This is only tangentially related, but if you like history and ship wrecks and live near Kansas City, go to the Steamboat Arabia museum.
They're digging up a steamboat that sunk, and they found after the river changed its course. It's super cool. When we went the last time we were driving across the states, one of the guys actually doing the excavating was there. He gave our kids a guided tour and talked about all the exhibits with them. It was super cool.
Look around Wikipedia, you find a little more info re slavery and this ship. Kansas and Missouri were on the violent border with a mixture of pro and anti-slavery views, even as the geographical boundary of allowed slavery separated "the south". The museum website says there's clothing on the ship that has a pro-slavery mark, to be sent to some store. The ship at one time was boarded by pro-slavery forces who found hidden guns that were being shipped to abolitionists. It does not appear they sent slaves on it en mass.
There were plenty of people who were pro slavery in those days. Mixed all across the US, read Mark Twain. There were plenty of people against it.
More to the point, I wonder if the museum addresses this. I'm going to guess only in a small way, having lived half my life in the south. Maybe someone with actual knowlege can comment instead of web search "experts" like me.
I would guess that sentence: "that sank 2600 years ago" would imply that we are not talking about exact date. But more explicit word like: "that sank about 2600 years ago" would help.
Using different number formatting instead of word or sign (~) is still implicit and not explicit.
Unless the precision (resolution) is known (stated), it is unclear whether the trailing zeroes are significant or not, one may only guess (while such a guess looks reasonable in this case). A convention for writing that unambiguously is to avoid insignificant trailing zeroes: e.g., writing it as 26e2 or 2.6e3. Then the written number carries along its precision.
This reminds me of Andrew Scott Waugh, who surveyed the height of Mount Everest. He was sure his method was accurate to the nearest foot but he measured the height of the mountain at exactly 29,000 feet.
Since he thought people would assume it was a rounded figure, he reported it as 29,002. And is therefore known as the man who first put 2 feet on the top of Everest.
In contexts significant figures might be relevant, a bar over the last 0 or a decimal point at the end are the easiest methods of saying "no really, these 0s are the real deal". Though you have other options like scientific notation, an explicit uncertainty bound, or natural language context too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures#Ways_to_de...
In some sense it never died. Lebanese people are largely their descendants, and their diaspora is extremely mercantile. Tyre is yet inhabited, as are many of the ancient metropoles of Phoenicia.
That’s one hypothesis for one component of the Sea Peoples. Like all the hypotheses, it’s very weakly evidenced - iirc correctly (from Eric Cline), in this case, there’s a possible philological link with the Egyptian exonym ‘Sherden’ and one possible representation of a nurhag.
"The wreck will be conserved, protected and eventually reassembled".
I wonder if Phoenicians labelled the parts of ships like their fellow Carthaginians (Chanani)? Or is this a Carthaginian ship but it's referred to as Phoenician?
How did people come up with alphabet? Phoenicians were one of the first to invent this technology, but I assume language existed way before that? How did that happen? Like, how did people agree on saying certain things to mean specific things? Starting from the mind of the first humans who didn't have language, how did we get to where we had language and it was so ubiquitous that even ancient civilizations like Phoenicians put it in writing?
Writing is an incredibly novel development. There are still today linguistic communities without writing, although they're becoming much rarer. Writing was unknown in parts of the world until quite recently - the Aborigines of Australia didn't have it, nor did many pre-Columbian civilisations.
It's a safe bet that writing first emerged out of a need for accounting and this thus closely tied to larger agricultural civilisations. That's why we find it in places like Mesopotamia and Egypt first. Of course, those weren't alphabets yet, but logosyllabic writing (characters could stand for either meanings or syllables). The alphabet is a specifically Phoenician innovation, although similar systems (such as abugidas), which are also phonetic, have emerged elsewhere.
Seems relative .. I literally grew up on Aboriginal land in the Kimberley and attended school with multi lingual kids that had non English speaking parents.
Most are still not writing in their own language.
What is "Far" for you is neighbours from school and locals of the town I now live in.
Certainly these are closer in space and time than Slavs from a few hundred years past.
Perthite Brit here. I’m hugely curious about the situation before the Europeans came. Was there really no writing? Were there really no boats? It’s all so murky because the history was literally not written by the aboriginal communities. But has a story been passed down?
No writing but a lot of drawing and oral transmission .. spending a few hours on a sand drawing while reciting a story that changes little across generations is another kind of map (and features in a massive tome on historic maps).
Thank you for this. I’m lucky to live near Galup (Lake Monger). It’s wonderful but I’m always reminded how much has been lost of the original wetlands.
I grew up speaking a dialect that people normally didn't regularly put into writing (and there still is no standard spelling) before the advent of text messaging.
I didn't mean far in time or space, I meant culturally. These people knew writing (in Latin) just not for their language. They had agriculture, domesticated animals, feudal society, some of them were already Christian, their language was very similar to English conceptually so their concepts would be similar to ours (well at least mine)
Stating this as fact is misleading. Lack of evidence isn't proof of absence.
