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.
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
Also of interest (but also a bit dated): "... the making and reading of two dimensional maps is almost universal among mankind whereas the reading and writing of linear scripts is a special accomplishment associated with a high level of social and technical sophistication." [1]
> 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)
This whole mode of thinking you demonstrate shows exactly what is so inane about trying to use empirical methods (best employed in deciding what thickness of paper clip to use in the Records department of an aquarium) to try to understand human beings.
Bandying about complete drivel that doesn't cohere with the perception that any living person with a pulse has of the world, and hiding behind percentages and mumbles about them coming from a well known study.
There are about one hundred thousand questions I can think of that anyone brandishing such figures would have to answer before even being able to interpret what it is they just said, let alone make any decisions about whether or not it is relevant in adjudicating any other question, I'll leave you with one, in two forms, feel free to copy and paste a dictionary style response that you haven't even read:
What is a culture?
What is a culture?
Show me a single "evidence-based" claim about human beings this approach has brought to the surface and I'll throw Dostoevsky and Cervantes at your head.
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!
> 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 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.
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)_/¯
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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].
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?
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.
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):
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.
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.
> 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?
"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.
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.
[*] 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Many countries are bombing Syria, including Syria itself, Jordan, Russia, and the US, largely because of the ongoing civil war and related ISIS attacks, though Jordan is mostly targeting drug smugglers aligned with the Syrian government. Focusing on Israel is just incredibly ignorant.
I had the same question, especially that the researchers are from a western "enemy" country. It's impressive the length researchers go to, well, research.
Isreal is regularly bombing targets in Syria as well. But the targets seem to be mostly military installations, so the civilian life is not nearly as much disrupted as it is in Lebanon.
> Assad has killed about half a million Syrians already in the civil war.
How can that be true? Western academics protest when so many people are killed. The Gaza health ministry itself claims less that 1/10 of that number, and look at how many protests and riots are in the US right now. If Syria really had half a million dead you'd see the academics rioting about that.
People typically protest their own government to effect policy changes. In the case of Gaza, the US is sending billions of dollars to Israel on a regular basis. The Syrian government, meanwhile, has been sanctioned for more than a decade by these western countries.
The definition of terrorism generally excludes acts performed by a legitimate state. Whenever this causes problems, you have to declare the relevant state illegitimate (which, depending on the state, may be trivial or highly contested).
It's also been standard practice in war since pretty much forever. Not that that's a good thing—war is and always has been terrible—but Israel didn't invent the idea of targeting civilians, nor are there any countries in recent history who have suddenly become above that kind of warfare. There are some that like to talk the talk, but they either have managed to just avoid war (to be fair, good on them) or do the same thing.
> It's worth mentioning the ongoing civil war in Syria that so far result in around 700k dead.
There's no way there are 700,000 people dead in Syria. US and European colleges are up in arms over Gaza, and Gaza has less than 50,000 dead. If 700,000 people really were dead in the Syrian civil war there would be riots in the West just like there are for Palestine.
700k fatalities is a little high as consensus estimates go, but it’s not ridiculous, even low estimates are in the hundreds of thousands.
It’s been going on for more than 13 years and has way more factions than anything happening in Gaza right now, many/most great powers both regionally and globally have a hand in somehow, and the Western press doesn’t report on it nearly as much as on more recent conflicts.
If college campus protests were driven directly or substantially by human suffering you’d be hearing about Sudan every day.
Riots for what? Assad was blamed and bombed by the West already, what should have people rioted for?
Besides, the entire Syrian civil war was started and fueled with American money and weapons- which ended up in the hands of each and every rebel/ terror group, including ISIS. Then the West blamed Assad for fighting back instead of leaving the country in the hand of those terror groups. Had he done that, now Syria would be a wasteland roamed by warlords, Mad Max style.
But Syria is (incorrectly) stereotyped as "brown people killing brown people" which college students shrug at. While Israel is (incorrectly) stereotyped as "white people killing brown people" which is a big no no.
Incorrectly because if you look at pictures of Syrian dictator Assad, he would be considered white in the US. Certainly whiter than many Israelis of Yemenite ancestry.
According to the Lancet medical journal, the Gaza deaths are closer to 200k but other sources say it might even be higher. No one knows because most of the hospitals are not operational, the dead from collapsed buildings can't be retrieved.
