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.
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-glob...
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.
There is reasonably strong evidence that writing actually evolved out of accounting. These early agricultural city-states needed to track the seasonal collection of harvests from the farmers, and continual distribution of food back to everyone.
What started as a ad-hoc system of tellies, eventually evolved into a fully-fledged writing system. And once the accountants had a functioning writing system, it would have been obviously useful, and moved into other parts of society. Tax records, laws, contracts, long-distance messages, recording history.
Art was probably one of the last places in society actually take advantage of this new writing technology.
Hunter-gatherer societies didn't develop writing because they didn't need accountants.
Or... we've found the most evidence of writing connected to an activity that would have naturally made the most effort to ensure it's preservation.
Thing is, we have plenty of evidence of writing connected to other activities from later periods.
As for the effort, the most would be expanded on preserving monumental projects glorifying the rulers etc. But, again, in the historical record, this shows up later than accounting records.
> Even when the world was mostly illiterate, it seems clear than lots of humans had some level of symbol literacy.
Interesting - where is that from?
Practically all painting or drawing includes some sort of symbolism. Sometimes it’s so obvious that we don’t recognise it as symbolism (picture of cow = cow), but other things aren’t (spiral = ?).
The Wikipedia article on Rock Art contains a lot of discussion on the meaning of ancient drawings, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_art
More recently, medieval painting has a lot of symbolism modern audiences can no longer “read”.
I read about an American professor that was visiting the various cathedrals in France and started noticing that the stained glass windows were interweaving the parable of the good samaritan with the story of the garden of eden in a fairly consistent manner. He didn't understand why they were doing that until he found records of medieval sermons explaining why they were combining these two stories. It was a symbolic message that would have made sense to medieval peoples, but had been lost over the intervening centuries.
I think it's a trivial observation. For example, it's clear illiterate people in Europe still knew what a cross meant when on a building, there is no doubt about that. There are many more religious symbols that were also well known. Flags and official seals similarly had well known meanings in their own areas, as did various military symbols.
OK, but symbol literacy, at least in this sense, is a long way from literacy in a language having the grammar of the spoken language of these people (or a grammar equally as expressive, as we see, for example, in the case of scholars who read and wrote in Latin while conversing in the vernacular of their time and place.)
> prior to the invention of the printing press, writing was very laborious to produce at scale.
Imagine having to engrave anything you write in clay, stone, wood, etc. One reason runic alphabets are shaped that way is because it's easier to carve in straight lines (iirc).
How many comments would there be on a HN page if that was required?
I agree runes like Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Irish were straight lines for the most part since they were easy to make. Irish Ogrham runes were just basic lines literally just lines. Norse Futhark was more complex but still all angles.
Ancient Sumerians in modern Iraq area used cuneiform. The cut tip of a reed was used to make marks in in wet clay which was quite a rapid way to write. There are even old practice tablets with scribblings of children in school learning to write.
The reason they still exist is fire. A wood building burned at some point and the fire caused the clay tablets to harden like in a kiln preserving them.
In modern Inda/Pakistan region Harappan culture also used clay Indus script but it was more elaborate and not as "wordy". It seems mainly clay tags to attach to goods to identify them.
The earliest surviving evidence of writing was not baked in antiquity, just dried clay. Some have been baked in the 19th century for preservation. Some of the clay tablets have indeed survived presumably due to fires that burned the building in which they were stored - there is even some evidence of unsent letters found in ruins with signs of burning.
But the reason we have very ancient evidence of writing is categorically not because they were baked in ancient times.
Those are not the only options, though. Papyrus is very ancient tech, as are palm leaves and similar. Parchment is more recent, but still predates the runic alphabets by many centuries. Some trees have bark soft enough to write on a sharp stylus - birch was notably used for that purpose. Then you have wax tablets etc.
The problem is that many of these options are expensive in a pre-industrial society. In places where the writing material was cheap and readily available, and where writing was socially beneficial, you see much more "mundane" writing show up - e.g. in the Novgorod merchant republic, birch bark was apparently cheap enough for kids to doodle on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim).
I don’t believe that agriculture only started then. It’s just the earliest evidence we have. Everything always gets pushed earlier
Yeah, you can do a lot of agriculture just by planting some plants and comming back later which would have looked basically the same as hunter gathering to archeologists. Similar stuff is done to this day for cannabis https://www.vice.com/en/article/meet-the-gangster-free-weed-...
It doesn't actually look the same to archaeologists. One of the things we'll do is look for subtle changes in seed morphology as a sign of domestication. There are also methods of seeing what types of plants are growing in a region, which changes when humans begin selectively cultivating certain plants. We can also get a rough estimate of how many people were in an area and in what seasons.
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.
Majority of this world is still not literate, just be happy to be there
That is plainly incorrect - even in the least literate areas of the world, which are mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa at this point, literacy rates are over 50%. Taken in aggregate, only 1 in 8 people worldwide is illiterate.
"nearly 90% of the world was illiterate" I've never believed statistics like this. Humans have a remarkable ability to grasp symbols.
Try to learn a script you don't know without any kind of instruction whatsoever. Maybe you'd have some chance with the Latin alphabet, but most writing systems are more complex than it, some far more complex. I would bet no one could learn Chinese writing for example without instruction, even if they knew spoken Mandarin to perfection.
Enter the hypothetical ice age civilization that was destroyed 13k years ago in a global cataclysm.
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
> 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)
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.
This reminded me of how cyrillic was invented.
The Byzantines created the cyrillic alphabet in the 9th century so that they could write a bible for Slavic countries.
Blew my mind that they didn’t have an alphabet before that.
How is that different from the thousands of different languages that did not have alphabet until recently but then got one created by linguists or missionaries (or often someone who is a little bit of both[1])?
Cyril and Methodius (who created the Glagolithic Alphabet, not the Cyrillic alphabet) weren't even the first Chritian missionaries who created a new alphabet for a language that didn't have on in order to spread Christianity. I believe the first one was Armenian (in the early 5th century).
