4 ms·
We may never truly know when writing was invented. There's a stele that was discovered in 1986 [1] in Veracruz. You could be forgiven if you think that writin
by retrac 5mo ago
We may never truly know when writing was invented.
There's a stele that was discovered in 1986 [1] in Veracruz. You could be forgiven if you think that writing is Maya. But it is not. It some other language. A couple other small fragments like it have been found, but the stele is basically an hapax. It is the only example.
And from the one example, we can see that it a system overflowingly glorious in its maturity and complexity. The scribes belonged to a culture that had been writing for a very long time. That is the refinement of millennia.
There are dates carved on La Mojorra 1; if they are in the same Long Count calendar the Maya used, then the stele appears to be talking about something that happened in the 140s and 150s AD.
The obvious relationship between the Mesoamerican writing systems might be somewhat analogous to the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, or Chinese and Japanese writing. One was adapted to write the other. Or they both evolved out of a common ancestral system. How far back might that have been?
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_Schematics.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...
- Baeocystin 5mo agoThat is a fantastic example of mesoamerican script. I would have naively assumed it was Maya had you not said otherwise otherwise, too. Thanks for posting it.
- riffraff 5mo agoI don't get it, why do you deduce this is "the refinement of millennia"? How can you tell that a script is "refined", especially from a single example?
- hattmall 5mo agoMainly from the amount and complexity of symbols. That gives rise to the context which they must include. We can tell from the other more complete examples we have seen that writing systems which are complex enough to reliably convey such a wide range of context generally require being refined over millennia. It's not a 100% given, but it's a very reasonable assertion.
- adrian_b 5mo agoNumerous and complex symbols are characteristic for the earliest scripts. The refined scripts typically use fewer and simpler symbols. The only exceptions to this tendency towards standardization and simplification are in the case of some script variants whose main purpose is to be decorative, not practical, e.g. which are intended for inscriptions on monuments.
- 4gotunameagain 5mo agoFor what it's worth, wikipedia says that it is Isthmian script, and has not been conclusively determined whether Isthmian script is a true writing system that represents a spoken language, or is a system of proto-writing
- 0x1ceb00da 5mo agoI don't think it's very refined or complex. It's on the same level as heiroglyphics in that it's pictorial. The letters represent real stuff (face, birds, eyes, animals, etc). Maybe my brain is doing pattern matching but I see a lot of real things in this picture. You need a more advanced language to represent abstract concepts, which is very difficult to do in such a script. For example, the sentence "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors" is pretty much impossible to represent in a script like egyptian heiroglyphics or this one.
- vkazanov 5mo agoI am sorry but this like saying that "chinese cannot represent abstract notions" because "picture" . In middle egyptian (the language you probably assume) "pictures" are just syllables. They are phonetic, not semantic, in the same way letter of modern language correspond to sounds, not meanings. Egyptians had no problem expressinyg conplex concepts and they also had cursive writing, which is much easier to write.
- 0x1ceb00da 5mo agoAs a language matures, it moves away from concrete things towards abstract things. Eg cave paintings -> pictorial scripts -> modern languages which are very detached from pictorial/phonetic meaning (even modern chinese). These days we have programming languages which do not have any phonetic or pictorial representation. And this trend will keep going on. I think I still stand by my point that this script isn't as refined as a modern language. Just like the great pyramids aren't as refined as burj khalifa.
- sampullman 5mo agoTo make this claim, wouldn't you need to understand the meaning of the script? It's probably not about monads, but you don't know for sure.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
- netcan 5mo agoGreat example. But... IDK if this (or other clearly advanced writing systems) demonstrate "refinement of millennia." I think we have a "history is accelerating" bias. Changes in the deep past happened slowly, and the pace of change increases over time. That may be true from a very broad POV... but I don't think it's true on shorter timescales. There are no hard limitations on going from a newly invented writing system to a professional scribal culture in a single generation. I don't think watershed "revolutions" are something new. Egyptian writing, and Early bronze age egyptian culture more broadly gets very advanced, very quickly. We don't really know what elements have deep histories... but it's hard to explain ancient egypt without allowing for some impressive leaps. Hence aliens. Also... "common ancestor" can be a lot of things. It could be like the gradual species-like philogenetics of cyrillic, latin, hebrew, arabic and all other alphabets' development from proto-sinaitic and canaanite/punic. The same script gradually evolving in different scriptural islands. Otoh... "ancestry" can be pure inspiration. The idea of writing, its uses and the certainty that widespread literacy is possible can be the "dna." The confusing part is that culture does, often, evolve very gradually like species and clades over time. These sometimes leave evidence of the whole process. Sudden explosions can't be deduced from the absence of evidence.
- card_zero 5mo agoMythology is involved in inhibiting invention. I mean, after inventing invention, the concept of it, you have a certain motivation, which is lacking in a culture that tells stories about how its greatest inventions were stolen from the gods by fantasy heroes. We still indulge in those stories slightly, by mythologizing inventors. But at least we don't have a cyclical concept of time where everything's predestined by the fates, and we all have proper roles and places, and there's no progress except round and round. That's a tranquil outlook, but tends to be self-fulfilling.
- netcan 5mo agoI agree. It's just hard to say anything with certainty (or even clarity) about these "mentality" components. A culture's mythology. It's "concept of concepts." It's so vague and abstract that we can't even name it legibly.
- torben-friis 5mo ago>We may never truly know when writing was invented We won't, by definition there's no written record pre writing. It sucks how many instances in the historical record are like "welp, they had settlements that point to thousands of people, they made pots and they buried their deceased" that's kinda all we know about places that stood for millenia.
- wongarsu 5mo agoIn principle there could be images about the invention of writing. The intersection of "those images existed", "they have been preserved", "we find them" and "we interpret them correctly" is however tiny Even written records of oral history of the invention of writing would work The bigger issue might be that "the invention of writing" is a rather boring and gradual event. Some administrator starts tracking the state of their grain stores with some symbols, then they start tracking other things and need symbols to differentiate, and over time more and more meaning is encoded in those symbols, until we call it writing