a fascinating double-reference securely on both targets🎯
Posted on 02/19/2022 8:36:01 AM PST by MNDude
Hyperborea maaaaaaan!
Writing requires settled living. Settled living took off best in the riverine cultures, which were based on settled agriculture and animal husbandry, and those activities required land, and property rights had to be recorded somehow. Accounting began first (in Sumer, by 3500 BC), and that led to writing.
Walled towns are at least as old as Catalhoyuk (in modern Turkey) and that town lasted over 2000 years with no streets -- residents walked across the roofs. Obviously they had food storage, animal bones have been excevated in plenty, and just as obviously they must have relied on farming and herding as well as their location on the obsidian trade route.
The pattern in Sumer was to wall the main town, work the other territory, go home at night, and a central authority maintained a standing army for common defense. There's no good reason to believe that the Catalhoyuk-ians didn't follow that pattern, they're just not (yet) known to have had writing.
Another impediment is, writing probably relied on perishable materials, much as it does now, and between obsolescence of the data due to age (language goes extinct, a relatively small literate class dies in an epidemic or meets, say, Mohammed), and the occasional arrival of a successful band of reavers (sometimes from the none-too-neighborly neighbors), those will vanish.
It's probable that there was some combination of independent invention and a now-lost chain of development and inheritance (as was the case with cuneiform, but not so much with Egyptian hieroglyphs) and not just in one region. :^)
Good historic narrative as the lead in to the post. Cheers.
# They were the first to brew beer. You can’t have a civilization without beer.
# islam forbids the consumption of any alcoholic beverage. Q.E.D.
Definitive proof that islam is not civilized (like we needed more evidence)
Mesopotamia had writing at least 1100 years before Abraham was born.
a fascinating double-reference securely on both targets🎯
What about cave paintings? Now, we don’t know how old those really are. But many “experts” seem to think the paintings are more than 10,000 years old.
Some of those paintings are pretty amazing and beautiful. Like, they-could-teach-Picasso-a-few-things-beautiful. (And Picasso did talk about “stealing” vs. copying. Hmmmm .....)
If a picture is worth a 1,000 words I would suggest we need to re-think “writing = civilization”.
I can’t find the reference but one of the things found in the Lauscaux cave paintings was that if you put up a flaming torch to it, flickering as it does, it generates the illusion of movement. Pretty advanced art.
London: Ancient cave artists created the illusion of images moving across cave walls, relying on “cartoon-like” techniques, say French researchers. ... When the images are viewed under the unsteady light of flickering flames the images can appear to move, the study claimed, the journal Antiquity reports.Sep 25, 2012
Ancient cave paintings create illusion of movement - Zee News
Ping for later
As hunter gatherers almost all of their time would have been spent just staying alive and safe so they had no time for the arts or writing down things for 2,000 years to remind them of what they were supposed to do. Since their life spans would have been perhaps about 30 to 35 years they simply had no time to learn stone masonry, stone carving nor building large megalithic structures. Consequently all of this complex structural and art work is simply happenstance because they were too primitive to develop high civilization.
Imagine what they might have done had they been civilized!
The lowest stage is hunter-gatherer tribes
Then primitive farmers
You get cities when there is enough population density to support manufacturing. What is the purpose of a city? It is a place where people who make things can interact. Where people who need tools can find a blacksmith to make them. When people who weave cloth can find people selling cotton or wool, and where customers can find the cloth makers. It’s helpful to have all these interdependent makers of things in a central place, where they can supply each others needs. Thus, cities.
:^) It’s nice to be appreciated in my own time.
The Big Old Mo outlawed the previous (and longstanding) systems of writing in use in Arabia and other muzzie-occupied places. Nabataean was in use in Petra and those kinds of monuments are found in their former territories, which inchlded a swath of Arabia.
Our number system originated in India, wound up passing through Arab intermediaries and into European use via muzzie-occupied Spain where the system we now use was developed. It looks a good deal different from what was and is in use in other Arab/muzzie societies, although it will probably prevail as it is in use throughout the world.
BTW, the abacus was invented by Mesopotamians and Romans, not by the Chinese, who nevertheless developed it to more or less its current form during the Middle Ages. It was in continuous use in commerce right on through ‘Dark Age’ and medieval Europe.
Highly unlikely. You would have to wipe out over 99% of human population.
Possible, but highly unlikely.
Our alphabet came from the Phoenicians.
Maybe farming is another marker and would probably happen before writing.
Or farming would necessitate writing. Gotta keep track of the growing season, how many bails of hay, etc. That would require an understanding of the seasons (stars and constellations and the sun) and some basic math.
Wonder which happened first — match or writing? At the same time?
Indus Valley Civilization is much older but we can not read their writing.
I don’t think it needs to be that high. The average person is not competent on modern technology. Any mass casualties, in my opinion 75% or above, could cause our technology base to drop 100 years. It would also be important if a single area was no affected. Energy production, food production, medical production, most manufacturing is only capable through the efforts of many people understanding a portion of the complex system.
I read how penicillin was first produced. I couldn’t do it on my own or with 10 random people.
Civilization is, plain and simple, living in cities. Nothing at all to do with writing.
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