Study Investigates the Origins of Writing

Archaeology Magazine ^ | November 6, 2024 | editors / unattributed

[RoosterRedux]

An economics professor of mine in college (might have been an accounting prof—it’s been a long time) said the very first written document was probably an IOU.;-)

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I am the Very Model of a Biblical Philogist

"I wrote my dissertation in flowery Akkadian
And proved the Philistines were almost certainly Canadian"

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

the very first written document was probably an IOU

The earliest cuneiform documents were warehouse inventories. Kept the custodian from selling all the goods.

[sphinx]

I can see from those tablets that autocorrect predated writing.

We should not be surprised by this. It’s the way evolution works all the time.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

the very first written document was probably an IOU

The earliest cuneiform documents were warehouse inventories. Kept the custodian from selling all the goods.

[RoosterRedux]

Interpersonal transactions—exchanges of goods, services, or favors between individuals—almost certainly preceded the invention of warehouses. Early human societies relied on direct exchanges, bartering, and communal sharing long before the development of storage facilities. And interpersonal transactions were most certainly recorded in some manner (to reflect who owes whom).

That said, the cuneiform tablets so far discovered might be the recording of warehouse inventories.

[Ezekiel]

"Study Investigates the Origins of Writing"

Thanks. It's certainly a novel and refreshing approach to "in the beginning was the word". Besides, the "TL DR" topic trail below is certainly in line with the varied subject matter of SunkenCiv's threads in general (sunken civ), so it might prove interesting for those who follow them.

BOLOGNA, ITALY—
designs on Mesopotamian cylinder seals were the precursors to certain signs in proto-cuneiform script, an archaic writing system based on pictographs.

Because, as the Zohar explains it (ALL CAPS as formatted at the link),

Shemot: Verse 99

99.

בְּהַהוּא זִמְנָא, יִתְּעַר מַלְכָּא מְשִׁיחָא, לְנַפְקָא מִגּוֹ גִּנְתָּא דְּעֵדֶן, מֵהַהוּא אֲתָר דְּאִתְקְרֵי קַ"ן צִפּוֹ"ר, וְיִתְּעָר בְּאַרְעָא דְּגָלִיל, וְהַהוּא יוֹמָא דְּיִפּוּק לְתַמָּן, יִתְרָגַּז כָּל עָלְמָא, וְכָל בְּנֵי עָלְמָא מִתְחַבְּאִין גּוֹ מְעַרְתֵי וְטִנָּרֵי, דְּלָא יַחְשְׁבוּן לְאִשְׁתְּזָבָא. וְעַל הַהוּא זִמְנָא כְּתִּיב, וּבָאוּ בִּמְעָרוֹת צוּרִים וּבִמְחִלּוֹת עָפָר מִפְּנֵי פַּחַד ה' וּמֵהֲדַר גְּאוֹנוֹ בְּקוּמוֹ לַעֲרוֹץ הָאָרֶץ.

At that time the king, Messiah, will arise to go out of the Garden of Eden from the place called the 'bird's nest' and he will become revealed in the land of Galilee [בְּאַרְעָא דְּגָלִיל]. On the day that MESSIAH goes there, the whole world will tremble and all the people of the world will hide in the caves and CRACKS in the rocks and will not expect to survive. And concerning that time, it is written, "And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and in the caves of the earth, for fear of Hashem, and for the glory of His majesty, when He arises to shake the earth terribly" (Yeshayah 2:19).

Which is to say, the word "Galilee" -- galil [גָלִיל] -- is literally a cylinder.

Ferrara and her colleagues identified a number of seal designs concerning the transport of pottery and textiles that evolved into later proto-cuneiform signs used for the same purpose.

Pottery. It's like the Jewish proverb that got top billing over on the Jewish Proverbs page:

The stone fell on the pitcher? Woe to the pitcher. The pitcher fell on the stone? Woe to the pitcher.

Esther Rabbah 7:10, quoted in Lewis Browne: The Wisdom of Israel, an Anthology [1]

Esther Rabbah 7:10

an archaic writing system based on pictographs

There's a simple Unicode sign for a wedge. It's easy to remember because it even looks like it goes full circle; i.e. 2π (2•22/7):

Wedge (∧) is a symbol that looks similar to an in-line caret (^). It is used to represent various operations. In Unicode, the symbol is encoded U+2227...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_(symbol)

I never get tired of the integration of all things. I always keep my eye out and my options open, however, because this isn't the only place where "Galilee" and "cylinder" appear together in history.

Galileo was born in Pisa (the following visual pairing is how I am able able to remember the detail without trying), so the 'land of the Galil/Galilee' even alludes to Italy, of Roman Empire fame (but who's looking there):

The biblical roots of Galileo's name and surname were to become the subject of a famous pun.[26] In 1614, during the Galileo affair, one of Galileo's opponents, the Dominican priest Tommaso Caccini, delivered against Galileo a controversial and influential sermon. In it he made a point of quoting Acts 1:11: "Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?".[citation needed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Name

(The quote is of sketchy credibility, but that's what's been out there for people to remember.)

It's a long, long journey that actually starts with Galileo's middle finger, going up. That's how I always find the best stuff. Never boring; always surprising.

