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To: bruinbirdman

3123 BC is too long before any known form of writing. Cuneiform included.


11 posted on 03/30/2008 8:54:54 PM PDT by sinanju
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To: sinanju
"3123 BC is too long before any known form of writing. Cuneiform included."

Wow, FR proves the scientist wrong again. It's so easy.

yitbos

12 posted on 03/30/2008 9:02:58 PM PDT by bruinbirdman ("Those who control language control minds." - Ayn Rand)
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To: sinanju
3123 BC is too long before any known form of writing. Cuneiform included.

Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of ideographic and/or early mnemonic symbols. The best known examples are:

The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic of the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400–3200 BC with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC.

The Chinese script likely developed independently of the Middle Eastern scripts, around 1600 BC.

The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are also generally believed to have had independent origins.

It is thought that the first true alphabetic writing appeared around 2000 BC, as a representation of language developed by Semitic workers in Egypt (see History of the alphabet). Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one innovation, many via the Phoenician alphabet, or were directly inspired by its design.

29 posted on 03/31/2008 7:03:52 AM PDT by AFreeBird
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