For Syria, I've heard ranges of anywhere between 300k and 700k. The difference between Syria and Gaza is most of the dead in Gaza are woman and children and the Syrian civil war death toll is over a decade
I had to look that up. Apparently the Lancet just multiplied by five the numbers from the Gazan health ministry, on the basis "of four indirect deaths per one direct death". That inflation technique is not used in any conflict anywhere else in the world, and particularly not in the Syrian conflict we're discussing and comparing to. If you would like to use that number, then apply that inflation technique also to the Syrian conflict as well.
Lancet's numbers are not based in facts. Here's the exact excerpt from them:
> Armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population's inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.
> In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.
Again, from their own words, these numbers are not based in any reality on the ground, they are just taking the current number of reported deaths and multiplying it by 5. It also includes theoretical deaths in the future.
Well Iran sponsors Hamas terrorism in Israel (rockets have been regularly shot across the border for years before the current war started). Iran also sponsors Hezbollah terror in both Israel and in Lebanon. Does that justify Israeli bombing against Hamas or Hezbollah? So how is "Syria bombing Syria" suddenly justified if someone is sponsoring terrorists?
It's not. Nowhere in my statement did I attempt to justify it. I explained the context so that people wouldn't walk away confused as to what that short sentence actually means.
Apparently that context being added irritates you. That is interesting in it's own right.
Syria has been bombed far more by the US and Turkey than Israel, and a significant area is currently being occupied by Turkey. Israel is barely a player in this conflict and is just striking the occasional tactical or strategic target (like random factions attacking Israel, IRGC or Hezbollah leadership).
But the answer is that there's really not much bombing at this point. A bigger problem for Syria is the multi-faction conflict on the ground, of which Hezbollah was one of the biggest factions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_civil_war#Belligerents
You might be confusing it with Lebanon, but Syria has been bombed by Israel and is pretty unstable in general so it's impressive they were able to do this research regardless. People shouldn't be downvoting you for asking a question.
Nah Israel is heavily assaulting Syria too, these days, at this moment, continuously. Special ops raids for targeted killing, blowing up some stuff or the other, bombing places. They don't even try to hide it, videos from chopper pilots, drones and helmet cams from soldiers are all over internet.
It may have some good reasons behind given war they wage on Lebanon, or just settling decades old political grudges, don't know.
> It may have some good reasons behind given war they wage on Lebanon
The day after Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, Lebanon (well, Hezbollah) stepped up their rocket attacks on Israel. Israel had to evacuate the entire north of the country, so that combined with the evacuated people from the Gaza area means something like 200,000 internally displaced Israelis right now. Hezbollah has killed dozens of citizen across the border, most prominently 12 children playing soccer a few months ago. They bombed two kindergartens in Israel this past week.
Honestly, I don't understand why the threshold for war seems to be ground invasion. If you're shooting missiles at another country, that's war too. Israel is at war with Syria, Iran, and Lebanon imo. Not to mention Hamas.
Also giving billions worth of weapon is seemingly totally fine but selling shells and sending troops to an allied country is "an escalation" when the opponent camp does it. The double standards and double speak is so tiring.
Also, Israel claims it must preemptively strike and do all sorts of things due to what its enemies may do to them, but given how much slaughter and actual genocide Israel sanctioned its allies to do in Lebanon in its history, they would be equally justified in reverse
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.
Many cultures never invent writing. From well-known 1969 research on 186 pre-industrial societies: [0]
Also of interest (but also a bit dated): "... the making and reading of two dimensional maps is almost universal among mankind whereas the reading and writing of linear scripts is a special accomplishment associated with a high level of social and technical sophistication." [1]> 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)
This whole mode of thinking you demonstrate shows exactly what is so inane about trying to use empirical methods (best employed in deciding what thickness of paper clip to use in the Records department of an aquarium) to try to understand human beings.
Bandying about complete drivel that doesn't cohere with the perception that any living person with a pulse has of the world, and hiding behind percentages and mumbles about them coming from a well known study.
There are about one hundred thousand questions I can think of that anyone brandishing such figures would have to answer before even being able to interpret what it is they just said, let alone make any decisions about whether or not it is relevant in adjudicating any other question, I'll leave you with one, in two forms, feel free to copy and paste a dictionary style response that you haven't even read:
What is a culture? What is a culture?
Show me a single "evidence-based" claim about human beings this approach has brought to the surface and I'll throw Dostoevsky and Cervantes at your head.
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...
> 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 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.
> 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?
Enter the hypothetical ice age civilization that was destroyed 13k years ago in a global cataclysm.
I don’t believe that agriculture only started then. It’s just the earliest evidence we have. Everything always gets pushed earlier
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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)_/¯
I'm so old that we didn't even have Emojis, not even letters yet, and we had to communicate with punctuation alone! ;)
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...
