A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it began
newscientist.com58 points by emot 5 days ago
58 points by emot 5 days ago
Ah the new science. 3/4th about how everyone else was wrong, how this was neglected, how this changes everything and then a small portion about what it is.
Recently I found this very interesting, first signs of writing about 40.000 years ago.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stone-age-art-may...
We may never truly know when writing was invented.
There's a stele that was discovered in 1986 [1] in Veracruz. You could be forgiven if you think that writing is Maya. But it is not. It some other language. A couple other small fragments like it have been found, but the stele is basically an hapax. It is the only example.
And from the one example, we can see that it a system overflowingly glorious in its maturity and complexity. The scribes belonged to a culture that had been writing for a very long time. That is the refinement of millennia.
There are dates carved on La Mojorra 1; if they are in the same Long Count calendar the Maya used, then the stele appears to be talking about something that happened in the 140s and 150s AD.
The obvious relationship between the Mesoamerican writing systems might be somewhat analogous to the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, or Chinese and Japanese writing. One was adapted to write the other. Or they both evolved out of a common ancestral system. How far back might that have been?
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...
That is a fantastic example of mesoamerican script. I would have naively assumed it was Maya had you not said otherwise otherwise, too. Thanks for posting it.
I don't get it, why do you deduce this is "the refinement of millennia"?
How can you tell that a script is "refined", especially from a single example?
Mainly from the amount and complexity of symbols. That gives rise to the context which they must include. We can tell from the other more complete examples we have seen that writing systems which are complex enough to reliably convey such a wide range of context generally require being refined over millennia. It's not a 100% given, but it's a very reasonable assertion.
Numerous and complex symbols are characteristic for the earliest scripts.
The refined scripts typically use fewer and simpler symbols. The only exceptions to this tendency towards standardization and simplification are in the case of some script variants whose main purpose is to be decorative, not practical, e.g. which are intended for inscriptions on monuments.
For what it's worth, wikipedia says that it is Isthmian script, and has not been conclusively determined whether Isthmian script is a true writing system that represents a spoken language, or is a system of proto-writing
I don't think it's very refined or complex. It's on the same level as heiroglyphics in that it's pictorial. The letters represent real stuff (face, birds, eyes, animals, etc). Maybe my brain is doing pattern matching but I see a lot of real things in this picture. You need a more advanced language to represent abstract concepts, which is very difficult to do in such a script. For example, the sentence "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors" is pretty much impossible to represent in a script like egyptian heiroglyphics or this one.
This is a line of thinking that's very common amongst people who only speak languages that use alphabets but it's not remotely true. Egypt became one of the greatest empires ever with hieroglyphs and those evolved into a phonetic writing system. Chinese and Japanese of course function and they evolved from pictographs. A pictograph is only limiting if a character that resembles a dog can only carry the meaning of a dog and nothing else. But that's not the case in any language. They all evolved to use the symbol of a dog, or any given character, to carry other meanings.
> the sentence "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors" is pretty much impossible to represent in a script like egyptian heiroglyphics or this one
单子是自函子范畴中的幺半群
It bears remembering that spoken language existed long before written language, and written language developed as a form of encoding spoken language. Purely pictorial communication utilises a small number of large symbols that make it clear what is being conveyed from pictures alone, but the language depicted is too complex and abstracted to be purely pictorial; it uses a great number of small symbols, and you cannot understand what it is trying to convey merely by looking at it as a series of pictures. For a reader to understand what is written there would require understanding the relation of symbols to spoken language.
The very first letter in your example sentence started as an ox 𓃾 then via 𐤀 α etc. turned into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A#:~:text=1-,History,a – but even in the hieroglyphics it was used to represent the sound (the sound of the start of the word for ox), not literal oxes. The road towards more abstract / less pictorial systems was created for speed and ease of writing, not in order to represent more abstract thought. (Note also how alphabets are changed by the implements used to write them, e.g. runes for knife-on-wood, wedge incisions for clay tablets, square capitals on stone – this too was a pressure from ease of writing, nothing to do with representing more complex ideas.)