Humanity in its current form has existed for 300,000 years. The idea that writing spontaneously emerged 13,000 years ago, independently in multiple locations all over the world, coincidentally right after glaciers melted and sea levels rose 300-900 feet, reshaping the world’s geography, is —at best— an assumption, not a certainty.
Except writing didn’t emerge 13,000 years ago but 5000 for writing and 9000 for proto-writing.
It also wasn’t discovered simultaneously. China is 3000 years ago, and Maya 2300 years ago. Sumerian or Egyptian were close to same time which probably means they were connected.
Also, writing didn't just spontaneously appear at random locations. It emerged in the most highly developed societies of the time, which had cities, agriculture, irrigation, sophisticated central governments, and so on.
Is that necessarily true? Likely we know much more about the most highly developed societies so that's where we would more likely discover ancient writing.
I'm saying the GP's claimed causal relationship between advanced civilization and writing might result from advancement causing more evidence to survive. Certainly there are undiscovered caches, of course.
Plenty of people lived in agricultural civilizations that were not the "most highly developed societies". Also, I'm not sure hunter-gatherers couldn't develop writing, though I know theories and could imagine reasons either way. How do you tell your compatriots, coming in the next few weeks, where the good food is?
You are still conflating 'advanced, settled Bronze-Age civilizations' with agriculture. Most agricultural communities were not 'advanced' (almost by definition).
> We have plenty of artifacts and paintings from hunter-gatherers
Though I'm not sure of the point in the parent comment, here's a story about how discovery of writing works:
Beowulf is the greatest discovery in the history of English. It's the earliest epic poem in any Germanic language, and by itself it is about 10% of known Old English poetry. The date of the story's creation is unknown, with estimates ranging from 6th-8th century CE. The manuscript we have today is thought to have been written (not printed, of course) in the south of England, maybe between the 10th and 12th centuries CE. And at some point after that, the story and manuscript were lost to time.
The physical document reappeared from oblivion, sometime before 1563 in the collection of Laurence Nowell. Nowell, unfortunately, didn't know (or didn't reveal) what they had. The document was there, but Beowulf the story and that manuscript were still lost.
And that continued to be the situation for over two hundred years, as the manuscript passed through at least two more hands, and still Beowulf was lost to time. In 1731 the manuscript was caught in a fire (!). Almost, it was forever consigned to oblivion before it was even discovered, but the fire only charred it around the edges, costing us a few words here and there, and drying the very old pages to make them even more fragile. Many other manuscripts were lost.
Finally, around 1790, Danish scholar Grimur Thorkelin read it and realized what he had. (Thorkelin then sat on it for another 25 years before finally publishing in 1815!)
Are there records we haven't discovered? Yes. Are they lost to history? Not yet.
And they can actually trace the development of writing in Mesopotamia all the way back to impressions of tokens on clay balls used for keeping track of IOUs.
Actually, the alphabet invention was precisely that the same alphabet could be used for different languages.
They did not agreed on using certain sounds for specific things. They already did that on their own languages, each with their specific sounds. What the Phoenician Alphabet did was transcribing those sounds that already existed to a writing system that was common.
The Phoenicians did not invent the alphabet but they used it so much that developed it a lot. They used it for communication as a Lingua Franca for commerce in the Mediterranean.
It actually became a language on its own. They will use a native word from the native language of some particular good or commodity and then everybody around the Mediterranean Sea will use that written name and sound for referring to that thing.
It was extremely useful, so people used it more and more creating over time latin and greek scripts.
> Actually, the alphabet invention was precisely that the same alphabet could be used for different languages.
No. Multiple languages were written with the same alphabet because of the borrowing of that technology by speakers of other languages, not because it was designed as such.
Actually the process of borrowing is fondamental to the emergence of alphabets: the three biggest (by corpus size) logographic scripts all gave birth to more phonetic scripts across language boundaries. That happened with hieroglyphics (the case we are discussing), but also with Sumerian cuneiform > Akkadian writing and Chinese characters > Japanese kanas.
We have the notes from a zoom meeting between the priests of Ba'al and some early Phoenician scribes when they were designing the alphabet and outside of sacrificing children they were actually really concerned about accessibility standards
You might be confusing language (a natural human skill which we evolved) and writing (a technology invented by humans, within the last 5-10 thousand years - very roughly).
As far as I’m aware, there no evidence that modern humans ever existed without language. And other recent hominid species that until recently co-existed with our ancestors probably had language too.
So probably there was never a human without language. Any non-lingual ancestor of ours was not human and probably pre-dates humans.
As for writing, to be reductionist, it is essentially arbitrary.
Yes, that is what I meant though in retrospect I see I didn’t make that entirely clear. What I meant was that language and vocalizations go way, way back than any ancestor remotely human-like.