Date: Stand, case, and inscription: ca. 1737

This item exemplifies the celebration of Galileo as a hero and martyr of science.

Middle finger of Galileo's right hand

“They also show how the meaning originally associated with these designs was integrated into a writing system.”

That's right. As such, Emojipedia includes in its catalog this important salute to science and establishment wisdom.

😉

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I wasn’t gainsaying that. Cuneiform arose to meet a need and almost certainly was derived from an earlier form of notation. By the time civilization started storing information on clay tablets, some form of writing had to be available.

There was a very provocative piece on PBS, Nova, perhaps, recently that claims that the alphabet was only ever invented once, in the Levant, about 3000 years ago, and was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. Tracing the Roman alphabet through Greek to Phoenician is relatively straight forward, and the Phoenician alphabet is very close to the earliest alphabetic symbols, which began by using hieroglyphs phonetically in rebuses-like form. All alphabets ever used in the world were derived from it. The assertion is that the alphabet was only invented once, one time, in one place.

[3_if_by_Treason]

PBS Nova, A to Z

Nova, A to Z

Writing and printing are perhaps the greatest inventions of all time, changing the course of human history through the spread of ideas.

In this two-part series, NOVA explores how writing began and reveals the astonishing origins of our own alphabet. Then, researchers investigate the origins of the printing press, which kicked off the Industrial Revolution and led to swift technological advancement and the expansion of cultures.

A to Z: The First Alphabet

The birth of writing and the first alphabet were among the world’s most vital inventions.

Where would we be without the world’s alphabets? Writing has played a vital role in the development and expansion of cultures throughout history. But researchers are only now uncovering the origin story to our own alphabet, which may have gotten its beginnings in a turquoise mine 4,000 years ago. From the shape of the letter A to the role of writing in trade and storytelling, discover how the written word shaped civilization itself.

A to Z: How Writing Changed the World

The creation of printing, the first information technology, drove empires and revolutions.

printing revolutionized the spread of information. While the invention of paper boosted Chinese and Islamic societies, the simple fact that the Latin alphabet could be printed using a small number of discrete, repetitive symbols helped popularize moveable type, handing Europe a crucial advantage at the beginning of the Renaissance. The printing press itself kicked off the scientific revolution that fast-tracked us to the current digital age.

[BobL]

Hieroglyphics still blows my mind. A bunch of recognizable characters, like Bird-House-Dog. Then they tried to decipher it, and wound up wondering: Does that mean that the Bird lived with the dog in the house? Or did the dog maybe eat the bird in the house? Or maybe...

Wound up none of the above. The characters were simply sounds, no different than our “a, b, c, d...”. They had us going for thousands of years with that scheme!

[Eli Kopter]

Wow! You have been busy! I have studied paleo Hebrew (circa 200 BCE) and noticed that each of letters were essentially morphed pictographs over time. For instance, the ancient aleph consisted of a vav, with two yods attached to it. The lower yod, attached to the base, pointed upwards to ‘heaven’, and the upper yod, attached to the top of the vav, pointed downwards to earth. So, you told an incredible story of faith, just by the first letter. The vav is a conjunctive, meaning that connection like an “and” would be in English. So the story it represents is one of God connecting with the lower realm, and the lower realm connecting to the God in the heavens. The second letter “bet”, pictures a house with a porch and an overhang facing to the left (or east, the direction of the rising sun), etc. Amazingly, each of the 22 letters represent a visual history of the people, as does all of the semitic aleph bets.

[DCBryan1]

What did the Mesopotamians ever do for us? Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh?!

[SunkenCiv]

"Why did the chicken scratch the road?" ...

[SunkenCiv]

I used to know a guy back in my days at The Globe (the forum system, not the newspaper) who claimed that the Sumerian writing system got more sophisticated when they improved their system of accounting. The way I remember it, he said they used a form of ‘dime accounting’ and altered the basis. He’d learned about this during his time in university. I’d try to track him down, but I can’t remember his name, or his nick, but I do recall that when he retired (and that would be in the area of 20 years ago) he moved to Indonesia, for the malaria or something.

https://search.brave.com/search?q=sumerian+dime+accounting

[SunkenCiv]

LOL, There was a young lady of Chichester...

[SunkenCiv]

They also reused the tablets and kept them moist, which made corrections pretty simple. When one city-state got pulverized by a none-too-neighborly neighbor, the visit was often accompanied by fire, and as the palace/archives burned down, the tablets got baked and the last things written on them were preserved for us. :^)

[SunkenCiv]

Freakin' flyin' dogs, they were a scourge, particularly when they walked into a bar in Sumeria...

[Joe 6-pack]

Often times when people try to assert their elitist credentials and expertise, I like to assert that written language was invented by illiterates.

[dfwgator]

Connections

https://youtu.be/NcOb3Dilzjc?t=1750

[SunkenCiv]

Hebrew grew out of their time in bondage in Egypt, the hieroglyphic system was adapted from or was analogous to hieratic writing in use for everyday communication. Oddly enough, cuneiform wound up getting used to write quite a number of other languages and was the preferred system for diplomatic correspondence by the 9th c BC. The archive at el-Amarna in Egypt consisted of cuneiform tablets, copies of incoming and outgoing diplomatic letters.