While the proto-writing systems are based on pictograms, both the Sumenrian cuneiforms and the Egyptian hieroglyphic (used for inscriptions on stone) and hieratic (use for writing with a reed brush on papyrus) have made the transition towards having phonetic symbols, used together with ideograms.
Using the phonetic sign subsets of the Egyptian and Sumerian scripts, it was possible to write any sentence that could be spoken in their languages.
This was the most important advance in writing and both in Mesopotamia and in Egypt there is evidence about this transition from an earlier writing system that could write only a subset of the words of a language, so it could not be used to write arbitrary sentences, but only things like lists of objects with their amounts and owners, like needed for accounting, to a writing system that added phonetic symbols for writing any words that did not have their own symbol.
I cannot read the paywalled article, but it seems that now there is evidence that also the Proto-Elamite writing system has also passed around the same time through this transition from having only symbols for certain words to having phonetic symbols too, e.g. for syllables, which can be used to write arbitrary words and sentences.
Before phonetic symbols began to be used, we cannot know the language spoken by the users of a proto-writing system.
While in Egypt there is little doubt that the first users of writing spoke some kind of Old Egyptian, in Mesopotamia there is doubt the users of the first proto-cuneiform writing system spoke Sumerian. However, by the time when phonetic cuneiform signs were introduced, the language of the writers was Sumerian.
In the territory later known as Elam (in the West of present Iran), it is not known what language was spoken by the users of the Proto-Elamite writing system. It could have been an ancestor of the Elamite language spoken a millennium later, or it could have been a completely different language. Elamite is not related to the Indo-European languages that spread much later in that territory, like Old Persian.
I am sorry but this like saying that "chinese cannot represent abstract notions" because "picture" .
In middle egyptian (the language you probably assume) "pictures" are just syllables. They are phonetic, not semantic, in the same way letter of modern language correspond to sounds, not meanings.
Egyptians had no problem expressinyg conplex concepts and they also had cursive writing, which is much easier to write.
As a language matures, it moves away from concrete things towards abstract things. Eg cave paintings -> pictorial scripts -> modern languages which are very detached from pictorial/phonetic meaning (even modern chinese). These days we have programming languages which do not have any phonetic or pictorial representation. And this trend will keep going on. I think I still stand by my point that this script isn't as refined as a modern language. Just like the great pyramids aren't as refined as burj khalifa.
There are two relatively recent books that dig in on the relationship between humans and governments or states and the degree to which these were less of a linear history and more of an ongoing negotiation - Against the Grain by James C Scott focuses on early states and their semi-regular failures, and The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow talk about the ongoing process of power negotiations between the putative leadership class and the citizenry. Both emphasize the same thing: that retrenchments against the state were a regular occurrence, and that the citizens of a given ruling group would not infrequently challenge, abolish, or abandon the state if the rulers overreached. The sudden disappearance of a script that was used for the purposes of tracking ownership and accounts would fit with this view, especially in light of even more modern reactions to attempts by the state to codify relationships for, eg, tax purposes, or just generally for control.
The fact that elamites suddenly stopped writing is easy to explain. Maybe they have invented paper or something similar and it doesn't last long in the archeological record.
> Maybe they have invented paper or something similar and it doesn't last long in the archeological record.
These can last a very long while in the archaeological record if the environment is suitable, and the area covered by elam (the iranian south-west) seems pretty suitable. The oldest surviving papyruses are the 4500 years old "red sea scrolls". Similarly we have paper fragments from shockingly early in the medium's history (~150 BCE, papermaking is believed to have been invented circa 200 BCE).
Given how long Elam lasted, it would be very strange that none of this successor materials would have survived even in telling (e.g. we do not have examples of the oldest chinese bamboo slips, but we do have references to such from later works), and that it would not have spread out of elam either.
