How to write in Cuneiform

Good stuff, but this has triggered my pet peeve! The title should be:

    How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Known Writing System in the World

The added word being: KNOWN

You can argue that, "well, obviously!" but correctness and exactness are what makes science, history, journalism, etc good, and allowing incorrectness like this is a step backwards.

I read a history book when I was a teenager (can't remember which one, unfortunately), and the author wrote a preface that said something along the lines of "Everything in this book is based on the published information I could discover during my research period of April to September 1999. I have chosen to write in absolutes--stating many things as certain and clear--but in reality there is still much we do not know about this time period. No history author should say their writing is fact and any good historian will make it clear that their work is composed of assumptions layered on assumptions. Please read these works with this in mind."

If you don't have a preface like that, you should add "known" to your title/sentence! I will argue with someone all day over this! I will die on this hill!

Exactly, knowing what we know about anthropology, it's extremely unlikely cuneiform was the oldest writing. What's more likely is that other human groups must have invented ways for storing information, but they didn't survive.

And it would seem safe to assume that cuneiform developed from something else

We have examples of cuneiform as it developed from pre-writing symbols, so that’s not necessarily the case.

What discoveries in anthropology make you think that cuneiform is unlikely to be the oldest?

Writing has only been invented independently a few times in history, so it seems reasonable that cuneiform could be the first.

Not necessarily. Logically, there must have been a first writing system (even if cuneiform wasn't it), so you can't show cuneiform wasn't the first on the basis of "something must have come before it".

This is a good hill to die on. I’m a middle school teacher and explain this concept often to my class. I explain that what I say now is what we know, yet these ideas can and do change, so keep this in mind as you continue your education.

> If you don't have a preface like that, you should add "known" to your title/sentence! I will argue with someone all day over this! I will die on this hill!

Of course, if you’re a fallibilist you believe that it’s always possible that you’re making a mistake. It seems unnecessary to always add “unless I am mistaken,” because that hedge always applies.

Sure, but you could also endlessly add clarifying details to be more exact

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Known (by the author) Writing System on Earth, the third planet from the Sun in the Milky Way galaxy, as of 2025 as long as you're a human without a major disability that would prevent you from using these techniques or are at least a being with similar hands and arms also able to obtain the necessary materials and can read and comprehend modern English if you aren't too busy doing other things and expect to live long enough to complete the task

You often get nitpickers going after some small technically correct detail which may be true but no reasonable person in the intended audience would ever actually need to be told. No one reading the original title would assume that the author had omniscient knowledge of the whole human history of writing beyond present archaeological fact and this doesn't need to be pointed out.

Writing has been independently invented two to four times that we know of in the last five millennia. (Some scholars debate whether cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese writing were all independently invented, with Mesoamerican writing being the other almost indisputably independent invention.) Anatomically modern humans date back at least 200,000 years and probably would be capable of inventing writing long before our known examples.

Why do we not see more writing in the archeological record? Maybe agrarian societies both motivate writing and are required to provide the free time to invent it? Or perhaps it was written on media that's subject to decay? If some society developed writing on tree bark 100,000 years ago, none of that is going to survive and we'd never know.

In principle I agree with you, but in practice people really seem to forget this basic premise of science and jump right to the “that’s how it is,” stage. So I think it’s helpful to continually remind ourselves that this enterprise is a skeptical one.

Other than the usual suspects being Lemurian and Atlantis civilizations from which everyone and everything have descended from, what actual evidence do we have for and against earlier writing systems?

Petroglyphs are not a form of writing, and the Kush tablet along with a few others are considered to be precursors of the proto-writing – at best.

So I reached for my trusted Ouija board to ask whether writing predates Sumer. It spelled, with unsettling clarity: «Y E S . B U R I E D . D E E P». Then it paused. «N O T Y E T M E A N T T O B E R E A D». Mysterious? Yes. Confirming? Not quite.

I'd settle for "earliest known", without an assumption that there was probably an older one.

Much like fossils, the vast majority of human writing is quickly lost to posterity. Paper, bark, and string decompose; clay and rock break; all writing materials can be repurposed for other writing (palimpsets) or other uses (reshaped to wall stones).

Still, given the paucity of known, independently invented writing systems... We may well know of all of them.