
    - mistercheph 2y ago
      The claims you are making (unsupported by evidence) are the only thing that's insulting, And with fitting aphorisms exchanged, we can part ways Mr. 40%-of-human-societies-don't-write-according-to-an-unreproduced-survey-performed-in-1969-that-is-not-a-survey-of-human-societies-but-our-own-knowledge-of-human-societies-and-is-confused-about-cultural-boundaries-and-how-to-count-one-society-or-many.
- cogman10 2y ago
  In fact, there are used languages today that are not written! I have family that just returned from a 2 year religious mission in pohnpei. The native language there is just barely starting to be written. One of the challenges to learning it is because of it's mostly unwritten nature, the language evolves rapidly. That fast evolution is part of what makes turning the language into a written language difficult.
riffraff 2y ago
Why not? People lived ok without being able to read and write until a couple generations ago. Passing knowledge orally and by example is easy.
- mcswell 2y ago
  People still survive that way.
nurettin 2y ago
I find it totally believable. There weren't that many humans living in comfort to create institutions and innovate.
globular-toast 2y ago
I take it you've never interacted with people who build houses, make rope or administer medicine then? They don't read, even today. They learn their trade by watching others. We are quite exceptional in that reading is usually the most efficient way to learn stuff, but it's not like that in other areas. If you needed to change a spark plug or plumb in a washing machine would you be reaching for the books or YouTube?
Hilift 2y ago
Greek society switched alphabets between 750 and 950 BC, and adopted a number system. There were writing collapses. There is still a lot of history to uncover from the end of the Bronze Age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
watwut 2y ago
Why would it be so hard to believe that people "would build houses, painting pictures, making rope" without writing? Illiteracy was high 2-3 hundred years ago, in Russia even longer. And all those illiterate villages and areas would build houses, draw, craft ropes and clothing. You need writing for organizing large groups of people and such. You dont need it for survival necessities.
tim333 2y ago
It makes you think how rapidly things are changing with the petabytes we are leaving these days.
lou1306 2y ago
Clearly, almost every time we find an ancient artifact, it is fair to assume that the technology it displays was common and established by the time the artifact was created. However, (and adding to the other replies here which also have a point) in Plato's Phaidros Socrates places the invention of writing in Egypt [1], not in some mind-blowingly past aeon, and the undertone of the tale is that civilization can (and reach) pretty interesting levels of sophistication before writing becomes a necessity. [1] https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439 https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439
- duckerude 2y ago
  Agreed that societies can get sophisticated without writing, but Egypt was already considered mind-blowingly old in Plato's time. The start of the Timaeus features an eight thousand year old Egyptian city with an eight thousand year long memory. It also says that Athens is even older, but that it's periodically destroyed by natural disasters, losing its history and technology. Writing is mentioned as one of the things lost: > Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. Egyptian hieroglyphics were already thousands of years old at the time! I think the myth in the Phaidros was meant to be understood as taking place in a mind-blowingly past aeon.
heresie-dabord 2y ago
Language is a powerful human talent. It's reasonable to assume that there have been many variants of writing systems throughout human evolution. However, such systems would need to be widely adopted and durably preserved to survive millennia and eventually be rediscovered. Which is how we happen to know the precious little that we do know about past writing systems.
- consf 2y ago
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- griffzhowl 2y ago
  > It's reasonable to assume that there have been many variants of writing systems throughout human evolution. I don't find it that reasonable an assumption. As far as I know, there is no hunter-gatherer society that has developed writing, except societies who have had contact with a sedentary agricultural civilisation with writing. Given that all human societies for which there's evidence were hunter-gatherers until about 10k years ago, to me it seems more reasonable to conclude they had no writing. Now, you might say that agriculture and civilisation were around earlier, but we dhaven't found the evidence. But we do have evidence of plenty of human groups at those earlier times, and they're all hunter-gatherers.
consf 2y ago
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PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. Why?
canjobear 2y ago
Consider the many cultures that Europeans discovered in the Americas. Of them, only one had a real writing system (the Maya). The Aztecs wrote down history in a sort of comic book form, and the Inca did accounting with qhipu, but only the Maya had a conventional system of written forms that correspond systematically with verbal language. You can communicate and remember a lot orally. The Polynesian navigators encoded information about how to navigate from island to island in oral poems passed down generation to generation. A lot of these traditions seem to vanish once a culture gets writing, leaving it unclear how they used to pass on so much information before.
contingencies 2y ago
The age of sailing is additionally potentially under-specified because the majority of materials used were either wood or animal skin. I have a few books on the subject which are very good, chiefly The Sea-craft of Prehistory by Paul Johnstone. Also, sailing without counting doesn't get you very far, because for instance you may run out of food or water. While early sailing was predominantly coastal, that doesn't mean an easy pit-stop whenever you get hungry or thirsty (due to rocky coastlines, dangerous currents and waves, and prevailing winds). Probably a lot of early boats were destroyed coming ashore.
EasyMark 2y ago
Honest question, why do you think any of that wouldn’t be possible without writing?
vjerancrnjak 2y ago
They also built massive structures without algebra.
w0de0 2y ago
You perhaps overestimate the utility of writing outside urban civilization - and underestimate the immense difficulty of its invention. Not only is symbolic thought required, but so too a cultural substrate which can find use for, agree upon, and preserve written works. One man may invent the wheel; only a people can invent writing.