Why not? People lived ok without being able to read and write until a couple generations ago. Passing knowledge orally and by example is easy.
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.
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-...
> 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.
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.
Quipo are amazing, but mostly accounting records?
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 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.
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.
Literacy is a modern phenomenon.
the distinction between writing and drawing seems to be a bit gray to be honest
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Logographic seems fine for the mind? Thinking in speech is the default and most people talk before they read.
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...
You’re off by a factor of 20+.
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.
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.
Sadly, we are unwinding thousands of years of progress by reverting to picture writing.
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.
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.
:(
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?
I was thinking of the Ge’ez script but that’s for Amharic not Swahili.
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.
Well it helped me, I didn’t put two and two together.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
> Personally I'm not convinced that it's alphabetic writing
What is their evidence and argument for it?
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.
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.
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?
"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.
> 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.
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:
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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?
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Carbon-14 dating can't be used directly on clay right? I assume the dating is inferred from some organic material found nearby?
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.
> 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.
Some informed speculation about this on languagehat, in the comments: https://languagehat.com/oldest-alphabet/
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.)
Egyptian is afro-asiatic but not semitic, like Berber, somali and others
Egyptian writing is old but it is not (primarily) alphabetic.
Yes kind of a hybrid, isn't it?
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?
CHON?
It's the brand name. When you need authentic pottery built to last, look for CHON on the cylinder.
Customer: *checks cylinder*, hey, this isn't CHON, it's C𓅓ON!
I guess they also knew organic chemistry back then!
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.
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Many countries are bombing Syria, including Syria itself, Jordan, Russia, and the US, largely because of the ongoing civil war and related ISIS attacks, though Jordan is mostly targeting drug smugglers aligned with the Syrian government. Focusing on Israel is just incredibly ignorant.
Have any of these countries (except the US) bombed Syria within the past few months that this discovery could be from?
Also the discovery is actually from 2004, so the point of my question was valid, it's not safe to do such research there now due to geopolitics
I had the same question, especially that the researchers are from a western "enemy" country. It's impressive the length researchers go to, well, research.
Often these things have been sitting in a drawer somewhere for years before the research is released.
> Archaeologists first found the cylinders in 2004
https://archive.ph/YOsqx
(Also: "It’s an alphabet. It’s easy-peasy. I’m used to much tougher things," said Silvia Ferrara, who was not involved.)
Thanks for the clarification. And, yes, that quote is so badass!
Most Westerners have their ancestry in Syria, the Levant, Mesopotamia if you go back far enough. Not that that is the only criterion!
You may be thinking of Lebanon.
Isreal is regularly bombing targets in Syria as well. But the targets seem to be mostly military installations, so the civilian life is not nearly as much disrupted as it is in Lebanon.
According to Israel's Dahiya doctrine, civilian targets are legitimate targets in order to put pressure on opposing governments.
Syria has been bombed way more by Assad, the dictator of Syria, than by Israel.
Assad has killed about half a million Syrians already in the civil war.
People typically protest their own government to effect policy changes. In the case of Gaza, the US is sending billions of dollars to Israel on a regular basis. The Syrian government, meanwhile, has been sanctioned for more than a decade by these western countries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_agai...
Keep in mind that Gaza's Health Ministry isn't really functional any more, and they are in no state to keep numbers.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Isn't this pretty much the definition of terrorism?
The definition of terrorism generally excludes acts performed by a legitimate state. Whenever this causes problems, you have to declare the relevant state illegitimate (which, depending on the state, may be trivial or highly contested).
It's also been standard practice in war since pretty much forever. Not that that's a good thing—war is and always has been terrible—but Israel didn't invent the idea of targeting civilians, nor are there any countries in recent history who have suddenly become above that kind of warfare. There are some that like to talk the talk, but they either have managed to just avoid war (to be fair, good on them) or do the same thing.
Israel does regularly bomb Syria.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/12/how-can-israel-att...
Syria also regularly bombs Syria.
It's worth mentioning the ongoing civil war in Syria that so far result in around 700k dead.
700k fatalities is a little high as consensus estimates go, but it’s not ridiculous, even low estimates are in the hundreds of thousands.
It’s been going on for more than 13 years and has way more factions than anything happening in Gaza right now, many/most great powers both regionally and globally have a hand in somehow, and the Western press doesn’t report on it nearly as much as on more recent conflicts.
If college campus protests were driven directly or substantially by human suffering you’d be hearing about Sudan every day.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_civil_war
Riots for what? Assad was blamed and bombed by the West already, what should have people rioted for?
