Thread by @Lg_on_the_Move

Listen up, boys and girls, because I'm going to tell you the story of the greatest inventors of all times: the inventors of #writing

Can you imagine a world without writing? No writing on screens, no writing on paper, no writing on stone, no writing on clay tables, nothing ...

To meet the inventors of #writing, we have to travel back in time a few thousand years to the first city states, such as Uruk, in what is today southern Iraq

Their newly emerging complex urban society needed a way to keep records of things like who had paid how much tax

This clay tablet provides an example of early #writing to record economic information. This tablet most likely documents grain distributed by a large temple

metmuseum.org/art/collection…

The Inca empire had a similar problem: how to record the results of their census?
How many people were in the empire? How much arable land? How many herd animals? How many soldiers in the troops?

The solution they came up with looks very different but is essentially the same: a record of the information stored in knotted strings of different shapes, length, and color

It's called a quipu or "talking knot" ancient.eu/Quipu/

The story so far: #Writing was invented for record keeping, as an information technology. Key domains for writing were state administration and bureaucracy; trade and commerce; and religion

Writing is a power tool, essential to social organization

languageonthemove.com/literacy-the-p…

Now that we know why #writing was invented, you may ask who invented writing?

❌lone genius
❌single civilization, only once
✅ Sumerians, Chinese, Mayans, maybe more

Whether #writing was invented even more often is complicated because (1) incomplete record (2) unclear connections between writing systems (3) the history of writing is a colonial story

Side exploration: #Australian #Indigenous message sticks

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

The only continuing #writing tradition is the #Chinese script. Earliest Chinese documents are the Shang Oracle Bones: prognostications about the future scratched into the shoulder blades of oxen or turtle shells

ancient.eu/Oracle_Bones/

How would you go about inventing #writing if you had absolutely no model to follow?

Our ingenious ancestors started with drawings of concrete objects ("pictogram") and abstracted away as in this image of a horse which, over time, became contemporary #Chinese character for horse

... or in this example of the Egyptian hieroglyph for ox, which, over time, became the Latin letter "A"

The really clever rebus principle associates pictograms with sounds

Note that the rebus principle is #language-specific, and although it is image-based, the example only works in #English

So, #writing was invented by modifying images. These pictograms lost their visual connection and became signs that either represent “words” (morphemes) or “sounds” (phonemes)

Our awesome ancestors made thousands of these clever associations and connections to create #writing

For a more detailed story to the invention of #writing, watch the full lecture

And yet another perspective on the invention of #writing

languageonthemove.com/who-invented-w…