The Cucuteni–Trypillia megasites in Ukraine appear to predate the Mesopotamian ones by a few centuries, though they didn't have writing (apparently).
these sites were in close proximity to the Vinca culture which did have some precursor of writing
Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
91–100 of 199 posts
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#92Title should be "How the Ancient Sumerians Created the World’s First Writing System"
HN automatically removes the word how from the start of titles. A controversial choice, but I don't see a big issue with it in this case
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#93"...Created the World’s First Writing System" that we know of. They used burned clay, which lasts forever. I am sure there have been writing systems before, they just rotted away.
Yes, there must have been a long pre-history of writing proper, like, leaving marks on trees or soil as a guide, a warning, etc. But it takes a civilization to start writing on a scale comparable to that of the Sumerians, and such a civilization cannot be lost to time so completely as to leave behind some evidence if its writing - especially given that they would likely use different media, including clay and stone.
It depends on the material. Incas uses knots for record keeping. Those are not as durable as burned clay. In our current global civilization with advanced computing tech, magnetic tapes, cdroms, and hard drives won't last very long. Maybe SSDs have greater durability, but they will also require computing tech to dicipher. I do not think the existence of surviving writing materials is a strong argument for evidence of civilization, and speaks more to the limitations of the technology.
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#94* that we are aware of as of 2024. I think most historical discoveries should be prefixed or suffixed with this because as we dig up more things we might learn that there was an even older writing system (in this case).
And in particular, I'm always curious -- how much of what we know of cuneiform is just because using clay tablets made examples more likely to survive to the present day? You can kind of imagine there being a soft temporal horizon for different kinds materials and artifacts -- far enough in the past, there are some kinds of things we should expect probably can't be discovered. If the people at Gobleki Tepe (or any ot…
And it follows: how much of the artifacts of our present civilization will last 3,000 years for future archaeologists and anthropologists?
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#95describing the surrounding countries as barbarian is such a bad narrative given what we now know about the Jiroft, Elamite, Harappan and Egyptian culture.
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#96I've always wondered whether the Sumerians knew they were the first. Past empires, lost civilizations, and ancient artifacts have always fascinated us. The first museum emerges is Mesopotamia around 530 BC; the Egyptian obelisk installed next to the brand-new Colosseum in Rome was older then than the Colosseum is now; legends of giants and heroes of bygone ages are literary universals. We hunger for the past. But the…
... were the Sumerians the first? The first what?
The article discusses the Uruk period, of maybe 4000 - 3000 BC.
In the middle east, there had been millennia of settlement and agriculture by this point. Gobekli Tepe is apparently ~9000 BC. The Tower of Jericho was built around 8000 BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_prehistory
Circa 7500 BC there were a bunch of significant sites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Ghazal_(archaeological_sit...
#/media/File:Fertile_crescent_Neolithic_B_circa_7500_BC.jpg){kind=link}
Did Sumerians not know about any of those preexisting sites in the broader region? Maybe they built bigger cities, but I don't think they lacked for evidence of older civilizations and sites.
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm aware, but it seems silly to me to say oral traditions aren't durable and that writing is the only way to get at history. As linked above as an example, there's recent scholarship that points to oral traditions that encode history perfectly well across enormous timelines. Even in written form, we have vague translations in ancient Buddhist texts that require cross referencing multiple sources to get at a meaning,…
> I'm aware, but it seems silly to me to say oral traditions aren't durable and that writing is the only way to get at history. no one said that but there is a definitional issue here - to reiterate the previous poster's point: > Historians use “history” as a technical term for events recorded in written and other durable records. That's how the word is defined by historians. It's not a value judgement on oral tradit…
It's those kinds of paradigmatic biases that someone has written the satire, "Nacirema", to illustrate how "everyone else is saying it" can lead to blind spots.
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, I know this is confusing (no, it isn't). The person I replied to replied to me. I never mentioned city, but they injected the word city nonetheless probably because they had no idea what they were replying to or what the words meant. What qualifies whether any fixed permanent or semi-permanent settlement is actually a city , town , hamlet , or village is entirely subjective.
> What qualifies whether any fixed permanent or semi-permanent settlement is actually a city, town, hamlet, or village is entirely subjective. nope
I'm game. What is a city?
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Walls are generally not a formal requirement, but are implied so due to their commonality. All ancient cities, especially pre-civilization, had walls though, often several layers of walls built on top of each other as the given cities were pillaged and rebuilt. Its not confusing to anybody vaguely aware of ancient history.
*All ancient construction that we've found and called cities had walls
[deleted]
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#100describing the surrounding countries as barbarian is such a bad narrative given what we now know about the Jiroft, Elamite, Harappan and Egyptian culture.
Isn't this a book with extracts from documents written near 5000 years ago?