Besides, the entire Syrian civil war was started and fueled with American money and weapons- which ended up in the hands of each and every rebel/ terror group, including ISIS. Then the West blamed Assad for fighting back instead of leaving the country in the hand of those terror groups. Had he done that, now Syria would be a wasteland roamed by warlords, Mad Max style.
But Syria is (incorrectly) stereotyped as "brown people killing brown people" which college students shrug at. While Israel is (incorrectly) stereotyped as "white people killing brown people" which is a big no no.
Incorrectly because if you look at pictures of Syrian dictator Assad, he would be considered white in the US. Certainly whiter than many Israelis of Yemenite ancestry.
According to the Lancet medical journal, the Gaza deaths are closer to 200k but other sources say it might even be higher. No one knows because most of the hospitals are not operational, the dead from collapsed buildings can't be retrieved.
For Syria, I've heard ranges of anywhere between 300k and 700k. The difference between Syria and Gaza is most of the dead in Gaza are woman and children and the Syrian civil war death toll is over a decade
I had to look that up. Apparently the Lancet just multiplied by five the numbers from the Gazan health ministry, on the basis "of four indirect deaths per one direct death". That inflation technique is not used in any conflict anywhere else in the world, and particularly not in the Syrian conflict we're discussing and comparing to. If you would like to use that number, then apply that inflation technique also to the Syrian conflict as well.
https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20240711-more-than-1...
Lancet's numbers are not based in facts. Here's the exact excerpt from them:
> Armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population's inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.
> In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.
Again, from their own words, these numbers are not based in any reality on the ground, they are just taking the current number of reported deaths and multiplying it by 5. It also includes theoretical deaths in the future.
Edit: corrected multiple
Haha, apologies, you are correct.
Just wait until you find out that our NATO ally Turkey is occupying an area larger than the west bank and gaza combined in Syria.
The USA sponsors ISIS terrorism inside Syria. I wonder if that's why they are in the position to "bomb themselves."
It's worth mentioning that this is an externally state sponsored "civil war" on both sides. The most appropriate description is "proxy war."
Well Iran sponsors Hamas terrorism in Israel (rockets have been regularly shot across the border for years before the current war started). Iran also sponsors Hezbollah terror in both Israel and in Lebanon. Does that justify Israeli bombing against Hamas or Hezbollah? So how is "Syria bombing Syria" suddenly justified if someone is sponsoring terrorists?
> Well Iran sponsors Hamas terrorism in Israel
So two wrongs make a right?
> how is "Syria bombing Syria" suddenly justified
It's not. Nowhere in my statement did I attempt to justify it. I explained the context so that people wouldn't walk away confused as to what that short sentence actually means.
Apparently that context being added irritates you. That is interesting in it's own right.
It was closer to a "regime change" proxy war with thousands of imported fighters, rather than a "civil war".
Syria has been bombed far more by the US and Turkey than Israel, and a significant area is currently being occupied by Turkey. Israel is barely a player in this conflict and is just striking the occasional tactical or strategic target (like random factions attacking Israel, IRGC or Hezbollah leadership).
But the answer is that there's really not much bombing at this point. A bigger problem for Syria is the multi-faction conflict on the ground, of which Hezbollah was one of the biggest factions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_civil_war#Belligerents
You might be confusing it with Lebanon, but Syria has been bombed by Israel and is pretty unstable in general so it's impressive they were able to do this research regardless. People shouldn't be downvoting you for asking a question.
Nah Israel is heavily assaulting Syria too, these days, at this moment, continuously. Special ops raids for targeted killing, blowing up some stuff or the other, bombing places. They don't even try to hide it, videos from chopper pilots, drones and helmet cams from soldiers are all over internet.
It may have some good reasons behind given war they wage on Lebanon, or just settling decades old political grudges, don't know.
Honestly, I don't understand why the threshold for war seems to be ground invasion. If you're shooting missiles at another country, that's war too. Israel is at war with Syria, Iran, and Lebanon imo. Not to mention Hamas.
When we bomb, it's called a preemptive strike. It's only considered war when the enemy responds.
Welcome to the "rules based international order"
Also giving billions worth of weapon is seemingly totally fine but selling shells and sending troops to an allied country is "an escalation" when the opponent camp does it. The double standards and double speak is so tiring.
Also, Israel claims it must preemptively strike and do all sorts of things due to what its enemies may do to them, but given how much slaughter and actual genocide Israel sanctioned its allies to do in Lebanon in its history, they would be equally justified in reverse
Graham Hancock.