It similarly blows my mind how far back many languages go with written accounts. My own native language wasn't written down until the 16th century, so its earlier forms are basically unattested. And the 16th writing is just a few sentences in official records and translations of certain Christian prayers. It took until the late 17th century to have a translated Bible, and for the first non-religious texts to appear. Meanwhile some other languages spoken next door had centuries old literature by then.
That's what's mind-blowing to me about pohnpei. It's an island with an airport and internet. English is the official language but according to my relative the native language is what everyone uses day to day. It has about 40k residents. Literacy is 98%.
Yet with all that, the spoken language remains unwritten. That's just wild to me.
According to Wikipedia, the two most spoken indigenous languages on Pohnpei are written with the Latin alphabet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pohnpeian_language
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuukese_language
See the "phonology" and "orthography" sections of the respective articles. It seems like both have a standard orthography.
Very interesting.
Perhaps my family member confused the fact that the religion had no training materials for the language with there being no written version of the language. (I'm admittedly ignorant about this, I just had a conversation with them on Saturday)
I wonder if the language isn't as commonly written as it is spoken?
To be more precise, Glagolitic was the originally created script, with wholly original letter shapes.
Cyrillic was a later iteration by the Slavs themselves - Bulgarians, to be precise - where those new shapes were mostly replaced with Greek letters (except where there was no direct equivalent), presumably because those guys were translating a lot of Greek books, and having similar alphabets for both Greek and Church Slavonic made things easier.
> The Byzantines created the cyrillic alphabet in the 9th century so that they could write a bible for Slavic countries.
A bit similarly: English uses the Latin alphabet mainly because, as I recall, after the fall of Rome the Christian church was doing much of the writing in (England? Wales? British Isles?), and they adapted the Latin alphabet to the local languages.
For a while being literate in Western Europe was the equivalent of being able to write/read Latin. Also almost all the major languages in (somewhat) literate societies in Western Europe were were either dialects of Latin or in much closer contact with Latin countries than the Greek world (e.g. Ireland or Germany, I don't think we have much if any surviving non-Latin texts from Britain until quite late).
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.)
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 - 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)_/¯
> there's probably a fluent transition between symbols and painting and writing and then alphabetic writing
I'm with you until we get to alphabetic writing, which has (to our knowledge) only been invented once. To get from other writing systems to an alphabet requires a few conceptual leaps which are much more challenging and, I would suggest, not fluent.
If it were a smooth path, we ought to have seen alphabetic scripts arise independently multiple times (as we have other forms of writing).
Not sure, but I think Hangul counts as a second invention of alphabetic writing.
If you count syllabic writing systems (which are not technically alphabetic, but are more so than Chinese, or Mayan or Egyptian hieroglyphics), there are more: Japanese hiragana and katakana, Cherokee syllabics, Pahawh Hmong, Vai (West Africa), and Linear B (and presumably Linear A).
There's also Thaana, the script used for Maldivian, which uses some Arabic script symbols, as well as Indic digits. So while it's semi-alphabetic (partly abugida), and it's derived from existing writing systems, it uses the borrowed symbols in unique ways.
There are other syllabic writing systems as well, like Inuktitut and Cree, but those were created by missionaries familiar with other writing systems.
> Not sure, but I think Hangul counts as a second invention of alphabetic writing.
It is my understanding that Hangul is believed to have been influenced by other alphabetic writing (e.g. Phagspa) which themselves descended from the original alphabet. Though it was a distinct creation, the core alphabetic idea was not independently discovered.
> If you count syllabic writing systems (which are not technically alphabetic, but are more so than Chinese, or Mayan or Egyptian hieroglyphics), there are more: Japanese hiragana and katakana, Cherokee syllabics, Pahawh Hmong, Vai (West Africa), and Linear B (and presumably Linear A).
Syllabic writing systems are significantly less powerful than the alphabet (hence why they have generally been superceded by alphabetic ones).
They have been invented multiple times, so you can argue the smooth slope goes up to syllabic writing, sure. But only once has that led to an alphabet.
> There's also Thaana
I hadn't heard of this, but Wikipedia seems to suggest it's descended from Phoenician like everything else (although it has made the step from abjad -> alphabet).
Alphabets may only have been invented once, but writing systems that have a (roughly, it's never perfect) 1:1 correspondence with the sounds of the language have been invented several times independently, e.g. in syllabaries (Japanese Kana are derived from Kanji) and abugidas. I would suggest that that conceptual leap is a much bigger one than the one of treating consonants and vowels as independent.
Syllabaries have been invented multiple times independently and an alphabet only once, which to me would suggest the alphabetic step is the harder one to make.
Why would you suggest the opposite? I'm a complete layperson in this area, so I understand my view might be quite limited.
The alternative possibility is that alphabets lend themselves much more naturally to adaptation for other languages, and so, once invented, they spread extremely fast - faster than it would take for another one to appear naturally.
Yes, that's a nice point - this adds censoring to our "data" on other writing systems. My intuition is that even if you accounted for exposure to an existing alphabet, the time-to-develop alphabet would still be much longer than for syllabaries or other writing systems, but that's a guess.
I'm so old that we didn't even have Emojis, not even letters yet, and we had to communicate with punctuation alone! ;)
You had punctuation? We had to to with empty spaces and silence! I once read an entire poem just using silence!
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.
> 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...
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.
And that distinction is crucial
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.
Programming languages are precise and unambiguous, designed for machines rather than humans to interpret, while emojis are symbolic and often rely on context for meaning, complementing rather than replacing text
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.
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)#R...
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-...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The Inca had Quipu.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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
> 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.
>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".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
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
It's easy to believe when you learn that there are still parts of the world that struggle with literacy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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?
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
You're probably referring to the Ishango bone
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.
The timeline of human innovation isn't linear; it’s likely there were many steps we just haven’t uncovered
I find it totally believable. There weren't that many humans living in comfort to create institutions and innovate.
It makes you think how rapidly things are changing with the petabytes we are leaving these days.
