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Comment by babesh | Hacker News Reader

The Iliad and the Odyssey were originally oral works in a prehistoric (pre-writing) culture. Transmission of culture was done orally and visually just as they are today. Culture wasn't just technology. It was also origin stories of the tribe, origin stories of the universe, and so on. A lot of information can be exchanged orally and visually without writing.

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Definitely I guess my point is more that our definition of what constitutes writing seems to be arbitrary when we do have “writing” that goes back ~20k years it just isn’t letters representing sounds. I mentioned tally marks and we’ve found them all over the place. If our definition has to be that people use an alphabet to record sentences then civilization under the definition of writing + multiple city states may not be moved back. But I think that doesn’t capture a large (like 2-3 times as long) span of time in which there were “civilizations” and it’s really a shame.

I think that isn't defined as a writing system as you can only record numerical data.

Same as how the Inca Quipu[1] isn't generally defined as writing, despite the fact it seems they may have encoded some non-numerical information such as provinces for accounting purposes - like having a province_id in a database.

You can keep track of taxes etc. with a system like Quipu, but you couldn't write down the Iliad with it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

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