Where you draw the line between mere “vocalizations” and “language” is a pretty open question, IMO.
and don't the most important of them all, neofetch, it is posited that they used it for colorful displays to attract mates. How successful it was, we do not know ;)
The Phoenician alphabet started as the Proto-Sinaitic script. For context, if you're trying to write things down in the Sinai, you're logging the wares carried by caravans going back and forth from Egypt to the Phoenician heartland and back. You don't need the full range of hieroglyphs, so you don't need the training of an Egyptian priest. So you start with a reduced list of symbols.
Someone in this position started using those symbols to register the sounds of the Semitic languages, and the rest is literally history.
Canaanite workers who went to Egypt to work in the mines saw these picture things used on walls. They had an idea to use it only instead of a picture per word the just used them for sounds. The Ox Head they saw they used for their Aleph sound. It was adjusted and rotated a bit then later on rotated again until we get our modern letter A.
The Phoenicians did not invent their alphabet, they inherited an older alphabet.
Nevertheless they had a very important role in spreading the alphabetic writing system to many other populations, which was a consequence of their travels and commercial relations with everybody around the Mediterranean and even farther away.
Because of this, the ancestry of the majority of the alphabetic systems, even of some far away in South Asia can be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet.
Because of the importance of the commerce with Phoenicians and because of the many Phoenician colonies, the Phoenician language has also been spoken by many non-Phoenicians. This had as a consequence a simplification of the pronunciation of the Phoenician language, because for most foreigners it was difficult to pronounce some of the sounds specific to the Semitic languages.
The result of this simplification in pronunciation was that the number of letters of the Phoenician alphabet has been reduced to 22 letters from the 27 letters of the older North-Semitic alphabet inherited by the Phoenicians, because some of the sounds that were written with different letters in the older alphabet have evolved towards an identical pronunciation, so eventually the redundant letters from each pair with the same pronunciation have been dropped.
22 letters is a too small number for most languages, which has forced those who have adapted the Phoenician alphabet to other languages to add supplemental letters, like in the Greek alphabet, then in the Latin alphabet.
The small number of letters has created problems also for the writing of other Semitic languages, like Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic, which did not have the simplified pronunciation of Phoenician. The older North-Semitic alphabet from which the Phoenician alphabet had been derived would have been perfect for such Semitic languages, but by the time when writing has spread from the Phoenicians to their Semitic neighbors the older Semitic alphabet had been forgotten, exactly in the same way (and probably for the same reasons) as the Mycenaean writing had been forgotten in Greece (i.e. toward the end of the 2nd millennium BC there have been a few centuries of "Dark Ages" when much prior knowledge had been lost, after the destruction of many cities).
Because the older Semitic alphabet had been forgotten, the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters derived from the Phoenician alphabet through the Aramaic alphabet, despite the fact that this number was not enough to write all the consonants of ancient Hebrew. One Hebrew letter has now 2 variants distinguished with diacritic marks, i.e. "shin" and "sin", because originally it was used to write 2 different sounds, one of which no longer existed in Phoenician (modern Hebrew has lost that sound, so now "sin" and "samekh" are pronounced in the same way).
Writing has been invented independently in many places around the world, but in almost all writing systems the written symbols have been used to denote either syllables or words.
The Egyptian writing system and the alphabetic writing systems, all of which have been derived from the Egyptian writing system, are the exception.
A subset of the symbols of the Egyptian writing system was used to denote single consonants, while the remainder were used to denote multiple consonants, regardless of which vowels were pronounced together with the consonants.
The ancient Semitic alphabet has simplified the Egyptian writing system by retaining only the symbols that denote a single consonant. The ancient Semitic alphabet has retained thus the principle of writing only the consonants, and it has also inherited from the Egyptians the direction of writing from right to left, which has been preserved in the Hebrew and Arabic writing systems. Besides changing the meaning of some Phoenician letters from consonants to vowels, developing thus the first alphabetic writing system in the restricted meaning of the term "alphabet", i.e. with an approximately one-to-one mapping between all phonemes and letters, not only between consonants and letters, the Greeks have reversed the writing direction and this has been inherited in the other European writing systems.
Unknown, but I'd hazard a guess that old cave art that depicts animals and sizes probably had sounds associated with them too. Humans like to tell stories, so probably cave art had oral history of some kind, and pictures probably became progressively more precise to handle progressively more complex stories, maybe about seasons, places, counting to keep track of things, etc.
That is a sound idea, but it makes more sense for hieroglyphs and ideograms.
My guess for phoenicia is that their alphabet comes from numbers (or maybe other smaller individual set of symbols) borrowed from another culture, but I wouldn't be able to determine from who or where.
There is a decent BBC documentary "The Secret History of Writing" which is all about the origins of writing. If you are interested in how it developed in all its different forms it's worth a watch.
try to recreate reality and a limited but repeatable form. roar like a lion, sing like a bird. remove everything that a thing looks like in order to leave what it is. break it into components and try to recompose them in new ways. general principals of intelligence, I'd say.
Loggers used to sink logs in water to keep them from rotting. Keeping wood wet is a pretty good preservative.