Honest question, why do you think any of that wouldn’t be possible without writing?
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?
> 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.)
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
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.
the distinction between writing and drawing seems to be a bit gray to be honest
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.
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.
It would be dangerous to transport you back to Roman times, because you might teach them to write C++ and compile it into cellular automata, and then program Empire with a 30 million soldier human computer, like the "human abacus" scene in "Three Body Problem"!
Of course you're right!
After much thinking about it, providing a printing press would be the most effective invention to bootstrap a modern society. And, well, that's exactly what happened after Gutenberg invented it. The greatest inventions in history are:
1. writing
2. phonetic alphabet
3. paper
4. printing
5. networks
And the pattern is obvious!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Alphabetic writing really is incredible.
Despite the fact that I personally prefer syllabaries. I can't discount the fact that alphabets have done an incredible job of being adopted by other languages that didn't previously have any sort of writing system. Alphabets are really flexible like that.
The latin alphabet alone is used in all sorts of languages from English to Tukish, Indonesian and Swahili. Having this many diverse languages follow a single writing system is only really possible with alphabets. You couldn't do this with Chinese characters or Korean hangul, for example.
Curious: why do you prefer syllabaries? I think about Chinese writing systems, which additionally don't have clear word boundaries. Now you can argue that this is an independent issue (which is true) but why does this complication seemingly show up in such writing systems?
Anyway, alphabets have been profoundly successful. You bring up Turkish. It's a good example. I'm sure most here know that prior to 1929 or so Turkish used the Arabic writing system. This is also an alphabet but a more complicated one (eg vowels aren't typically written) and didn't necessarily fit the Turkish language.
So they designed a Latin writing system that is entirely phonetic it was was profoundly successful at increasing literacy rates. A completely illiterate person could be taught to read and write Turksih in a matter of months.
I compare this to Taiwan that has high school competitions to see who can find a word the fastest in a dictionary because knowledge is required of the roots and symbols. There are thousands of characters to learn in Chinese languages. As a foreigner, this will often take a decade or more. I've seen accounts of people who have spent a decade learning Chinese that still struggle to read books intended for 12 year olds.
Literacy is so transformative to one's life that I'm so on board with anything that makes that easier.
The Arabic writing system is an abjad, not an alphabet. The two kinds of system are closely related (the Phoenician script was the origin of both the Greek alphabet and the various Semitic abjads and was itself an abjad) but are not the same thing. Abjads are well-suited to Semitic languages where the vowels are less important for morphological reasons, but in Indo-European languages (like Greek) and Turkic languages (like Turkish) vowels are important in writing for comprehension. It's no surprise that switching to an alphabet aided literacy in Turkey.
Abjads are no more or less complicated than alphabets though. They're just a bad fit for Turkish.
It really depends on the language, but the main reason why syllabaries can be simpler in terms of mental load is because syllables (or moras, or something similar) is how humans naturally break down words in most languages. Consider that even in languages like English with a well-established alphabetic orthography, words are still routinely spelled out syllable by syllable.
However, phonotactics place some practical limits on that. If your language only has (C)V syllables with a fairly limited phonemic inventory - e.g. Japanese - a syllabary is small enough, and even if letter shapes for related syllables aren't consistent, is easy enough to learn. OTOH if you routinely have, say, 3-consonant clusters (as in e.g. the word SCRipt), you quickly get combinatorial explosion.
To some extent this can be mitigated by alphasyllabaries like Hangul, where syllables are clearly marked in writing but still composed of some more fundamental units. Still, you can only cram so many tiny elements into a single glyph that is still distinct. Hangul actually used to have standard syllable blocks for all combinations of three consonants in the onset, and those are already very hard to read.
Hangul is a 'syllabic alphabet'- it is a combination of alphabetic and syllabic and as such probably the clearest/simplest writing system invented.
Although it has some weirdnesses of its own, such as having jamo that change their sound based on context (e.g., ᄋ is silent if it’s an initial consonant but has the sound ng at the end of a syllable). Nearly every consonant has a different sound between initial and final position, although many of these are inaudible to English ears. On the other hand, having been a consciously designed writing system, it does have a rationality that most traditional writing systems lack, such as the fact that all vowels are based on either ㅡ or ㅣ with additional strokes added as appropriate to modify the base vowel (the fact that a double stroke, e.g., ㅑ or ㅛ represents the single stroke vowel with a y- sound prefixed seems just brilliant to me).
Hangul made more sense the way it was originally designed - for example, ᄋ [∅] was distinct from ㆁ [ng]. It was also much more phonetic originally, but subsequent reforms have turned it into more of a morphophonemic orthography, while at the same time not updating it wrt evolution of the language other than dropping obsolete jamo (which is why vowels can't be organized quite so neatly as they used to be).
Consonants changing their sound based on position is not such an abnormality — that's just basic phonology. This phenomenon (allophony [1]) is found in virtually every language, but it remains a bit obscure to laymen, since it is mostly undetectable to the language's own speaker.
For instance, the phoneme /t/ is always rendered by the English letter /t/, but that phoneme can be rendered in so many different ways. In an initial position it would be rendered as an aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive [tʰ], equivalent to the Korean Jamo ㅌ in initial or intervocalic positions. An English /t/ in other positions is generally not aspirated, but besides that the rendition is highly dependent on the speaker's accent. MRP ("BBC English") speakers render a "final" /t/ (i.e. after a vowel or consonant, but not before another vowel) as as [ʔt] ([t] sound preceded by a glottal stopped) or even just as a pure glottal stop [ʔ]. In intervocalic position RP speakers would keep /t/ as a simple [t] sound, but most Americans would change this sound into a voiced alveolar flap [ɾ]. Cockney speakers famously change an intervocalic /t/ into a glottal stop (so you'd get something that sounds like "woh-ah" for "water") and I didn't even get into how /t/ behaves when it follows other consonants such as the elided /t/ in "listen" or the way some American speakers pronounce "winter".
