Symbol by means of José-Manuel Benito, by means of Wikimedia Commons
Some consult with the written Chinese language as ideographic: this is, structured according to a system by which every symbol represents a particular thought or concept, whether or not summary or concrete. That’s true of certain Chinese characters, however just a small minority. Maximum of them are actually logographs, every of which represents a phrase or a part of a phrase. However when you dig deep sufficient into their history — and the history of other Asian languages that use Chinese-derived vocabulary — you’ll to find that some get starteded out way back as %tographs, designed visually to repredespatched the item to which they referred.
That doesn’t hang true for Chinese by myself: it sounds as if, in reality, that every one written languages started as kinds of %tographic “professionalto-writing,” no less than judging by means of the earliest texts curhirely identified to guy. If we take a look at the previousest of all of them, the limestone “Kish pill” unearthed from the website of the eponymous historic Sumerian metropolis in modern-day Iraq, we will in some sense “learn” several of the symbols in its textual content, even 5 and a part millennia after it was once written. “The writing on its surface is naturally %tographic,” says the narrator of the transient IFLScience video underneath, “and represents a midlevel between professionalto-writing and the extra sophisticated writing of the cuneiform.”
Cuneiform, previously featured right here on Open Culture, was once utilized by the traditional Childlonians to label maps and file stew recipes, amongst other important duties. “First developed round 3200 B.C. by means of Sumerian scribes within the historic city-state of Uruk, in present-day Iraq, as a method of fileing transactions, cuneiform writing was once created by means of the usage of a reed stylus to make wedge-shaped indentations in clay capsules,” says Archaeology magazineazine. Over 3,000 years, this earliest proper script “was once utilized by scribes of multiple cultures over that point to write down a number of languages other than Sumerian, maximum significantly Akkadian, a Semitic language that was once the lingua franca of the Assyrian and Childlonian Empires.”
Cuneiform was once extensively utilized to write down the Scheil dynastic pill, which dates from the early second millennium BC. That suggests we will learn it, and thus know that it comprises a literary-historical textual content that lists off the reigns of various rulers of Sumerian towns. We must word that the Scheil dynastic pill may be, someoccasions, known as the “Kish pill,” which positively causes some confusion. However for the anonymous creator of the earlier Kish pill, who would have lived about two millennia earlier, the emergence of cuneiform and all of the civilizational developments it might make possible lay a long way at some point. His %tographic textual content might never be deciphered properly or mapped to a historically documentumented language, however no less than we will inform that he will have to positively have had fingers and toes kind of like our personal.
Related content:
The Outdatedest Recognized Sentence Written in an Alphawager Has Been Discovered on a Head-Lice Comb (Circa 1700 BC)
The best way to Write in Cuneiform, the Outdatedest Writing System within the International: A Brief, Allureing Introduction
Dictionary of the Outdatedest Written Language – It Took 90 Years to Complete, and It’s Now Unfastened On-line
How Writing Has Unfold Around the International, from 3000 BC to This 12 months: An Animated Map
40,000-12 months-Outdated Symbols Present in Caves Internationallarge Would possibly Be the Earliest Written Language
Based totally in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and widecasts on towns, language, and culture. His tasks come with the Substack newsletter Books on Towns and the e-book The Statemuch less Town: a Stroll thru Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facee-book.
