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A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it began

88 points by emot

by retrac

5 subcomments

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...

by roughly

1 subcomments

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.

by Panzerschrek

2 subcomments

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.

by KingOfCoders

1 subcomments

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, signs of writing about 40.000 years ago.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stone-age-art-may...

by aix1

1 subcomments

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

by pier25

0 subcomment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Elamite_script

by user2722

0 subcomment

The half of the story which was available was indeed fascinating.
Dates I'll retain, 1.7 million years and 5000 years. Two different, if associated, marks of civilization.

by GeekyBear

2 subcomments

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.

by egorfine

0 subcomment

I read "ancient script" and my first though was: what kind of script? Like, REXX for OS/2? ksh? Maybe even perl?

by nephihaha

0 subcomment

The roots of writing appear to be in the Stone Age. Pre-literate societies have a certain degree of symbology. You can see this with native Australians into the modern period and ancient rock art.

by netcan

2 subcomments

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.