In all honesty, this is probably just as messy as what happens in Korean, it's just that the Korean allophones are more foreign to us. Besides ᄋ, all the variations are regular allophones. As far as I understand ᄋ was indeed just reused for two different purposes (there is no /ŋ/ phoneme that transforms to an empty sound in initial position).
I'd say that one thing that still makes Hangul hard, is that a lot of consonant clusters sounds sound the same when they come in final position. It makes pronunciation regular, but it's a bit hard to know how to transcribe many words. The vowels ㅐ and ㅔ are also pronounced the same in most (perhaps all?) modern Korean dialects, but that's a small irregularity compared to the redundancies of many other alphabetic writing systems.
In short, Hangul is much more regular than most alphabets. I wouldn't say it is the most regular though — it's hard to beat new writing systems designed by professional linguists for small language that didn't have an alphabet before. Hangul is still an relatively older system that had to go through writing reforms, but still retrains some spelling complexities. And if you compare Korean to Polynesian languages like Hawaiian, with their extremely simple phonology and phonotactics (they have very few vowels and consonants and generally don't allow consonant clusters and final consonants at all) - then the writing system of these languages is much simpler — and almost all of them use the Latin alphabet with a highly regular orthography.
I think there is a more impressive trait of Hangul, that is highly underappreciated. It's an alphabetic writing system that blends very well with traditional Chinese characters. Chinese characters are all monosyllabic (i.e. they represent a single syllable) and while that property is not maintained in Japanese (due to its vastly different phonology), it has been maintained in Korean and Vietnamese. Hangul lets you write each syllable with a single graphic block (even if that block contains multiple "Jamo" letters). All other alphabet systems that have been developed in languages that used Chinese characters (Such as Pinyin, Zhuyin or the Vietnamese alphabet) do not share this property. This means that when you try to add some alphabet letters into a document written Chinese characters, the result is extremely unpleasant typographically. It is not only harder to typeset nicely, but it's also quite painful to read.
Although Modern Korean doesn't blend Hangul and Hanja (Chinese characters) very often, I think this property made Hangul quite a lot more palatable as a replacement for Chinese characters in Korea compared to Pinyin or Zhuyin. Koreans didn't have to throw your entire typographic and calligraphic tradition in order to adopt Hangul: A block is fixed-size (not proportional), the writing is easier to read both vertically and horizontally and you can keep writing it with brush strokes using traditional Chinese calligraphic methods and practices. It can even be mixed nicely with Chinese characters like Japanese Kana (and it would be more compact than Japanese Kana). Eventually Korean language reformers have chosen to mostly drop Hanja altogether, but when you still do need to mix Hanja in a Korean text, you can do it seamlessly.
Hangeul is an 24 character alphabet, with 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Each little square is a syllable made up of consonants and vowel combinations.
Alphabet writing is probably the most important invention perhaps even more so than the invention of wheel. It's truly the original "bicycle of the mind".
Syllable based writing are not intuitive for human, Korean found it the hard way by relatively recently by inventing Hangul alphabets despite had been using the Chinese characters for several thousands of years previously with majority of the people remained illiterate.
The low literacy rates in pre-Hangul Korea had less to do with phonological vs. logographic writing systems and more to do with the fact that in Korea at the time Chinese played the role Latin played in medieval Europe: it was the language of scholars and officials, but most ordinary people couldn't read it because, well, they didn't speak Latin. The same thing happened with Hanja in Korea. When you're trying to get people literate in a writing system designed for a language they don't use in daily life, you're fighting an uphill battle from the start.
What is true that unlike the Latin alphabet, which European languages could adopt/adapt for their own use (or think the way Cyrillic was adapted for Mongolian), Chinese characters, being logographic, couldn't simply be repurposed to represent sounds of the Korean tongue — that's why Hangul had to be invented from scratch. That's one important difference between phonological and logographic writing systems, but it has little do with the question which system is better at spreading literacy.
This is anectotal but I've a friend who's well educated senior chip design engineer who's mother tongue Chinese but cannot read the written words since he has no background in Chinese vernacular education where people properly learn the multitudes of Chinese characters.
I know of at least one other instance. But note that the same is true of English speakers. Becoming literate in English isn't just a matter of learning the alphabet (otherwise a Frenchman automatically qualifies as literate in English simply because he knows the English alphabet). The way literacy is typically assessed is by asking you to read a typical paragraph from say a newspaper and then testing you for reading comprehension. Someone whose native tongue is English, but who for whatever reason has never had the primary/secondary education experience typical in an English speaking country is going to encounter the same sort of difficulty becoming literate in English as you friend in becoming literate in Chinese.
By his own account, it took this man [1] 7 years (during his late 40s/early 50s) achieving English literacy, and that happened in a English speaking country where he encounters English texts on a daily basis (I assume your friend lives & works in the West).
When some form of phonetic writing is developed, it's almost invariably syllabic. If anything, the very intuitiveness of syllabaries is why all alphabets, abjads, and abugida originate from a single source while there are many syllabaries that have developed independently.
Further, Hangul is not "syllabic". It's an alphabet. It happens to organise its letters into syllable blocks, but that's it.
That's what I'm saying, after several thousands years of using Chinese characters Korean found that it's not intuitive for literacy hence they invented their very own alphabet, and voila the literacy increased considerably. Actually as a foreigner, you can learn to read Hangul in one single day, and then you can read the Korean for names, sign boards, etc but to understand them is another story. However, if your mother tongue is Korean, you can understand them intuitively. That's the reason I considered alphabet is more important than invention of the wheels and it's truly the original "bicycle of the mind".
Not intuitive? Why would that be?
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
"Around 1809, impressed by the "talking leaves" of European written languages, Sequoyah began work to create a writing system for the Cherokee language. After attempting to create a character for each word, Sequoyah realized this would be too difficult and eventually created characters to represent syllables. He worked on the syllabary for twelve years before completion and dropped or modified most of the characters he originally created."
"After the syllabary was completed in the early 1820s, it achieved almost instantaneous popularity and spread rapidly throughout Cherokee society. By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography."