v8xi 2y ago

Was going to say about the same - this is ~2500 years after construction of the pyramids. How do you coordinate something that massive without any form of writing?

jaco6 2y ago
The article is about alphabets. There was writing prior to alphabets, but it was done in hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and characters. Alphabets are easier to learn and therefore more widely used.
dragonwriter 2y ago
> Was going to say about the same - this is ~2500 years after construction of the pyramids. The first Egyptian pyramid known was built ~2780 BCE, the alphabetic writing in this article was from ~2500 BCE. That’s a gap of ~250 years, not ~2,500. > How do you coordinate something that massive without any form of writing? The Egyptians at the time of the Pyramids had writing, but it was logographic (symbols directly represent a word/concept), not alphabetic (a small inventory of symbols are combined in different ways to represent words/concepts.) An alphabetic – and also phonetic – script is a big advance not because of what you communicate with it, but because if you know a fairly small set of symbols and their phonetic interpretation, you can encode a spoken language in it in a reasonably intelligible way to anyone who knows the same script (and you can even encode different spoken languages in the same script intelligibly, if they have a similar-enough phonetic inventory.)
- timschmidt 2y ago
  I'm no expert, but my understanding is that Coptic made use of hieroglyphs as an alphabet, and co-existed with their use for Egyptian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_language

danielheath 2y ago

We find lots of non-alphabetic writing from earlier periods that does survive, though. Surely if they had alphabetic writing, we'd find that when we find writing?

StanislavPetrov 2y ago
Virtually all of the writing we find from earlier periods has been carved in stone. Without finding the rare monument or well-preserved grave stone, a traveler that arrived here 10,000 years in the future would find just as little evidence that we knew how to write.
- bjt 2y ago
  I've heard this argument before, and generally don't buy it. It really comes down to how hard they're looking. We have found many dinosaur bones that are hundreds of millions of years old. We have an Australopithecus skeleton (Lucy) from 3.2 million years ago. We have many examples of writing that would be similarly durable. Even if most things wither or decay or erode or get scavenged or build over, so 99% of it is gone in 10,000 years, there's still plenty that'd get buried and preserved. You give the example of monuments. They're not all that rare though. Every town has a few, usually right at the center, right where excavation would be most likely. I'm thinking of the world war memorials that every little English town seems to have, with the names of all their fallen soldiers. They're not ALL just going to turn to dust, right? There are temples in Egypt where you can still see not just what they carved in the stone thousands of years ago, but even the paint that they put on it. So if we're all gone in 10,000 years and that traveller just buzzes by and doesn't scratch the surface or even look very hard, sure. But if they're excavating at the level that humans are today, it will be hard to miss that we had writing.

