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.