They literally achieved higher literacy than the european settlers
> They literally achieved higher literacy than the european settlers
Is there any hard evidence behind that claim? (Not necessarily questioning it, it would just be very fascinating to read it)
Remembered reading it a while ago here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah
Second paragraph, with a citation actually (but as always with WP, who knows how much of it is actually in the book)
Syllabaries are more intuitive for humans if anything, because syllables are phonemic units that can be pronounced easily in isolation, which is not the case with standalone consonants.
The genius of Hangul is that it is an alphasyllabary, so it provides the benefits of both - regularity and human friendliness.
Logographic seems fine for the mind? Thinking in speech is the default and most people talk before they read.
Speech is far more like alphabetic writing than it is like logographic writing. Spoken words are not single units, rather they're made up of phonemes.
I am talking about literacy. For reading Chinese newspaper headlines you probably need around 50,000 basic character recognition.
My understanding is that the average Chinese dictionary has 20,000 characters. The full set is somewhere around 50,000. The average educated adult knows about 8000. The number of characters to read a Chinese newspaper is about 2500 to 3500.
This is based on multiple sources online. Here is one example source (BBC): https://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese/mini_gu...
Regardless the number of characters required for understanding the headlines, I think my points are still valid. After several thousands years of using Chinese characters Korean found that it's not intuitive for literacy hence they invented their very own alphabet namely Hangul, and voila the literacy increased considerably.
Fun facts, as a foreigner, you can learn to read Hangul in one single day, and then you can read the Korean written words for names, sign boards, etc but to understand them you need to learn the Korean language. However, if your mother tongue is Korean, you can understand them intuitively. That's the reason I considered alphabet is more important than invention of the wheels and it's truly the original "bicycle of the mind".
Sadly, we are unwinding thousands of years of progress by reverting to picture writing.
That seems only partly true. We did already have punctuation marks (like !?) that are a form of picture writing to modulate the underlying alphabetic meaning.
The smiley was invented because a pure alphabetic script does not do a good job expressing emotions, especially in short isolated sentences.
Emojis are overused in some current contexts (smartphone/messaging addiction) but some sort of standardization along with "emoji" literacy is, in principle, an evolution of the alphabet towards more sophistication and nuance.
Emojis are not quite the same thing as picture writing (icons).
I used emojis for a while, then got kinda sick of them.
> a pure alphabetic script does not do a good job expressing emotions
Instead of a smiley emoji, I'll write "haha". Instead of a barf emoji, I write "barf". English has a million words in it. I'm sure you can find a variety of words that express emotions just fine.
?! being a form of picture writing? I don't see it.
What makes "?!" different from emoji in your eyes, exactly? It literally encodes emotional delivery of the sentence to which it is applied.
Case in point: Susan Kare's trash can icon is slowly being replaced by [delete] as people discover that words for actions are better than pictures.
Not convincing to me. The world of UI design is too agitated with copycat and fads to be a solid reference.
Many years ago I had a designer friend do some interface for me and I pointed out we should be using a couple icons for actions like "post", "delete", etc.
He replied something like "I don't believe in the thaumaturgical power of icons" and that has stayed with me forever since. Words may he worth 1/1000th of a picture but at least you understand them.
you hover your mouse over the icon and a tooltip appears with words. Also the menu item shows the icon next to the word.
> the menu item shows the icon next to the word
Proof that icons don't work.
The icon next to the word builds the association between the icon and the word. Users aren't all drooling morons with the memory of a goldfish. The first couple of times, yeah, you have to hunt for the right icon but after you know what you're looking for, the improved density of icons puts more tools within immediate reach. If tooltip shows the keyboard shortcut, even better!
The idea that everything should be immediately intuitive is ridiculous. Babies have to learn how to properly suck a nipple and how to chew food in order to eat. Why should we expect mastery of a much more complex tool to be immediate?
I blame Microsoft for that--in particular, the Ribbon (and before that, toolbars).
They're simple enough to learn and reproduce, yet powerful enough to capture the nuances of different languages
Correction to my comment: Korean Hangul is actually an alphabetic writing system.
Thank you to the commenters who pointed this out!
Hangul is a very new alphabet. The Koreans didn’t have their own script until something like a century ago. Swahili has its own alphabet too.
A bit less recent than that. More like the 15th century for Hangul.
Swahili uses either modified Latin or modified Arabic for writing. Are you perhaps thinking of one of the invented scripts for indigenous American languages, e.g., Cree syllabics or Inuktitut?
To clarify, this is specific to "alphabetic" writing, cuneiform/hieroglyphs are older.
It should also be noted that a difference is often made between alphabets in the strict sense, where consonants and also vowels are represented by distinct symbols, and alphabets in the wider sense, where this is not the case (vowels are not represented at all or occasionally by certain consonant symbols typically when clarification is necessary). A writing system where symbols denote larger units of speech is not called an alphabet, but a syllabary. If it does not represent phonetic, but semantic units, it is called a logographic script. There are of course all kinds of mixed forms ("I ♥ NY").
Technically, a syllabary only refers to writing systems where the symbol represents the specific consonant and vowel pair, such as Japanese's Hiragana. For example, in a syllabary, the syllables "ka" and "ki" are two different symbols.
If the vowels are optional or not present, e.g. there's one "k" symbol regardless of the vowel, it's an Abjad. The archetypal Abjad is the Hebrew writing system.
If the vowels are written by adding them to the consonant symbol (similar to diacritics), it's called an Abugida. One example of this is the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia.
I did not want to make it too technical, so "Abjad" falls under "alphabets in the wider sense" and "Abugida" under "mixed forms". My comment was based on the assumption that the article in question does not necessarily refer to an alphabet in the strict sense. To make this clear, I did not think it was necessary to go into too much detail.
There are many specialized terms for different types of writing system, but those distinctions are generally of very little interest unless you're compiling a table of different writing systems.