AlotOfReading 2y ago

This is more an artifact of how we typically define writing than anything meaningful about the act of communication itself. Graphical symbolic communication is tens of thousands of years older than what the article discusses. Writing as typically defined is a complete system for encoding verbal language using specific, formalized symbols. That's much more sophisticated and largely unnecessary for "most" human activities prior to the invention of large, hierarchical societies.

mmooss 2y ago
> Graphical symbolic communication is tens of thousands of years older than what the article discusses. This article says that the earliest proto-writing is 10,000 years old - 3-d clay counters used for accounting. What was earlier? https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing/ https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing...
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  Proto-writing is still quite far along on the spectrum I'm talking about of contextually defined symbols. Lascaux and chauvet have plenty of examples generally agreed to be partially symbolic, just off the top of my head.
consf 2y ago
And that distinction is crucial
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  Can't say I agree, and I suspect you probably don't agree with the implications of that definition either. As a hypothetical example, do you think any of the following aren't writing: * a script which can represent taxes, histories, and religious texts but not the full range of verbal expression * programming languages * emojis The first of these is an actual scholarly debate about whether Aztec script can be considered "full" writing or merely proto-writing.

gregschlom 2y ago

Counter example: until relatively recently you had large segments of the population who didn't know how to read and write, but were very skilled at whatever their trade was.

reissbaker 2y ago

Agriculture started around 12k years ago. Prior to that, all of humanity lived in hunter-gatherer tribal bands. Why would you need writing, when you could just talk to the person who knew the thing you wanted to learn? Not to mention that prior to the invention of the printing press, writing was very laborious to produce at scale. Even as recently as the 1800s, nearly 90% of the world was illiterate [1]. We live in a hyper-literate society, so it's almost unimaginable, but it's really how the world worked! 1: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/09/reading-writing-global-literacy-rate-changed/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/09/reading-writing-glob...

chalcolithic 2y ago
It's not "why do you need writing?", it's "how do you discover writing?". Once it's discovered the new purposes will appear pronto.
tastyfreeze 2y ago
Enter the hypothetical ice age civilization that was destroyed 13k years ago in a global cataclysm.
- namaria 2y ago
  Enter the hypothetical tea kettle in orbit around the sun
4b11b4 2y ago
[flagged]
Glyptodon 2y ago
I think you have to assume that there's kind of an ambiguous continuum between art and writing. Obviously hunter-gatherer bands likely had reasons to communicate with band members, whether by sounds or visual signals. And obviously they made art, and humans being humans, presumably a lot of the art hat some kind of meaning. I think there are uses for using symbols to communicate well before you need ledgers or anything similar. But I don't know exactly where art turns into writing: Even when the world was mostly illiterate, it seems clear than lots of humans had some level of symbol literacy. And in some places that symbol literacy gets so dense you have Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs. And maybe in others you maybe have something similar but less preserved.

raincole 2y ago

How do we know humans did "counting" when there weren't no written text? Just a few marks on the stone? Does it not count as writing?

mmooss 2y ago
There is a matter of definition. IIRC, if you lookup some cave paintings from ~30,000 years ago, there is/was a debate whether marks near animals were intended to represent quantities.
gus_massa 2y ago
Quipu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu I remember an article about credit in stores in tiny towns in Spain. It was just a rod of wood with some simbol as a signature of the store. Each time you buy something ¿big? they add a mark, and when you get all the ¿10? marks you have to pay with real money. IIRC, the oldest number recorded was some kind of lunar calendar in a bone, wit marks like IIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIII Coincidence? (I don't remember the details, but the article was convincing.)
- griffzhowl 2y ago
  You're probably referring to the Ishango bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishango_bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishango_bone

dyauspitr 2y ago

Why? The alphabet seems like a huge abstraction I don’t think I could come up with on my own. I could see myself coming up with structures, drawing, counting etc. on my own given enough free time.