What gets to wood is critters. A lot of sea creatures will nibble away at it. On land, it's insects and fungus and the like. Tidal action will also scour away exposed wood.
Sometimes sediments (sand, mud) protect the wooden wreck from decay. Once the wreck is moved, it becomes a race against time to prevent decay. The way that museum wrecks like the Wasa in Stockholm are preserved is by drying every wooden piece and saturating them with plastic resin. This process is slow and labour intensive: the article mentions that preparing the Spanish wreck for display will take four years.
The archeology museum in Arles, France displays a conserved Roman river barge which was conserved in this fashion, see their Youtube documentary [0] There are many more known river barges at the bottom of the Rhone, but these are best preserved by leaving them where they are.
In water yes, but ancient shipwrecks are found all over the place because they've been buried under sediment. That is the case with this one, you'll notice in the article that they say, "the sand protection is leaving", which I take to mean that while it was discovered in 1993, it was covered up with sand and so protected from issues such as water movement, sun, and life forms. The sand is now eroding away and leaving the ship unprotected, hence the move, hence the article.
In Stockholm there now is, in addition to the well known Vasa museum, a museum about wrecks. It is called Vrak (Wreck) and is about wrecks in the Baltic Sea mainly. It is more of the interactive kind, no big wrecks on display, but smaller artifacts and audio/video/VR and so on. Interesting for those curious about the subject.
This is only tangentially related, but if you like history and ship wrecks and live near Kansas City, go to the Steamboat Arabia museum.
They're digging up a steamboat that sunk, and they found after the river changed its course. It's super cool. When we went the last time we were driving across the states, one of the guys actually doing the excavating was there. He gave our kids a guided tour and talked about all the exhibits with them. It was super cool.
Cool indeed but 1856CE is not quite as incredible as 300BCE.
What was in the 1856 wreck has rewritten the history of commerce on the Mississippi.
You'll never guess what happened next!
This is the one weird trick that museums use to pull in donor dollars.
did it rewrite the slave trade part as well or did that remain as it is written?
Look around Wikipedia, you find a little more info re slavery and this ship. Kansas and Missouri were on the violent border with a mixture of pro and anti-slavery views, even as the geographical boundary of allowed slavery separated "the south". The museum website says there's clothing on the ship that has a pro-slavery mark, to be sent to some store. The ship at one time was boarded by pro-slavery forces who found hidden guns that were being shipped to abolitionists. It does not appear they sent slaves on it en mass.
There were plenty of people who were pro slavery in those days. Mixed all across the US, read Mark Twain. There were plenty of people against it.
More to the point, I wonder if the museum addresses this. I'm going to guess only in a small way, having lived half my life in the south. Maybe someone with actual knowlege can comment instead of web search "experts" like me.
It’s not a competition.
Yeah but the one from 19th century seems bit random for this thread.
Loughla did state: "only tangentially related"
Loved the one in Kansas City! There are some great, thematically-similar museums in other countries as well, if you ever find yourself there:
- the Vasa in Stockholm, Sweden is a ship dredged from the harbor and stabilized, sank in 1628
- the Mary Rose in Portsmouth, England is a Tudor ship that sank in 1545 that was raised and stabilized
In both cases a ton of work was done to stabilize and preserve the remains of the ships that is, imo, almost more interesting than the ship itself.
The Vasa Museum , Stockholm, Sweden ( Ultra 4K ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9NQUULR-UE
Honestly I wouldn't rush to see the Mary Rose unless you are extremely interested. It's a little anticlimactic as a viewing experience.
Go and see it while you can! Its lease ends in 2026 I think its future is uncertain.
Agreed, it is a very cool museum. Go early on a weekend morning in the spring and hit the market while it’s bustling, love that part of the city.
FYI 2600 and 2.6k use the same number of characters.
Could use the electronics convention and save a character: 2k6
It doesn't mean the same though, 2.6k implies somewhere between 2550 and 2650 years ago and 2600 an exact number of years.
I would guess that sentence: "that sank 2600 years ago" would imply that we are not talking about exact date. But more explicit word like: "that sank about 2600 years ago" would help.
Using different number formatting instead of word or sign (~) is still implicit and not explicit.
That is intriguing I had never seen xk used in that sense. Is that a common convention?
Popular in finance. Often you dont need the details.
2600 only has 2 significant digits. It's not an exact number.
Unless the precision (resolution) is known (stated), it is unclear whether the trailing zeroes are significant or not, one may only guess (while such a guess looks reasonable in this case). A convention for writing that unambiguously is to avoid insignificant trailing zeroes: e.g., writing it as 26e2 or 2.6e3. Then the written number carries along its precision.
This reminds me of Andrew Scott Waugh, who surveyed the height of Mount Everest. He was sure his method was accurate to the nearest foot but he measured the height of the mountain at exactly 29,000 feet.
Since he thought people would assume it was a rounded figure, he reported it as 29,002. And is therefore known as the man who first put 2 feet on the top of Everest.
