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“Before the alphabet, humans relied on hieroglyphics, according to Professor Schwartz, who found the cylinders in 2004.”

Hieroglyphics are just pictorial representations of words, essentially what the Chinese written languages are today. This prof is trying to milk a career out of a minor discovery.

Written Egyptian is more complicated than that. Yes, there were pictographs, but there were also one-sound-one-letter correspondences, particularly with names and some grammatical forms. That’s how Champollion figured out how to read it...names in Greek were transliterated nearly letter-by-letter with Egyptian hieroglyphs in the cartouches.

And actually, there are very early inscriptions called “proto-Siniatic” that used the Egyptian values almost like an alphabet.

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

““Before the alphabet, humans relied on hieroglyphics, according to Professor Schwartz, who found the cylinders.”

Two things. For some reason he is excluding the very well and acknowledged as earlier Mesopotamian Cuneiform that was dated before this.

While the Harappan Script before that was hieroglyphic, Cuneiform has a distinct alphabet.

I am trying to figure our why hieroglyphics are so persecuted as a written language. All they are is a whole premise or story equal to text compressed into a one symbol file. It is a zip file that dumps a whole bunch of data into the mind at a rate text cannot.

Yet we use alphabets and first written languages to judge intelligence. We do this for our computers now with barcodes, and we have a faster mind than it does. Hieroglyphics are faster to read compared to text. When you are educated how.

Not everyone throughout history was allowed to learn to read text. But where there are hieroglyphics they are plastered all over in public to read. This means, that most everyone could read. A sign of lower intelligence and overall education? It is the exact opposite...