philipswood 2y ago
A is for apple, B is for bear, ... And then you use the picture of an apple, bear, etc. It's one of those simple solutions that anyone could have, but not often do.
mmooss 2y ago
> The alphabet seems like a huge abstraction I don’t think I could come up with on my own. Given how many humans did come up with it, over all those millennia, I think we all can safely say that!

bentley 2y ago

Even within the last millennium powerful and accomplished civilizations like the Inca survived and excelled without writing. I think a better lesson to take from this is that though humans are inherently communicative and inventive, these characteristics don’t depend upon written communication, and that writing is not an obvious invention even if we can see elements of it in similar inventions like quipu.

philipswood 2y ago
The Inca had Quipu.
- mcswell 2y ago
  The Quipu were definitely not an alphabetic system, and probably not a system for transcribing words.
- mmooss 2y ago
  Quipo are amazing, but mostly accounting records?
- bentley 2y ago
  Yes, I mentioned that.

WalterBright 2y ago

It's clumsy and inconvenient to have writing without paper and pen. There wasn't a whole lot of writing before the printing press. I've sometimes idly wondered if I was transported back in time to the stone age, could I help the tribe by teaching them to read and write? Sadly, nope. If I was transported to Roman times, I'd try to invent paper and a printing press. I bet it would catch on fast.

int_19h 2y ago
There are many reasonably convenient options depending on geography and economy. Palm leaves, birch bark, wax tablets... sure, they are not as convenient as paper, but good enough to write e.g. personal letters, diaries, and even doodles.
gostsamo 2y ago
They had paper though not as durable as the modern one. Papyrus had the same function, but it decays over few decades and things written on it should be rewritten. If you have a few centuries of war and low literacy like in the western parts of the Roman empire, there is noone to renew the pagan texts and they get lost. The eastern empire bothered only with the texts compatible with christianity while the arabs kept those compatible with islam. The printing press might've been useful though.
mmooss 2y ago
> I'd try to invent ... a printing press I sometimes wonder if the development of the printing press relied on technology that hadn't been available previously - like many/most innovations. But what? Paper? There were ink-retaining sheets long before the printing press. A durable mechanism for the roller? They made wagon axles, I assume, that supported much more weight. Durable letters? Even sans metal, I'd guess that carving wood letters would still be worth the effort.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Gutenberg's press was a modified wine press that was based on a screw. The Romans had screw wine presses. The precursors were available to the Romans. He used lead letters. Lead was readily available in Roman times - after all, the water pipes were made of lead (and poisoned the people who used them). The lead letters would quickly wear out, but it was easy to melt and recast them as needed. I've seen a demonstration of it. I think the Chinese did wood block printing, but it didn't get very far.

sapphicsnail 2y ago

Humans are able to pass on an incredible amount of knowledge without the use of writing. There are oral, epic traditions 100s of years old that we only know about because they were eventually written down. People were able to do things like recite the Iliad from memory. I don't know about other ancient languages but the oldest Greek texts of significant length are all metrical poetry. We know and have scientific works that were written in meter. There are probably all sorts of things that were passed don't orally that we can't even imagine.

philipswood 2y ago
A book that gives a nice view of these some of these memory technologies is The Memory Code by Lynne Kelly I can't get myself to link to the marketing blurb inspired summaries, but I love the book. This wikipedia heading gives a less breathless overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Kelly_(science_writer)#Research_on_primary_orality_and_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Kelly_(science_writer)#R...
stevenwoo 2y ago
I think this was on here in prior story but Australian Aboriginal stories about changes in ocean level were shown to reflect conditions about 10000 years ago. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-...
- int_19h 2y ago
  Hadza have oral stories of "ancient ones" who did not know fire or tools.

webdoodle 2y ago

Book burning has been a major issue many times by people trying to control history. The library of Alexandria, one of the oldest known book burnings, may have had some of the evidence your expecting. Then there are the cretins like folks trying to unroll the Dead Sea Scrolls. The modern day equivalent are the internet censors deleting our comments and posts on social media.

tivert 2y ago

> I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived. What's so hard to believe? Everything you can write you can say, and you can show quite a lot that's difficult to describe in writing.