Doesn't writing out the trailing zeroes mean that you clain 4 significant digits? At least in the physics context.
I think there are a few conventions for expressing sig digits.
Where I was taught…
2600 has 2 sd
2600. Has 4 sd
2.6e3 has 2sd
2.60e3 has 3 sd
Edit. If I had been in charge of setting sd rules, I would’ve said …
2600 has 4 sd
260? Has 3 sd
26?? Has 2 sd
The fact zeros are overloaded (they can be placeholders or they can actually mean 0) is confusing to students.
I’m pre coffee so go easy. How do I write the exact number 2600 if 2600 isn’t an exact number?
In contexts significant figures might be relevant, a bar over the last 0 or a decimal point at the end are the easiest methods of saying "no really, these 0s are the real deal". Though you have other options like scientific notation, an explicit uncertainty bound, or natural language context too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures#Ways_to_de...
Has the advantage that you can't confuse it with 2600BCE.
A good book to read more or less related to this shipwreck:
https://www.amazon.com/How-World-Made-West-History/dp/059372...
> They spent 560 hours diving at the wreck site to make detailed diagrams of its many cracks and fissures.
I feel a bit jealous of them, me being in tech, doing hard work like this to preserve the history of humanity.
Diving with a little compressor tube looks fun. I used to clean my dad's pool that way, as a kid.
Phoenicia will rise again
In some sense it never died. Lebanese people are largely their descendants, and their diaspora is extremely mercantile. Tyre is yet inhabited, as are many of the ancient metropoles of Phoenicia.
Bring on the Sea Peoples (maybe)
The sea peoples likely came from around the Mediterranean, but primarily were Nuragic people from modern-day Sardinia
That’s one hypothesis for one component of the Sea Peoples. Like all the hypotheses, it’s very weakly evidenced - iirc correctly (from Eric Cline), in this case, there’s a possible philological link with the Egyptian exonym ‘Sherden’ and one possible representation of a nurhag.
Different set of people (although they both traveled on the sea).
ahem... https://xkcd.com/356/
MPGA
"The wreck will be conserved, protected and eventually reassembled".
I wonder if Phoenicians labelled the parts of ships like their fellow Carthaginians (Chanani)? Or is this a Carthaginian ship but it's referred to as Phoenician?
Fun-fact that the ship was found on a beach that is near the Spanish city called "Cartagena".
Many of the cities in the region have Carthaginian names. It's a little surreal to see them when you speak Hebrew:
Cadiz: "boundary" - the city that guarded access to Britain. Malaga: "Queen City". Cartagena. Barcelona ("barkel" - blessing)
Fun fact #2: that city was founded by Hasdrubal Barca, father of Hannibal Barca!
There’s also a ‘Carthage of the Indies’ (Cartagena de Indias) in Colombia.
"Carthaginian" is more or less a subset of "Phoenician".
Which is why the adjective associated with Carthage is "Punic".
How did people come up with alphabet? Phoenicians were one of the first to invent this technology, but I assume language existed way before that? How did that happen? Like, how did people agree on saying certain things to mean specific things? Starting from the mind of the first humans who didn't have language, how did we get to where we had language and it was so ubiquitous that even ancient civilizations like Phoenicians put it in writing?
> but I assume language existed way before that
Way, way, way older.
Writing is an incredibly novel development. There are still today linguistic communities without writing, although they're becoming much rarer. Writing was unknown in parts of the world until quite recently - the Aborigines of Australia didn't have it, nor did many pre-Columbian civilisations.
It's a safe bet that writing first emerged out of a need for accounting and this thus closely tied to larger agricultural civilisations. That's why we find it in places like Mesopotamia and Egypt first. Of course, those weren't alphabets yet, but logosyllabic writing (characters could stand for either meanings or syllables). The alphabet is a specifically Phoenician innovation, although similar systems (such as abugidas), which are also phonetic, have emerged elsewhere.
> There are still today linguistic communities without writing, although they're becoming much rarer.
From a 1969 study of preindustrial societies (though I'm not sure if they are all contemporary or if some are historical):
It's from a somewhat famous data set in its field: George P. Murdock, D.R. White. Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). Ethnology (1969)> the Aborigines of Australia didn't have it, nor did many pre-Columbian civilisations.
No need to go that far, the Slavs didn't write down their languages until ~800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script
> No need to go that far ..
Seems relative .. I literally grew up on Aboriginal land in the Kimberley and attended school with multi lingual kids that had non English speaking parents.
Most are still not writing in their own language.
What is "Far" for you is neighbours from school and locals of the town I now live in.
Certainly these are closer in space and time than Slavs from a few hundred years past.
Perthite Brit here. I’m hugely curious about the situation before the Europeans came. Was there really no writing? Were there really no boats? It’s all so murky because the history was literally not written by the aboriginal communities. But has a story been passed down?
