Where Did Writing Come From? | Hacker News Reader

Where Did Writing Come From?

getty.edu

42 pointsandsoitis30 comments

From Theuth, duh:

>Socrates tells a brief legend, critically commenting on the gift of writing from the Egyptian god Theuth to King Thamus, who was to disperse Theuth's gifts to the people of Egypt. After Theuth remarks on his discovery of writing as a remedy for the memory, Thamus responds that its true effects are likely to be the opposite; it is a remedy for reminding, not remembering, he says, with the appearance but not the reality of wisdom. Future generations will hear much without being properly taught, and will appear wise but not be so, making them difficult to get along with.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)

Interesting: the many-millenia old version of "tv bad", "internet bad", etc...

>Dicson has in mind the passage in Plato's Phaedrus which I quoted in an earlier chapter, in which Socrates tells the story of the interview between the Egyptian King, Thamus and the wise Theuth who had just invented the art of writing. Thamus says that that the invention of writing will not improve memory but destroy it, because the Egyptians will trust in these 'external characters which are not part of themselves' and this will discourage 'the use of their own memory within them'.

The Art of Memory, Frances A. Yates

Differentiating between external characters and internal ones is kinda interesting.

Another simplified quote goes like that: Socrates, why don't you write any book? Because it can be used by bad people. And what if it gets to the hands of good one's? Good (smart, wise?) people don't need books...

Interesting, is the idea wisdom is not gained from reading but from direct experience?

I don't think that's what Plato is getting at. In many ways, Plato's theory of forms discounts the value of direct experience.

Firstly, look at memorizing as a workout for the brain. If you don't need to do as much of it, you do less of it, and you don't develop that ability as much. Socrates valued a fit mind and body and likely would have considered a good memory as an important part of mental fitness.

Secondly, consider the context. Plato was a student of Socrates, who taught not by lecturing on what he thought to be true, but by posing questions to his students and discussing various possible answers. Wisdom was obtained not by passively absorbing, but by dialogue with a teacher. Plato's works take the form of a passive listener, observing such dialogs. Later in the dialogue, Socrates gives this second objection to writing in more explicit form: "Writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence."

Plato does seem to try to transcend the limitations of written form here. When Socrates relates the tale of Thamus and Theuth, Phaedrus pushes back saying Socrates can easily make up tales from foreign lands. Socrates retorts that it was enough for the men of old that they heard the truth, the source being irrelevant. Phaedrus too easily crumbles and concedes that King Thamus was right about writing. One is left with the impression that neither person has made good arguments against each other, leaving one to consider the issue further.

I remember reading a whole essay by Jacques Derrida about this exact question, and how it remains open:

http://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/derrida_platos_...

Plato is a great favorite of these French post-structuralist thinkers for exactly how he always leaves room for more questions, never giving you a final answer.

I think it's more that nobody will bother remembering stuff (and therefore being "wise") if they can just write it down and then look it up later as needed.

To me that's a bit of both, and it's something I've often witnessed. What you "learn" from solved problems is vastly different from experiencing the problem first on your own without and idea of what to interpret from the events. That subtle knowledge is lost in scriptation (even if the scribe allocates a lot of space to details)

The article doesn't really answer the question - it just says it began with pictographs in clay tablets. But surely that's not the actual origin - wouldn't it be perhaps that earlier than that, there might have been things like ad-hoc markers scratched into trees or rocks (probably pictograms, indicating e.g. a good cave, or the direction to something?) that eventually became more formalised before making the jump to tablets?

We can only really speak about the earliest writing we know of and that basically requires writing in stone.

We have to remember that we only ever have a squinting view at the past because >99% not made from stone of everything has rotted.

I have no doubt that we were writing on paper-like substances long, long before rock carving, but there's simply no remaining evidence of it the we know of.

We were painting on caves way before that. I would argue that wall paintings were the first forms of writing. The reason for this is that wall paintings always seem to convey some type of idea or in many cases they seem to represent some type of past event. Eventually that made the jump to actual writing.

Merely conveying ideas isn't enough to be writing in the archeological sense, you have to actually be conveying speech. So-called "full writing" is when the written language can convey any spoken sentence and vice versa.

Importantly, not all drawn symbols that convey meaning are writing. Musical notation is not writing for example. There's been an open debate in archaeology regarding the extent to which rock and cave art are actually conveying speech as opposed to some other form of communication and whether these practices are even directly related to early writing traditions.

Wild to think about the potentially countless records etched on wood that are completely lost to time.

a few years ago an article posted here in HN explained that writing was basically invented for accounting. So first forms were depicting symbols for items to be accounted for, then by composition they created new symbols to represent multiple symbols.

what's fascinating is words, numbers, money and computation seem to have the same origin in those proto-cuneiform boxes.

Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a true American genius, develops the idea of writing from accounting for objects of common value like olive oil, wine, flour etc. She traces the development of literacy to an earlier phenomenon called numeracy - skill in counting and calls both literacy and numeracy as sources of power for the person who possessed those skills.

The following reference may be of help:

How Writing Came About. By Denise Schmandt-Besserat. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Pp. xii+193; figures, notes, index. $19.95.

This book is a summary of her earlier two volume study called 'Before Writing'.

Hope this helps.

I haven't read this book, but the earliest written signs we have are pictographic, and don't seem to have a relation to numbers per se, but are much closer in character to ancient cave drawings. The argument is interesting from the perspective of numeracy as ancient Egyptian magical stories often involved numerical quantities, the Tao Te Ching is another example of magic involved with numbers, but I think that would come from a later period of development of civilization, whereas the origins of writing itself probably predate something like an advanced agrarian economy such as Egypt, China, the Indus River Valley civilization and the Mayan civilization.

Here in Peru the quipu system, a form of proto-writing, was invented for accounting. It is said that it was used for balancing agricultural production across different regions.

Freud argues in Totem and Taboo that the first written sign was actually the totemic figure(s) which tribes use in their various rituals. We can surmise that from these signs evolved pictographs, which then became systematic pictographic writing, which then led to our modern writing systems.

i have not read the article but no, it came from cuneiform from sumer 6k years ago.

AFAIK writing is thought to have been invented from nothing in at least three places: the Americas, the Middle East, and China.

the article says cuneiform came from these pictograms (proto cuneiform)

cuneiform is just the method, like pen and paper. i am sure there existed characters before but we cannot know that, nor how they wrote before that, because the clay tablets are the oldest written records humanity has available that survived all this time.

Cuneiform clay tablets have a survival advantage over other materials, so it's anyone's guess when the first well-defined symbolic representation of spoken language system was invented, it may have been lost to history entirely.

Highly recommend Prof Irving Fink's talk to Royal Institution on the 3,000 year development of cuneiform, how it is read, and the story of its decipherment:

https://youtu.be/PfYYraMgiBA

I like ancient history and languages and I find it so funny how writing systems often developed from bad puns. Words that have sounds similar to what you are describing eg. pictures of a bee and leaf for the word belief.

https://zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm is a great example that shows how Chinese ideograms work by reinventing them for the English language.

I was a bit lazy to start working on my Sumerian diploma again (despite exams being soonish), but the first image in the article is really nice, and a good reading exercice. Thanks!

Didn't read the article nor all comments, but someone may find this interesting:

https://studyfinds.org/markings-cave-paintings-decoded/

Side note: How does Getty gets an edu domain?

https://net.educause.edu/eligibility.htm

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