tastyfreeze 4 days ago

Written on what? There are very few materials that will last 10s of millennia.

Aztec, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and their contemporaries all used some type of paper. Sumerians seem to be alone in their use of clay for writing.

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AlotOfReading 4 days ago

Paper was only one written medium. All of the cultures you've listed constructed stone stelae with writing, like the Rosetta stone. South Asian cultures used palm leaves instead of paper. Maya used fig bark. Europeans and Nahuatl often used animal hides instead of paper. There's a long list.

tastyfreeze 4 days ago

Ok. Maybe I should have been more generic. Organic thin sheet material... velum, parchment, papyrus. The bulk of writing is done on material that is gone in a few thousand years at most.

AlotOfReading 4 days ago

Which still leaves stelae as already mentioned. There's also petroglyphs, ceramics, and paints. The point I'm trying to convey is that writing has never been limited solely to paper or even organic materials.

Wytwwww 2 days ago

> Sumerians seem to be alone in their use of clay for writing.

I think we have more Assyrian and Hittite tablets that have survived?

Also they were used as fast Crete and Greece and even in the Danubian civilizations (although they probably didn't develop a full writing system).