Generally you look at what concepts are embodied in the script, and at the form of the glyphs. So:
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to phonemes. ("Language is made of sounds.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to consonants and doesn't bother to represent vowels. ("Language is made of sounds, and some of them are more important than others.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to syllables. ("Language is made of things you can say.")
You might have a script in which the glyphs assigned to syllables are composed of recognizable and conceptually distinct parts, but those parts have no independent representation. (Compare the glyphs ሀ ለ ሐ with the related glyphs ሄ ሌ ሔ.) ("Language is made of things you can say, but there are patterns.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to words, though in almost all cases you don't. The label "logographic script", applied to a script the labeler doesn't know well, is infinitely more popular than the concept "logographic script". I don't think any script has ever existed meeting the criterion of "it does not represent phonetic, but semantic units". But there are some, and used to be more, that leaned more or less strongly in that direction.
Just a fun fact: some later forms of cuneiform were alphabets. Like Old Persian Cuneiform:
https://www.omniglot.com/writing/opcuneiform.htm
If you wanted to tell people you "learned cuneiform" you could memorize this in an afternoon!
> To clarify, this is specific to "alphabetic" writing, cuneiform/hieroglyphs are older.
That’s literally in the title of both the post and the article. What are you “clarifying”?
It's common to think of alphabetic writing as all writing. I assume that the author is asserting that the characters represent individual phonemes as opposed to pictograms or syllables because those have been around much earlier. There's not much information though and I have no idea how they can make such a radical claim with 4 finger-sized cylinders.
Yes, however, I was still left wondering about the writing that existing from earlier; and was hoping the article would explain it.
I am still not fully clear actually -- Alphabet being a finite set of symbols, how did pre-alphabetic writing work?
Alphabets have symbols that represent sounds which are strung together to make words. Other types of writing might include symbols that represent words or phrases, with an example being like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters.
Also, in some, symbols represent syllables. It's significant because there are many more syllables than individual sounds.
I'm curious how they arrived at the conclusion it's an alphabet without deciphering it.
Normally researcher will make a statistical distribution and compared it with the existing deciphered alphabets for example the most popular is the yet to be deciphered Indus script against the popular Egyption script or Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The Indus script research findings on it being a script was so controversial that the researcher had a death threat upon him based on the discovery.
I think the OP article author is wrong by claiming it's the oldest while it should be the Indus script but perhaps they considered the latter as symbols like Chinese characters not strictly alphabets [1].
[1] Indus script:
Personally I'm not convinced that it's alphabetic writing: it's four cylinders with some markings on them, supposedly in an unknown language (convenient!), that appears to have had zero influence on and zero influence from its surrounding region. For the two claimants to the oldest alphabets — the Indus script [1], and the Proto-Sinaitic script [2] — there is ample evidence of broad usage and influence from existing cultures: the Proto-Sinaitic script developed as simplified hieroglyphics used to communicate with Canaanite slaves [3] in Egypt and was the origin of (probably) all modern alphabetic systems, and the Indus script developed from earlier potter's marks over hundreds of years and has nearly a thousand years of archeological evidence, although there is some debate as whether it qualifies as an alphabet. This appears unrelated to any existing writing system in the region, and — if it was an alphabet — appears to have had no subsequent influence on any other writing system ever made. If archeologists are suspicious of even the Indus script, how on earth do these qualify?
We have plenty of examples of pottery with markings on it that aren't alphabets. Cuneiform obviously, but also simply tradesman marks like the predecessors to the Indus script. What makes this "seem like alphabetic writing" as opposed to any of the other kinds of clay markings we've seen at the time? There are only four objects bearing the markings, with nothing else to compare against, in a supposedly "unknown" language!
If this really is an alphabet: what did it develop from? Where are the cultures who used it? And why did no one in the region ever use anything like it again?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script
> If this really is an alphabet: what did it develop from? Where are the cultures who used it? And why did no one in the region ever use anything like it again?
All good points, and my sense of it also is that it's pre-writing, but it might be that additional material just hasn't yet been discovered. Linear A and PS are known from a very, very few inscriptions.
The skeptics also provided similar arguments as yours against the idea of Egyption hieroglyphics as syllabic/alphabets until they found the venerable Rosetta Stone, and the rest is history. We just need another Rosetta Stone but for Indus script.
This does not make GP incorrect though. It just means we really cannot know for sure how the writing system works until we have enough information to decipher the inscriptions.
I don't take beef with the possibility of an earlier alphabet that predates the Proto-Canaanite alphabet — that is entirely plausible. But I think the article is overselling the story. The evidence is not very strong at this point, and I although I can be wrong, I suspect it can never be with if we remain with just four very short inscriptions without external context.
It is important to clarify the vast difference between this and the decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphs. I think the myth and magic of the Rosetta stone is overemphasized in popular culture, so just a few points of difference between the Egyptian Hieroglyphs and scripts like the Indus Valley Script or Linear A.
- Of course, to start with we did have the Rosetta Stone, and we have no equivalent for these scripts. But the Rosetta Stone was rediscovered in 1799, while Champollion provided the first phonetic interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs only two and half decades later, in 1822. But even after Champollion's famous achievement, we weren't able to read most hieroglyphic texts yet! Champollion didn't realize that many phonetic hieroglyphs represent not just a single consonant, but often two or three different consonants! It took a couple of more decades until we Egyptian was fully deciphered.
- We knew exactly which culture and language the Egyptian Hieroglyphs belonged to. More importantly, we had a vast wealth of external historical sources about this culture that we could read: mostly in Greek, Hebrew, Roman and Aramaic. From these sources we knew the names of Egyptian kings that we could expect to find in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and we knew enough about Egyptian culture, religion and history to often guess what the texts would be talking about. This is not anywhere nearly as true for the Indus Valley Script! Since we don't know who their kings were, we cannot use the names of kings as a highly verifiable way to test the phonetic writing hypothesis.
- We had a vast quantity of Hieroglyphs inscriptions. There are fewer attested Indus Valley Script inscriptions, but the number should be enough if we just had other external clues.
