6 ms·

"...Created the World’s First Writing System" that we know of. They used burned clay, which lasts forever. I am sure there have been writing systems before, the

• Koshkin 2y ago
  Yes, there must have been a long pre-history of writing proper, like, leaving marks on trees or soil as a guide, a warning, etc. But it takes a civilization to start writing on a scale comparable to that of the Sumerians, and such a civilization cannot be lost to time so completely as to leave behind some evidence if its writing - especially given that they would likely use different media, including clay and stone.
  • hosh 2y ago
    It depends on the material. Incas uses knots for record keeping. Those are not as durable as burned clay. In our current global civilization with advanced computing tech, magnetic tapes, cdroms, and hard drives won't last very long. Maybe SSDs have greater durability, but they will also require computing tech to dicipher. I do not think the existence of surviving writing materials is a strong argument for evidence of civilization, and speaks more to the limitations of the technology.
  • adastra22 2y ago
    Leaving marks on trees and such is not writing. It is not the transcription of spoken language. We have examples of this kind of symbol-placement on ancient cave art stretching far back into the ice age. It is not considered writing.
    • shakna 2y ago
      Written language is rarely just a transcription. It usually has a number of distinct differences in both lexicon and syntax. There are languages that are only written. Art is not writing, true. Distinct symbols and syntax are required for writing. But it need not be transcription of anything spoken.
    • Koshkin 2y ago
      Well, hieroglyphs are not exactly a “transcription”, either…
      • adastra22 2y ago
        They are in the same way that Chinese is.
        • Koshkin 2y ago
          Yes - not exactly a transcription.
          • adastra22 2y ago
            Written chinese is a direct transcription of the spoken language. It is not (entirely) phonetic, but it is still a 1:1 transcription.
            • Koshkin 2y ago
              Well, now imagine a mark on a boulder that means ‘danger’ (left there because, say, a tiger lives nearby). Same thing. (And it would not be unreasonable to suspect that that’s how writing began.)
              • adastra22 2y ago
                Which is not a transcription of language. Yes writing systems evolved from earlier symbols used to indicate general concepts without a linguistic context. And those symbols go far back into the ice age -- we see such symbols on the walls of cave paintings in Europe, for example. In the case of Sumer, we certainly know that the writing system derived from accounting symbols for livestock and grain and such. But going from simple context-free symbols to transcribing spoken language or thought with grammar and structure is a conceptual leap worth tracking.
• adrian_b 2y ago
  This does not seem very likely, because earlier than this people did not really need a writing system. More precisely, they had no reason to believe that a writing system would be useful, so there was no pressure to invent one. In Mesopotamia we can see the evolution over many hundreds of years and even a few millennia from an accounting system that used a few symbols for the things that were recorded, to a full fledged writing system that was able to record any spoken sentence. Before the societies of Mesopotamia and Egypt, which required a complex management of the available resources, there was no need for accounting with written records for great quantities of varied goods. It is likely that for tens of thousands of years people have been able to make drawings that recorded useful things, like maps, and they probably have used some sets of symbols for various important things, like kinds of humans, kinds of animals, kinds of plants and so on. Nevertheless, it is very unlikely that any such set of symbols used in the distant past has ever been able to record any complete sentence spoken in their language, with all the grammatical markers that do not have a concrete meaning.
  • mistercheph 2y ago
    How do you know so much about the motivations of people that have been dead for tens of thousands of years? Maybe you can speak to the dead?
    • adrian_b 2y ago
      The people from fifty thousand years ago do not differ in any essential way from the people of today, except in the knowledge and in the set of skills that they were taught. Most human societies that have not seen a writing system at other people have never invented any writing system. All those that are likely to have invented writing independently (though for some of them it is not certain that they have not seen the writing used by others) have invented writing systems in contexts similar to those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, i.e. in a settled agricultural society where cooperation was required at a large scale and management and accounting of resources was necessary.
      • Amezarak 2y ago
• shrubble 2y ago
  I am reminded of the Polynesians creating a sort of "map" using the stick chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Islands_stick_chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Islands_stick_chart
• hosh 2y ago
  Agreed. Examples include the Inca civilization using knots to record complex information and accounts. Those won't last as long as burned clay.
• adastra22 2y ago
  We can follow the development of the Sumerian writing system, so we know it didn't derive from an older source. While nobody can prove there wasn't some civilization that had writing prior to Sumer (can't prove a negative), it stretches the imagination to think that a civilization ONLY ever wrote on perishable media and not on, say, pottery or building walls. Then died out without transmitting their invention to successor civilizations, all of which we can account for their development of writing. Also, what perishable media? The invention of papyrus was contemporary with Sumer's clay tablets.