No writing but a lot of drawing and oral transmission .. spending a few hours on a sand drawing while reciting a story that changes little across generations is another kind of map (and features in a massive tome on historic maps).
No "boats" ala coracles or oak keel ships but (regionally) plenty of canoes .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Canoes isn't set on the Swan River.
Perth, of course, once had many lakes and swampy wetlands before all the market garden bore went in and drainage ditches.
> But has a story been passed down?
Many, all over. DM from up where I grew up touched up pretty old paintings and told stories: https://magabala.com.au/products/yorro-yorro
There were|are a lot of language areas each with stories of their own: https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...
Thank you for this. I’m lucky to live near Galup (Lake Monger). It’s wonderful but I’m always reminded how much has been lost of the original wetlands.
I grew up speaking a dialect that people normally didn't regularly put into writing (and there still is no standard spelling) before the advent of text messaging.
1492 is nearer than the 800s
I didn't mean far in time or space, I meant culturally. These people knew writing (in Latin) just not for their language. They had agriculture, domesticated animals, feudal society, some of them were already Christian, their language was very similar to English conceptually so their concepts would be similar to ours (well at least mine)
> Writing is an incredibly novel development.
Stating this as fact is misleading. Lack of evidence isn't proof of absence.
Humanity in its current form has existed for 300,000 years. The idea that writing spontaneously emerged 13,000 years ago, independently in multiple locations all over the world, coincidentally right after glaciers melted and sea levels rose 300-900 feet, reshaping the world’s geography, is —at best— an assumption, not a certainty.
We have many artefacts dating 20 to 50,000 years old. They don't have writing on them. It's strong evidence.
Except writing didn’t emerge 13,000 years ago but 5000 for writing and 9000 for proto-writing.
It also wasn’t discovered simultaneously. China is 3000 years ago, and Maya 2300 years ago. Sumerian or Egyptian were close to same time which probably means they were connected.
Also, writing didn't just spontaneously appear at random locations. It emerged in the most highly developed societies of the time, which had cities, agriculture, irrigation, sophisticated central governments, and so on.
Is that necessarily true? Likely we know much more about the most highly developed societies so that's where we would more likely discover ancient writing.
What are you suggesting? That there are undiscovered caches of writing from ancient hunter-gatherers?
I'm saying the GP's claimed causal relationship between advanced civilization and writing might result from advancement causing more evidence to survive. Certainly there are undiscovered caches, of course.
Plenty of people lived in agricultural civilizations that were not the "most highly developed societies". Also, I'm not sure hunter-gatherers couldn't develop writing, though I know theories and could imagine reasons either way. How do you tell your compatriots, coming in the next few weeks, where the good food is?
We have plenty of artifacts and paintings from hunter-gatherers, but no evidence at all of writing.
Meanwhile, we have mountains of evidence of writing from the advanced, settled Bronze-Age civilizations.
We can't be sure that nobody ever scribbled some symbol down before the invention of agriculture, but we know it can't have been common.
You are still conflating 'advanced, settled Bronze-Age civilizations' with agriculture. Most agricultural communities were not 'advanced' (almost by definition).
> We have plenty of artifacts and paintings from hunter-gatherers
Do we? And in the Neolithic or later?
In the global context, they were extremely advanced.
If you have no records, then we fundamentally cannot know about it yes?
Literally lost to history.
Though I'm not sure of the point in the parent comment, here's a story about how discovery of writing works:
Beowulf is the greatest discovery in the history of English. It's the earliest epic poem in any Germanic language, and by itself it is about 10% of known Old English poetry. The date of the story's creation is unknown, with estimates ranging from 6th-8th century CE. The manuscript we have today is thought to have been written (not printed, of course) in the south of England, maybe between the 10th and 12th centuries CE. And at some point after that, the story and manuscript were lost to time.
The physical document reappeared from oblivion, sometime before 1563 in the collection of Laurence Nowell. Nowell, unfortunately, didn't know (or didn't reveal) what they had. The document was there, but Beowulf the story and that manuscript were still lost.
And that continued to be the situation for over two hundred years, as the manuscript passed through at least two more hands, and still Beowulf was lost to time. In 1731 the manuscript was caught in a fire (!). Almost, it was forever consigned to oblivion before it was even discovered, but the fire only charred it around the edges, costing us a few words here and there, and drying the very old pages to make them even more fragile. Many other manuscripts were lost.
Finally, around 1790, Danish scholar Grimur Thorkelin read it and realized what he had. (Thorkelin then sat on it for another 25 years before finally publishing in 1815!)
Are there records we haven't discovered? Yes. Are they lost to history? Not yet.
And they can actually trace the development of writing in Mesopotamia all the way back to impressions of tokens on clay balls used for keeping track of IOUs.
This isn't really accurate; we have tokens and we have proto-writing, but there's not a clear dependence of either on the other.
Actually, the alphabet invention was precisely that the same alphabet could be used for different languages.
They did not agreed on using certain sounds for specific things. They already did that on their own languages, each with their specific sounds. What the Phoenician Alphabet did was transcribing those sounds that already existed to a writing system that was common.