- Egyptian still had a (barely-)living descendant (Coptic) at the time Champollion and other scholars were working on its decipherment. Coptic priests and AFAIK even native speakers have provided a lot of help them in understanding how the Egyptian language they were trying to decipher might sound and work.
> Personally I'm not convinced that it's alphabetic writing
What is their evidence and argument for it?
The tldr is that they don't know it's alphabetic for sure (see below quote). The main scholar (Glenn Schwartz) who co-oversaw the '94-'10 excavation isn't an expert in writing. He put it out there around 2010 and said "maybe it's alphabetic, idk" and there was not much followup from the community. So he consulted with some writing experts who helped him with the 2021 paper where he goes over the evidence for different possibilities and suggests that the strongest argument is for alphabetic. The dating seems to be on firmer ground but the error bands on this and Wadi el-Hol can probably knock a century or two off the "500 years".
A decent summary is the blog post below from another researcher who briefly was part of the same dig and a former student of Schwartz (so not entirely independent):
http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=921
It is worth noting that in the past Schwartz has been reluctant to affirm that the four inscribed clay cylinders from Tomb 4 of Umm el-Marra are alphabetic (Schwartz 2010). Thus, he certainly did not rush to this conclusion. Moreover, his most recent article about these is also very cautious (Schwartz 2021), as he moves through various possibilities (as discussed above). But it is clear that he is now willing to state that this is the most reasonable position (i.e., it is Early Alphabetic). And I concur. That is, the most reasonable conclusion is that the Umm el-Marra clay cylinders are inscribed with signs that are most readily understood as Early Alphabetic letters (graphemes). Moreover, since the Early Alphabetic alphabet was used to write Semitic, it is logical to conclude that this is the language of the Umm el-Marra inscriptions (the fact that they were found in Syria would also augment this conclusion, of course).
The full blog post is worth reading and summarizes the case for various non-alphabetic possibilities.
I admit I didn't have time to read this blog post deeply, but it doesn't sound very convincing. It doesn't bring any EVIDENCE that this is an alphabet it just cites other cases of possible alphabets in Mesopotamia and the near East [1].
Besides that, this blog post mentions some morphological characteristics of the inscriptions that make the author believe the writing is alphabetic, but it fails to mention these characteristics. I don't doubt Rollston has good reasons for this statement, but the claims behind them need to be published and reviewed. I'm not sure if this is the case (and I do not have access to the 2021 article).
[1] This includes the Lachish Dagger I tried to look up, but its dating seems disputed, but even the earliest proposed date (the 17th century) is more recent than the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, so I'm not entirely sure what it is supposed to prove, except perhaps an earlier spread of the Alphabet from Egypt and the Sinai peninsula to Canaan proper?
> it doesn't sound very convincing
That's because it's not a strong conclusion. It's a "better than the alternatives" hypothesis. Repeating my tldr above "they don't know it's alphabetic".
> doesn't bring any EVIDENCE .. some morphological characteristics of the inscriptions
I'd say the "morphological characteristics of the inscriptions" count as evidence and I'll just recap everything linked that I think counts as evidence: the graphemes include several repetitions even with only 12 signs in total; they don't resemble cuneiform at all; they have a weak resemblances to some Egyptian glyphs but weak and Egypt didn't have these clay cigars; they have a weak resemblance to some Indus glyphs and (later) Byblos glyphs but again weak; they don't appear to be numbers, potmarks, etc.; but what they do strikingly resemble is later alphabetic signs, to the point where the author, one of the foremost experts on Semitic epigraphy, really wanted the dating to be wrong.
Now the blog post doesn't go into much detail on these items but Schwartz's 20+ page 2021 paper (I had no trouble getting a free, legal copy) does (not always a lot more detail but also covers more possible alternatives). But, like the blog post says, the case Schwartz 2021 makes is still extremely cautious and he basically concludes that we just have to hope we can find more examples to confirm what kind of system they are from, and to increase the chance of deciphering them.
> Egypt didn't have these clay cigars
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I'll escort myself out now...
How is it better than the alternative "we have a set of symbol and we don't know what it means"? I really think there is a merit in saying "with this sample size, every theory we put out has low confidence level".
With 12 signals in total, it's very hard to show patterns that are in line with an alphabet. I don't think that with this sample size you can make a very strong claim that the chance that this is an alphabet is higher than the chance is that these symbol serve any other kind of purpose (including being a non-language). The main claim seems to be that repetition (what kind? I'm a quite disappointed the blog post has no transcritions, considering it's just 12 symbols we're talking about!) makes the chance that this is an alphabet higher. The rest of the claims (it doesn't resemble cuneiform, doesn't seem to be derived from hieroglyphs and doesn't seem related to any other script) are meaningless. The resemblence for later Canaanite alphabetic signs is interesting, and could probably be more convincing if we had a larger sample size.
So in the end, if we are convinced by these claims, we're basically saying something like "We have at most 1% confidence for every other theory, but we've got 2% confidence that this is an independent development of the alphabet that may have inspired the Canaanite alphabet we've seen 500 later". Higher confidence that is still far below the threshold doesn't cut it.
Now, I'm pretty sure the original article did not put the theory in these terms, but the headline is somewhat sensationalist, and the way it was picked up in newspapers is even worse, for instance:
Scientific American: World's Oldest Alphabet Found on an Ancient Clay Gift Tag
Stopping the press from misreporting science is a bit like trying to stop space rockets in midair with your bare hands, but even "Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city". The popular understanding of the word evidence is assumed to be "hard" evidence by default, not a weak evidence that bumps up the probability of a certain theory a little bit more.
I'll actually be quite excited if this turns out to be truly an alphabet encoding a Semitic language (it opens a lot of interesting questions and possibilities), but I'm not holding my breath for it.
ahmedfromtunis's comment was killed, presumably because he attributed it to Gemini, but it was correct on the facts. Here's the response I wrote to him:
-----
Count of symbol types is what you'd look at. You have a bunch of unknown symbols, so there's nothing else you can look at.
