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How to write in Cuneiform

(www.openculture.com)
100 points PaulHoule | 8 comments | 09 Oct 25 22:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.797s | source | bottom
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DecoPerson ◴[10 Oct 25 00:13 UTC] No.45534322[source]▶
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!

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1. gnulinux ◴[10 Oct 25 00:19 UTC] No.45534355[source]▶
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.
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2. galaxyLogic ◴[10 Oct 25 00:27 UTC] No.45534391[source]▶
And it would seem safe to assume that cuneiform developed from something else
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3. mcphage ◴[10 Oct 25 00:30 UTC] No.45534407[source]▶
We have examples of cuneiform as it developed from pre-writing symbols, so that’s not necessarily the case.
4. canjobear ◴[10 Oct 25 00:39 UTC] No.45534450[source]▶
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.

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5. bigstrat2003 ◴[10 Oct 25 00:41 UTC] No.45534467[source]▶
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".
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6. ◴[10 Oct 25 01:04 UTC] No.45534573{3}[source]▶
7. wl ◴[10 Oct 25 02:12 UTC] No.45534843[source]▶
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.

8. IAmBroom ◴[10 Oct 25 14:38 UTC] No.45539613[source]▶
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.