DonHopkins 2y ago
>Everything you can write you can say That's easy to say if you've never written C++ or Perl. One of the unique golden rules of FORTH is that every word definition must have a well defined pronunciation in the documentation, so you can discuss FORTH code over the telephone without confusion. That's because FORTH words have no syntax except space as a delimiter, so can mix arbitrary punctuation with letters in any way, so you have many weird words like @ (fetch) ! (store) +! (plus store) ' (tick) ['] (bracket tick) >R (to r) R> (r from) etc. So you could define an emoticon in FORTH like: : ;-) WINK NOSE SMILE ; // Pronounced "winkie".
- ehecatl42 2y ago
  Writing Perl is easy; reading it a few weeks later is the hard part. CPP I don't know much about… I was a sysadmin, not a programmer <@:) # clown-hat-curly-hair-smiley-face… or, part of a regex

tastyfreeze 2y ago

Written on what? There are very few materials that will last 10s of millennia. Aztec, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and their contemporaries all used some type of paper. Sumerians seem to be alone in their use of clay for writing.

Wytwwww 2y ago
> Sumerians seem to be alone in their use of clay for writing. I think we have more Assyrian and Hittite tablets that have survived? Also they were used as fast Crete and Greece and even in the Danubian civilizations (although they probably didn't develop a full writing system).
AlotOfReading 2y ago
Paper was only one written medium. All of the cultures you've listed constructed stone stelae with writing, like the Rosetta stone. South Asian cultures used palm leaves instead of paper. Maya used fig bark. Europeans and Nahuatl often used animal hides instead of paper. There's a long list.
- tastyfreeze 2y ago
  Ok. Maybe I should have been more generic. Organic thin sheet material... velum, parchment, papyrus. The bulk of writing is done on material that is gone in a few thousand years at most.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    Which still leaves stelae as already mentioned. There's also petroglyphs, ceramics, and paints. The point I'm trying to convey is that writing has never been limited solely to paper or even organic materials.

lkrubner 2y ago

I agree that there must have been earlier writing, likely written on wood. Early systems could have evolved from markings on trees, like we still use on the Appalachian Trail, and other trails. Warnings for bears or tigers, symbols for different tribes on different paths. If you've hiked much then you're aware that even experienced woodsmen can get lost as the season changes and a valley changes, or after a hard storm washes away evidence of a trail. Children, in particular, would have been at risk, but would have almost certainly needed to do work over distances, in particular fetching water, which is something that even today children as young as 5 are asked to do. Notches on trees would have been a likely starting point for a system of symbols to communicate. When I was much younger I used to work as a hike leader for a summer camp in Virginia. We would take a small group of teenagers out for 7 day hikes, during which we could cover something between 70 to 90 miles (112 to 145 kilometers). At one time I knew that stretch of trail so well I thought I could walk it blindfolded. And yet, I only knew it in the summer. One year I went in the fall and I was astonished how different it was. I was helped by the markings on the trees. (This was before cell phones and GPS.)

dachris 2y ago
Exactly - there's probably a fluent transition between symbols and painting and writing and then alphabetic writing. Territorial animals that we are, I'd add "here starts the territory of the Saber-Toothed Tiger Clan" signs to path markings as likely candidates for earliest symbolic communication. Nice to see that the earliest examples of writing are still somewhat recognizable (as opposed to modern alphabets) - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing - a hand, a foot, a goat or sheep. Fun thing is, with modern technology we have regressed (advanced?) to a massive use of pictograms - a modern smartphone wielding human, in addition to the alphabet, knows at least a few hundreds or even thousands of pictograms ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  I'm so old that we didn't even have Emojis, not even letters yet, and we had to communicate with punctuation alone! ;)

nunez 2y ago

It's easy to believe when you learn that there are still parts of the world that struggle with literacy.