The Phoenicians did not invent the alphabet but they used it so much that developed it a lot. They used it for communication as a Lingua Franca for commerce in the Mediterranean.
It actually became a language on its own. They will use a native word from the native language of some particular good or commodity and then everybody around the Mediterranean Sea will use that written name and sound for referring to that thing.
It was extremely useful, so people used it more and more creating over time latin and greek scripts.
We're currently evolving back to pictograms.
> Actually, the alphabet invention was precisely that the same alphabet could be used for different languages.
No. Multiple languages were written with the same alphabet because of the borrowing of that technology by speakers of other languages, not because it was designed as such.
Actually the process of borrowing is fondamental to the emergence of alphabets: the three biggest (by corpus size) logographic scripts all gave birth to more phonetic scripts across language boundaries. That happened with hieroglyphics (the case we are discussing), but also with Sumerian cuneiform > Akkadian writing and Chinese characters > Japanese kanas.
We have the notes from a zoom meeting between the priests of Ba'al and some early Phoenician scribes when they were designing the alphabet and outside of sacrificing children they were actually really concerned about accessibility standards
You might be confusing language (a natural human skill which we evolved) and writing (a technology invented by humans, within the last 5-10 thousand years - very roughly).
As far as I’m aware, there no evidence that modern humans ever existed without language. And other recent hominid species that until recently co-existed with our ancestors probably had language too.
So probably there was never a human without language. Any non-lingual ancestor of ours was not human and probably pre-dates humans.
As for writing, to be reductionist, it is essentially arbitrary.
We co-evolved with language - the evidence is our adaptations to control over the voicebox, tongue, lips, etc.
Yes, that is what I meant though in retrospect I see I didn’t make that entirely clear. What I meant was that language and vocalizations go way, way back than any ancestor remotely human-like.
Where you draw the line between mere “vocalizations” and “language” is a pretty open question, IMO.
Man's first words were:
> awk grep ping biff ip yum du curl sed
Not to offend anyone, but ip yum and curl are neologisms introduced in later translations.
Wars have been fought over this disagreement!
and don't the most important of them all, neofetch, it is posited that they used it for colorful displays to attract mates. How successful it was, we do not know ;)
Written with ed, of course.
The Phoenician alphabet started as the Proto-Sinaitic script. For context, if you're trying to write things down in the Sinai, you're logging the wares carried by caravans going back and forth from Egypt to the Phoenician heartland and back. You don't need the full range of hieroglyphs, so you don't need the training of an Egyptian priest. So you start with a reduced list of symbols.
Someone in this position started using those symbols to register the sounds of the Semitic languages, and the rest is literally history.
Canaanite workers who went to Egypt to work in the mines saw these picture things used on walls. They had an idea to use it only instead of a picture per word the just used them for sounds. The Ox Head they saw they used for their Aleph sound. It was adjusted and rotated a bit then later on rotated again until we get our modern letter A.
Egyptian hieroglyphs were used sometimes to represent 1-3 consonants, rather than words or ideas.
Egyptian Hieratic script simplified the forms down for writing with ink.
Canaanites simplified it further by tossing all the ideograms, logograms and multi-consonant symbols to create an abjad.
The Greeks added the first vowels to create a true alphabet.
The Phoenicians did not invent their alphabet, they inherited an older alphabet.
Nevertheless they had a very important role in spreading the alphabetic writing system to many other populations, which was a consequence of their travels and commercial relations with everybody around the Mediterranean and even farther away.
Because of this, the ancestry of the majority of the alphabetic systems, even of some far away in South Asia can be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet.
Because of the importance of the commerce with Phoenicians and because of the many Phoenician colonies, the Phoenician language has also been spoken by many non-Phoenicians. This had as a consequence a simplification of the pronunciation of the Phoenician language, because for most foreigners it was difficult to pronounce some of the sounds specific to the Semitic languages.
The result of this simplification in pronunciation was that the number of letters of the Phoenician alphabet has been reduced to 22 letters from the 27 letters of the older North-Semitic alphabet inherited by the Phoenicians, because some of the sounds that were written with different letters in the older alphabet have evolved towards an identical pronunciation, so eventually the redundant letters from each pair with the same pronunciation have been dropped.
22 letters is a too small number for most languages, which has forced those who have adapted the Phoenician alphabet to other languages to add supplemental letters, like in the Greek alphabet, then in the Latin alphabet.
The small number of letters has created problems also for the writing of other Semitic languages, like Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic, which did not have the simplified pronunciation of Phoenician. The older North-Semitic alphabet from which the Phoenician alphabet had been derived would have been perfect for such Semitic languages, but by the time when writing has spread from the Phoenicians to their Semitic neighbors the older Semitic alphabet had been forgotten, exactly in the same way (and probably for the same reasons) as the Mycenaean writing had been forgotten in Greece (i.e. toward the end of the 2nd millennium BC there have been a few centuries of "Dark Ages" when much prior knowledge had been lost, after the destruction of many cities).