For comparison:
Japanese hiragana: ~71 symbols [*]
Cherokee syllabary: ~86 symbols
Greek alphabet: ~24 symbols
Latin alphabet: ~21 symbols ( https://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/graffito/AGP-EDR187776 )
[*] Many Japanese syllables are spelled with digraphs ("sh", if the "h" appeared in a special combining form) or diacritics ("è", if è and e were completely distinct sounds, as they are in French), which lowers the memory burden. I've counted diacritics as creating new symbols and digraphs as not doing so.
How do you get 71 hiraganas? By counting the dakuten versions and smaller versions separately?
Right. 4 clay cylinders inch-long, perforated, with geometric symbols on the outside, are not jewelry (otherwise found in the same tomb) but ... labels with a new form of writing because... they were found next to the pottery?
The article is brilliantly written to lead with the significance of such a find before providing evidence.
The article is well cited. They handily beat out newspapers by providing links to earlier blog posts on the research.
You might want this one: http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=921
> I will convey my own perspective regarding these four inscribed clay cylinders: namely, the script is Early Alphabetic (based on the clear morphology of the letters), the language is arguably Semitic, and the date is early (based on the secure archaeological context and carbon 14 dates).
> My initial thought (because of the graphemic shapes of the signs on the cylinders and the clear similarity to Early Alphabetic letters) was that these cylinders might be intrusive
So, the major argument that they're writing is that they look very similar to other writing that we can read. Imagine that you can read Latin, but not Greek, and you're confronted with some inscriptions in Greek. Should you call them writing?
> Imagine that you can read Latin, but not Greek, and you're confronted with some inscriptions in Greek. Should you call them writing?
Not sure if this is good example since we know that Greek alphabet really is writing.
"乇乂ㄒ尺卂" looks like "EXTRA", but it's (meaninglessly-arranged) Chinese characters with a purely coincidental relationship to the Latin.
Did they find a bunch of these artifacts, with a variety of inscriptions? If so then sure, I buy it. If it's just the "CHON" fragment - that could well be coincidence.
Depends; your example (乇乂ㄒ尺卂) would be a truly stupendous coincidence if it were the only extant example of something and the Chinese characters just happened to be arranged in that way, but would be much weaker evidence if you had gone mining through thousands of characters and cherry-picked one five-character string that happened to match something. It would be an even bigger coincidence if those five characters, in sequence, were found, by themselves, on a document created in an English-speaking or Latin-alphabet-writing region.
So if all of the handful of fragments have marks that look like actual alphabetic symbols that were actually used in that area (later), that's substantially stronger evidence than you're giving credit for.
Is it worth inquiring whether people who acquired PhDs and have spent lifetimes studying this subject, and (I think) years studying these particular objects, would overlook and be fooled by the most obvious issue?
Some informed speculation about this on languagehat, in the comments: https://languagehat.com/oldest-alphabet/
Wow, this is impressive if actually true. I wonder how accurate their dating methodology is, since they have to do carbon dating on something in that layer, and not on the clay tablet itself.
It does seem strange that the alphabet would have remained isolated for so many hundreds years, and not spread out somewhere else.
The article is not complete. I could not find any comparison of the new alphabet to the known ones. Is this close to Phoenician or Aramaic?
How do they know when the writing is pictographic (an idea expressed as an image, like a big predator showing teeth), or syllabic (an image of a bestial grunt, basically, like 'ugh' or 'caw' or what not) or alphabetic (the breakdown of syllabic utterances into, at first, the hard consantants and the vowels)?
Basically, the number of symbols and the repeating patterns. But it seems that in this particular case, they also relied on the shapes of the "letters" to conclude the alphabetic nature of the script.
How practical and functional early writing systems were, far before they became the monumental tools of record-keeping we often associate with ancient civilizations
Given that most signs on the cylinders are unique it's much more likely that they represent just another syllabary of it's time, no?
> Schwartz said. "Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate."
If you can't translate it, how do they know it's alphabetic?
Statistical analysis, more or less. Alphabets have a couple dozen characters, syllabaries have a couple hundred, and logographic scripts have thousands to tens of thousands.
Carbon-14 dating can't be used directly on clay right? I assume the dating is inferred from some organic material found nearby?
CHON?
> Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite. Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated
Thousands of years later (with few cultural diffusion barriers) billions of people do not use alphabets. So there is probably something missing from this picture.
E.g., the large Chinese society is notoriously competitive and you would think that if the use of alphabet is an obvious enabler it would have been adopted by some segment?
Maybe there is a tradeof in a phonetic system: if the spoken language cannot be properly captured it negates the combinatorial benefits of an alphabet.
Some claim that standard Arabic has been intentionally made more complicated because writers were paid well by rulers back in old days, and there were more incentives to make grammar hard for the ordinary folks, so that you need "craftsmen" to write according to an Arabic linguist.Until the 80s in many Arab countries you needed clerks to produce documents from governments. (Comedy sketch on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtloJgMgFho) Arabic linguist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqDR0Hd9f0
'Category V – It usually takes 88 weeks or 2200 hours to reach S-3/R-3 proficiency in these languages. This small group of “super-hard languages” includes Chinese (Mandarin), Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic.' (Arabic linguist)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqDR0Hd9f0&t=3645s
I don't think anyone has seriously claimed that Modern Standard Arabic has been intentionally made complicated. It's clearly related to a lot of other Semitic languages (including the regional varieties of spoken Arabic). And the Category V thing is only about learning Arabic (any variety, not just MSA) as a second language, an in particular a second language for native speakers of English.
They could also be descriptions of musical scales, or maybe weaving patterns, base-encoded numbers perhaps....who knows, really? Also Egyptian writing goes back perhaps 5000 years. That is a Semitic language so it stands to reason that it too would likely fall in the same category. Anyway I do love these kinds of archeological finds nonetheless. Interesting to see if Gobekli Tepe yields even older instances of written script? (If they ever get around to a proper excavation, that is! IIRC the site is currently not open to researchers.)