momoschili 2y ago

the distinction between writing and drawing seems to be a bit gray to be honest

asdff 2y ago

Literacy is a modern phenomenon.

foogazi 2y ago

> I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. Egyptian Pyramids - 3,800 BCE They were writing just not with an alphabet

otherme123 2y ago
Exactly. It seems that alphabet development is closely related to the regions more focused on international trading (the region we know as Phoenicia) rather than war and conquest of the neighbours. Maybe a system that represent sounds was useful to write words from sounds in multiple languages that were never heard before, unlike pictograms, hieroglyphs or cuneiform, that had to be adapted to each language.
- int_19h 2y ago
  But also, Phoenicians did not develop the alphabet. The basic notion of encoding sounds with glyphs is a Egyptian invention, and the earliest evidence for true abjads (from which Phoenician script and other Semitic writing systems all derive) is also from that same area. Note that war and conquest of neighbors means managing (in particular, taxing) a large foreign-speaking population, whereby abjads and alphabets also come in handy. Not to mention the monuments - if you are a king erecting, say, a monumental stele to boast about having vanquished a mighty foreign ruler, it might behoove you to spell his name in a way that is sufficiently recognizable for people to appreciate the achievement.
namaria 2y ago
You're off by over a thousand years there

mmooss 2y ago

Many cultures never invent writing. From well-known 1969 research on 186 pre-industrial societies: [0] * 39.2%: No writing * 37.1%: Pictures only * 23.7%: Writing Also of interest (but also a bit dated): "... the making and reading of two dimensional maps is almost universal among mankind whereas the reading and writing of linear scripts is a special accomplishment associated with a high level of social and technical sophistication." [1] > I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived. It's an interesting question, but do I think that? That's the thing about science - we need evidence. Otherwise, what we think turns out to be especially unreliable. [0] George P. Murdock, D.R. White. Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). Ethnology (1969) [1] Edmund Leach. Culture and Communication. Cambridge U. Press (1976)

mistercheph 2y ago
[flagged]
- mmooss 2y ago
  There's an old quote among lawyers: If you have the facts on your side, hammer on the facts. If you have the law, hammer on the law. If you have neither, hammer on the table. If I understand you correctly: You have no claim of your own or argument for it, so you are using what you do know, insults.
  - mistercheph 2y ago
    The claims you are making (unsupported by evidence) are the only thing that's insulting, And with fitting aphorisms exchanged, we can part ways Mr. 40%-of-human-societies-don't-write-according-to-an-unreproduced-survey-performed-in-1969-that-is-not-a-survey-of-human-societies-but-our-own-knowledge-of-human-societies-and-is-confused-about-cultural-boundaries-and-how-to-count-one-society-or-many.
cogman10 2y ago
In fact, there are used languages today that are not written! I have family that just returned from a 2 year religious mission in pohnpei. The native language there is just barely starting to be written. One of the challenges to learning it is because of it's mostly unwritten nature, the language evolves rapidly. That fast evolution is part of what makes turning the language into a written language difficult.

riffraff 2y ago

Why not? People lived ok without being able to read and write until a couple generations ago. Passing knowledge orally and by example is easy.

mcswell 2y ago
People still survive that way.

nurettin 2y ago

I find it totally believable. There weren't that many humans living in comfort to create institutions and innovate.

globular-toast 2y ago

I take it you've never interacted with people who build houses, make rope or administer medicine then? They don't read, even today. They learn their trade by watching others. We are quite exceptional in that reading is usually the most efficient way to learn stuff, but it's not like that in other areas. If you needed to change a spark plug or plumb in a washing machine would you be reaching for the books or YouTube?