I am a bit disappointed by New Scientist's standard of reporting here.
"Has been shockingly overlooked by all but a handful of scholars since its discovery 125 years ago" -- really? I picked up the one popular book on the subject that I own. It was first published almost 25 years ago and has an entire chapter on proto-Elamite, plus about a dozen mentions throughout the book.
Everything seems to have some sort of fake narrative these days to make it more "interesting". <old-man-yells-at-cloud/>
P.S. Highly recommend the book: https://www.thamesandhudson.com/products/lost-languages
Professor emeritus Irving Finkel of the British Museum thinks that we have evidence from much farther back in history.
> Controversial theory about Göbekli Tepe | Irving Finkel and Lex Fridman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0BcGMaEV8o
This interview sent me down a Finkel interview rabbit hole, as he makes a delightful guest.
Also,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stone-age-art-may...
Pre-script about 40.000 years ago
Is it possible to summarise? I can't watch a video currently.
I'm also aware Göbekli Tepe is a favourite of pseudoarcheologists and conspiracy theorists. Given who Finkel is, it will be nice to see a theory presented by someone who is actually a genuine expert! :)
Assyriologist Irving Finkel believes Gobekli Tepeh is or is evidence of writing or proto-writing. That's 12,000 bp. There are ice age artefacts that may represent writing-like symbolism.
The super-old artefacts themselves are only a hint... but I think more recent artefacts demonstrate that invention of a writing system is relatively common. We tend to think of invention of core concepts as the magical event, with expansion and proliferation as derivative or even inevitable. But... I think this may be backwards.
In general... I think purely intellectual feats that can be completed by one person happen over and over. Otoh, we intuitively underestimate the role of context. Availability of trade goods like paper and ink. The application of writing to uses like tax collection, trade contracts, religion, scholarship or whatnot. Those all require many people. Whole societies, economic and political structures.
IMO, this is the uniqueness of the early bronze age... for writing and other things.
A lot of the writing dirth of the european dark age relates to the scarcity of papyrus. Writing medium seems like a trivial issue. You can write on skins, or bark or shingles. But... that doesn't scale and doesn't lend to the development of writing as a big deal. The invention of cheap paper-making was as important as moveable type for the "Gutenberg Revolution" to take place.
Rongorongo is an undeciphered script from Easter Island. From the handful of surviving examples, this is clearly a highly developed script... developed independently on a small island. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo#Corpus
The Cherokee Syllabary is a fascinating example. It was invented by Sequoyah. One guy. He had access to paper, ink and examples of english writing. He (seemingly) didn't have any information on how english writing worked. He borrowed letters from english... but he used them to represent syllables with no relation to latin. EG: the letter "D" represents the sound "A."
The ingredients for the invention of a full, advanced, newspaper-ready language were (1) one motivated genius (2) paper and ink (3) an example of how far the idea of writing could take you.
There was no proto-writing stage. It wasn't limited to personal seals, charms, prayers, accounting or short documents. I think the key here is example, a demonstration of potential. Sequoyah had seen books, letters and longform text. So, he went straight to newspapers, constitutional documents and suchlike. He taught his young daughter to read and the timeline from initial conception to widespread, advanced literacy was just 20 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
Writing and proto-writing may have been invented tens of thousands of times. Neanderthal proto-writing would be a paradigm-shifting find... but it wouldn't shock me that much.
The breakthrough inventions that tend to unlock a flood and punctuate our understanding of history... I think these are often more trivial than we expect. What matters is the ethereal and hard to describe "context." The addition of one or more trivial ingredients like a writing medium. Abstract "meta" like "writing should be used to write whole books." The sociability of the inventor.
The growing appreciation of Elamite sophistication adds to the shockingly large corpus of large, advanced civilizations that have existed in history. There are so many of them... and we don't even know what most were called.