Because the older Semitic alphabet had been forgotten, the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters derived from the Phoenician alphabet through the Aramaic alphabet, despite the fact that this number was not enough to write all the consonants of ancient Hebrew. One Hebrew letter has now 2 variants distinguished with diacritic marks, i.e. "shin" and "sin", because originally it was used to write 2 different sounds, one of which no longer existed in Phoenician (modern Hebrew has lost that sound, so now "sin" and "samekh" are pronounced in the same way).
Writing has been invented independently in many places around the world, but in almost all writing systems the written symbols have been used to denote either syllables or words.
The Egyptian writing system and the alphabetic writing systems, all of which have been derived from the Egyptian writing system, are the exception.
A subset of the symbols of the Egyptian writing system was used to denote single consonants, while the remainder were used to denote multiple consonants, regardless of which vowels were pronounced together with the consonants.
The ancient Semitic alphabet has simplified the Egyptian writing system by retaining only the symbols that denote a single consonant. The ancient Semitic alphabet has retained thus the principle of writing only the consonants, and it has also inherited from the Egyptians the direction of writing from right to left, which has been preserved in the Hebrew and Arabic writing systems. Besides changing the meaning of some Phoenician letters from consonants to vowels, developing thus the first alphabetic writing system in the restricted meaning of the term "alphabet", i.e. with an approximately one-to-one mapping between all phonemes and letters, not only between consonants and letters, the Greeks have reversed the writing direction and this has been inherited in the other European writing systems.
Unknown, but I'd hazard a guess that old cave art that depicts animals and sizes probably had sounds associated with them too. Humans like to tell stories, so probably cave art had oral history of some kind, and pictures probably became progressively more precise to handle progressively more complex stories, maybe about seasons, places, counting to keep track of things, etc.
That is a sound idea, but it makes more sense for hieroglyphs and ideograms.
My guess for phoenicia is that their alphabet comes from numbers (or maybe other smaller individual set of symbols) borrowed from another culture, but I wouldn't be able to determine from who or where.
Here is a good history, by an expert, of how writing evolved from a counting system to a full written language:
https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing...
There is a decent BBC documentary "The Secret History of Writing" which is all about the origins of writing. If you are interested in how it developed in all its different forms it's worth a watch.
This is basically unknown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language
Realize that any successful language came from a close family with repeative daily tasks. To be successful they would need common terms to cooperate.
People come up with new things all the time. It happens in this very moment, all around the world. I don't see how this is astonishing.
try to recreate reality and a limited but repeatable form. roar like a lion, sing like a bird. remove everything that a thing looks like in order to leave what it is. break it into components and try to recompose them in new ways. general principals of intelligence, I'd say.
Preserved ancient shipwrecks are why I don't believe when people say some material "degrades in X years".
The extreme lack of ancient shipwrecks should convince you that those materials do degrade, almost every time.
Loggers used to sink logs in water to keep them from rotting. Keeping wood wet is a pretty good preservative.
What gets to wood is critters. A lot of sea creatures will nibble away at it. On land, it's insects and fungus and the like. Tidal action will also scour away exposed wood.
Sometimes sediments (sand, mud) protect the wooden wreck from decay. Once the wreck is moved, it becomes a race against time to prevent decay. The way that museum wrecks like the Wasa in Stockholm are preserved is by drying every wooden piece and saturating them with plastic resin. This process is slow and labour intensive: the article mentions that preparing the Spanish wreck for display will take four years.
The archeology museum in Arles, France displays a conserved Roman river barge which was conserved in this fashion, see their Youtube documentary [0] There are many more known river barges at the bottom of the Rhone, but these are best preserved by leaving them where they are.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUBvSkdJ4Ig
In most waters, wood will be consumed by various life forms fairly quickly. No ancient shipwrecks are found there.
The exceptions include the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the deep ocean.
Don't know what saved this old boat though.
In water yes, but ancient shipwrecks are found all over the place because they've been buried under sediment. That is the case with this one, you'll notice in the article that they say, "the sand protection is leaving", which I take to mean that while it was discovered in 1993, it was covered up with sand and so protected from issues such as water movement, sun, and life forms. The sand is now eroding away and leaving the ship unprotected, hence the move, hence the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology_of_shipwrecks
Thanks. I wasn't aware of this!
It was also protected with a metallic coffin when discovered in the 90s
In Stockholm there now is, in addition to the well known Vasa museum, a museum about wrecks. It is called Vrak (Wreck) and is about wrecks in the Baltic Sea mainly. It is more of the interactive kind, no big wrecks on display, but smaller artifacts and audio/video/VR and so on. Interesting for those curious about the subject.
Of course the Titanic has been continuously rusting away too, along with being eaten by bacteria.
> Preserved ancient shipwrecks
See also "bog people".
But the results of such extreme anomalies do not extrapolate reliably to the general case.