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Comment by vorporeal | Hacker News Reader

Drawings are the heart and soul of civilization. For one, they originated ~37 thousand years before the first written language. Second, understanding text requires knowing how the information it contains is encoded (what language it is written in). Drawings are far more universal.

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Perhaps, but Classical Greek civilization remains startlingly intelligible to us after 2500 years. We stare up at the paintings on the caves at Lascaux having only the vaguest idea what they mean (and that's hardly the most recent example).

One might also imagine how our understanding of, say, the Italian Renaissance might be affected were every painting to disappear, and then to reconsider the same scenario with every bit of writing erased. Both would be devastating, but as a student of human culture, I'd far prefer the former.

The fact that images pre-date anything vaguely similar to what we call civilisation shows that the two are not causally linked. Words /are/ causally linked with civilisation.

It is speech that is most universal -- words. Drawing came after, and relegated to being foci of rituals and stories that were spoken and symbolic of spoken agreements.

And I read picture books before I graduated to books with text and chapters.

  > Second, understanding text requires knowing how the 
  > information it contains is encoded (what language it
  > is written in). Drawings are far more universal.

So you're saying that you can look at those old drawings and understand what they mean?

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