Pictures for things and even ideas gave us proto-writing. But we can do better!
It's time to invent full-fledged writing.
You’re ready to grab that chisel and get your pictographic and ideographic carving
on. Then someone… inventive… comes along. Your system is artistic, but it’s not practical
enough for her.
Gone are the days of Lascaux. The world outside this cave is changing, she says. Crops, cities,
rulers, markets, and she needs a way to keep track of it all. She likes your icons. She
can use them for goats and pots, fields and even long walks through the desert. But she
has an incredible practical streak. She takes those goats and those pots, and starts to
tally the items she’s recording. One goat, she says. Then two goats, three goats, four
goats. Notice what she’s done. These aren’t simple depictions anymore. They’re not just
ideas. She’s reading one word for each symbol. She’s encoding language.
Let’s slow down here, because it’s hard to overstate the importance of this “Major
Moments in the History of Writing”. These goat counts are word-symbols now - logographs.
Pictographs can be visualized. Ideographs can be imagined. But logographs can be directly
and consistently read.
Logographic systems emerge and flourish in the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt,
China, and Mexico. Characters for people, animals, land, crops, hundreds - even thousands
- of logographs for everything under the sun and moon, including the sun and the moon.
Even after all these millennia, if you squint hard enough you can still pick out the symbols
scratched into weathered artifacts bearing the world’s early scripts: a Chinese turtle,
an Egyptian house, a Sumerian head, a Sumerian head eating bread, a Mayan jaguar. And, in
each of these places, in all of these languages, these were read as words. We know what these
logographs mean, and we can put that meaning into words.
The world is now in a race to fill itself with logographs. But which humans started
this craze? Well, the Mesoamericans started writing more
than 2900 years ago. Some Chinese characters are at least 3200 years old. Writing popped
up in Crete 4000 years ago. But the two clear contenders are Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Sumerian
Cuneiform, both a whopping 5000 years old! Minimum. It’s common to say that the Egyptians
stole the idea of writing from Mesopotamia and just came up with their own glyphs - common,
but not demonstrated.
For a while, monogenesis made sense. This is idea that one civilization was king of
all the writing, that writing started once in Mesopotamia, where people pressed a stylus
into wet clay to make these wedge (cuneus) shapes (forms): Cuneiform. So the monogenesis
story goes, everyone else steals Cuneiform and reskins it to fit their needs. It’s
not a popular story these days, given what we know about Chinese and especially Mesoamerican
writing, along with some very early Egyptian finds.
Whoever’s first, in these early days of writing, all the civilizations start manufacturing
hordes of logographs, so many in fact that they unwittingly unleash an epic memory burden
on budding logographers, from would-be ancient scribes to beginning students of
Mandarin Chinese.
Do they really need this many characters to write? Surely there’s an easier way!