Image by José-Manuel Benito, via Wikimedia Commons
Some confer with the written Chinese language as ideographic: this is, structured according to a system during which each and 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, each and every of which represents a phrase or a part of a phrase. However in the event you dig deep sufficient into their history — and the history of other Asian languages that use Chinese-derived vocabulary — you’ll in finding that some get starteded out way back as pictographs, designed visually to repredespatched the object to which they referred.
That doesn’t hang true for Chinese on my own: it seems that, if truth be told, that each one written languages started as types of pictographic “professionalto-writing,” no less than judging by way of the earliest texts curhirely recognized to guy. If we have a look at the previousest of all of them, the limestone “Kish pill” unearthed from the web page of the eponymous historic Sumerian metropolis in modern-day Iraq, we will be able to 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 pictographic,” says the narrator of the brief IFLScience video below, “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 report stew recipes, amongst other important duties. “First developed round 3200 B.C. by way of Sumerian scribes within the historic city-state of Uruk, in present-day Iraq, as a way of reporting transactions, cuneiform writing was once created by way of the usage of a reed stylus to make wedge-shaped indentations in clay capsules,” says Archaeology magazine. 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 particularly 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 tablet, which dates from the early second millennium BC. That implies we will be able to 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 could also be, someinstances, known as the “Kish pill,” which certainly 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 some distance one day. His pictographic textual content would possibly never be deciphered properly or mapped to a historically documentumented language, however no less than we will be able to inform that he will have to certainly have had palms and ft kind of like our personal.
Related content:
The Outdatedest Identified Sentence Written in an Alphaguess Has Been Discovered on a Head-Lice Comb (Circa 1700 BC)
Write in Cuneiform, the Outdatedest Writing System within the Global: A Quick, Attractioning Introduction
Dictionary of the Outdatedest Written Language – It Took 90 Years to Complete, and It’s Now Loose On-line
How Writing Has Unfold Around the Global, from 3000 BC to This Yr: An Animated Map
40,000-Yr-Outdated Symbols Present in Caves Globallarge Might Be the Earliest Written Language
Based totally in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and hugecasts on towns, language, and culture. His initiatives come with the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the ebook The Statemuch less Town: a Stroll thru Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