Hilift 2y ago

Greek society switched alphabets between 750 and 950 BC, and adopted a number system. There were writing collapses. There is still a lot of history to uncover from the end of the Bronze Age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

watwut 2y ago

Why would it be so hard to believe that people "would build houses, painting pictures, making rope" without writing? Illiteracy was high 2-3 hundred years ago, in Russia even longer. And all those illiterate villages and areas would build houses, draw, craft ropes and clothing. You need writing for organizing large groups of people and such. You dont need it for survival necessities.

tim333 2y ago

It makes you think how rapidly things are changing with the petabytes we are leaving these days.

lou1306 2y ago

Clearly, almost every time we find an ancient artifact, it is fair to assume that the technology it displays was common and established by the time the artifact was created. However, (and adding to the other replies here which also have a point) in Plato's Phaidros Socrates places the invention of writing in Egypt [1], not in some mind-blowingly past aeon, and the undertone of the tale is that civilization can (and reach) pretty interesting levels of sophistication before writing becomes a necessity. [1] https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439 https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439

duckerude 2y ago
Agreed that societies can get sophisticated without writing, but Egypt was already considered mind-blowingly old in Plato's time. The start of the Timaeus features an eight thousand year old Egyptian city with an eight thousand year long memory. It also says that Athens is even older, but that it's periodically destroyed by natural disasters, losing its history and technology. Writing is mentioned as one of the things lost: > Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. Egyptian hieroglyphics were already thousands of years old at the time! I think the myth in the Phaidros was meant to be understood as taking place in a mind-blowingly past aeon.

heresie-dabord 2y ago

Language is a powerful human talent. It's reasonable to assume that there have been many variants of writing systems throughout human evolution. However, such systems would need to be widely adopted and durably preserved to survive millennia and eventually be rediscovered. Which is how we happen to know the precious little that we do know about past writing systems.

consf 2y ago
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griffzhowl 2y ago
> It's reasonable to assume that there have been many variants of writing systems throughout human evolution. I don't find it that reasonable an assumption. As far as I know, there is no hunter-gatherer society that has developed writing, except societies who have had contact with a sedentary agricultural civilisation with writing. Given that all human societies for which there's evidence were hunter-gatherers until about 10k years ago, to me it seems more reasonable to conclude they had no writing. Now, you might say that agriculture and civilisation were around earlier, but we dhaven't found the evidence. But we do have evidence of plenty of human groups at those earlier times, and they're all hunter-gatherers.

consf 2y ago

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PittleyDunkin 2y ago

> I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. Why?

canjobear 2y ago

Consider the many cultures that Europeans discovered in the Americas. Of them, only one had a real writing system (the Maya). The Aztecs wrote down history in a sort of comic book form, and the Inca did accounting with qhipu, but only the Maya had a conventional system of written forms that correspond systematically with verbal language. You can communicate and remember a lot orally. The Polynesian navigators encoded information about how to navigate from island to island in oral poems passed down generation to generation. A lot of these traditions seem to vanish once a culture gets writing, leaving it unclear how they used to pass on so much information before.

contingencies 2y ago

The age of sailing is additionally potentially under-specified because the majority of materials used were either wood or animal skin. I have a few books on the subject which are very good, chiefly The Sea-craft of Prehistory by Paul Johnstone. Also, sailing without counting doesn't get you very far, because for instance you may run out of food or water. While early sailing was predominantly coastal, that doesn't mean an easy pit-stop whenever you get hungry or thirsty (due to rocky coastlines, dangerous currents and waves, and prevailing winds). Probably a lot of early boats were destroyed coming ashore.

EasyMark 2y ago

Honest question, why do you think any of that wouldn’t be possible without writing?

vjerancrnjak 2y ago

They also built massive structures without algebra.

w0de0 2y ago

You perhaps overestimate the utility of writing outside urban civilization - and underestimate the immense difficulty of its invention. Not only is symbolic thought required, but so too a cultural substrate which can find use for, agree upon, and preserve written works. One man may invent the wheel; only a people can invent writing.