A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it began

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2524042-a-lost-ancient-script-reveals-how-writing-as-we-know-it-really-began/

by emot • 3 months ago

107 72 3 months ago

roughly• 2 months ago

There are two relatively recent books that dig in on the relationship between humans and governments or states and the degree to which these were less of a linear history and more of an ongoing negotiation - Against the Grain by James C Scott focuses on early states and their semi-regular failures, and The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow talk about the ongoing process of power negotiations between the putative leadership class and the citizenry. Both emphasize the same thing: that retrenchments against the state were a regular occurrence, and that the citizens of a given ruling group would not infrequently challenge, abolish, or abandon the state if the rulers overreached. The sudden disappearance of a script that was used for the purposes of tracking ownership and accounts would fit with this view, especially in light of even more modern reactions to attempts by the state to codify relationships for, eg, tax purposes, or just generally for control.

retrac• 2 months ago

We may never truly know when writing was invented.

There's a stele that was discovered in 1986 [1] in Veracruz. You could be forgiven if you think that writing is Maya. But it is not. It some other language. A couple other small fragments like it have been found, but the stele is basically an hapax. It is the only example.

And from the one example, we can see that it a system overflowingly glorious in its maturity and complexity. The scribes belonged to a culture that had been writing for a very long time. That is the refinement of millennia.

There are dates carved on La Mojorra 1; if they are in the same Long Count calendar the Maya used, then the stele appears to be talking about something that happened in the 140s and 150s AD.

The obvious relationship between the Mesoamerican writing systems might be somewhat analogous to the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, or Chinese and Japanese writing. One was adapted to write the other. Or they both evolved out of a common ancestral system. How far back might that have been?

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...

Baeocystin• 2 months ago

That is a fantastic example of mesoamerican script. I would have naively assumed it was Maya had you not said otherwise otherwise, too. Thanks for posting it.

riffraff• 2 months ago

I don't get it, why do you deduce this is "the refinement of millennia"?

How can you tell that a script is "refined", especially from a single example?

hattmall• 2 months ago

Mainly from the amount and complexity of symbols. That gives rise to the context which they must include. We can tell from the other more complete examples we have seen that writing systems which are complex enough to reliably convey such a wide range of context generally require being refined over millennia. It's not a 100% given, but it's a very reasonable assertion.

4gotunameagain• 2 months ago

For what it's worth, wikipedia says that it is Isthmian script, and has not been conclusively determined whether Isthmian script is a true writing system that represents a spoken language, or is a system of proto-writing

0x1ceb00da2• 2 months ago

I don't think it's very refined or complex. It's on the same level as heiroglyphics in that it's pictorial. The letters represent real stuff (face, birds, eyes, animals, etc). Maybe my brain is doing pattern matching but I see a lot of real things in this picture. You need a more advanced language to represent abstract concepts, which is very difficult to do in such a script. For example, the sentence "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors" is pretty much impossible to represent in a script like egyptian heiroglyphics or this one.

vkazanov3• 2 months ago

I am sorry but this like saying that "chinese cannot represent abstract notions" because "picture" .

In middle egyptian (the language you probably assume) "pictures" are just syllables. They are phonetic, not semantic, in the same way letter of modern language correspond to sounds, not meanings.

Egyptians had no problem expressinyg conplex concepts and they also had cursive writing, which is much easier to write.

applfanboysbgon3• 2 months ago

the sentence "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors" is pretty much impossible to represent in a script like egyptian heiroglyphics or this one

单子是自函子范畴中的幺半群

It bears remembering that spoken language existed long before written language, and written language developed as a form of encoding spoken language. Purely pictorial communication utilises a small number of large symbols that make it clear what is being conveyed from pictures alone, but the language depicted is too complex and abstracted to be purely pictorial; it uses a great number of small symbols, and you cannot understand what it is trying to convey merely by looking at it as a series of pictures. For a reader to understand what is written there would require understanding the relation of symbols to spoken language.

internet_points• 2 months ago

The very first letter in your example sentence started as an ox 𓃾 then via 𐤀 α etc. turned into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A#:~:text=1-,History,a – but even in the hieroglyphics it was used to represent the sound (the sound of the start of the word for ox), not literal oxes. The road towards more abstract / less pictorial systems was created for speed and ease of writing, not in order to represent more abstract thought. (Note also how alphabets are changed by the implements used to write them, e.g. runes for knife-on-wood, wedge incisions for clay tablets, square capitals on stone – this too was a pressure from ease of writing, nothing to do with representing more complex ideas.)

adrian_b3• 2 months ago

While the proto-writing systems are based on pictograms, both the Sumenrian cuneiforms and the Egyptian hieroglyphic (used for inscriptions on stone) and hieratic (use for writing with a reed brush on papyrus) have made the transition towards having phonetic symbols, used together with ideograms.

Using the phonetic sign subsets of the Egyptian and Sumerian scripts, it was possible to write any sentence that could be spoken in their languages.

This was the most important advance in writing and both in Mesopotamia and in Egypt there is evidence about this transition from an earlier writing system that could write only a subset of the words of a language, so it could not be used to write arbitrary sentences, but only things like lists of objects with their amounts and owners, like needed for accounting, to a writing system that added phonetic symbols for writing any words that did not have their own symbol.

I cannot read the paywalled article, but it seems that now there is evidence that also the Proto-Elamite writing system has also passed around the same time through this transition from having only symbols for certain words to having phonetic symbols too, e.g. for syllables, which can be used to write arbitrary words and sentences.

Before phonetic symbols began to be used, we cannot know the language spoken by the users of a proto-writing system.

While in Egypt there is little doubt that the first users of writing spoke some kind of Old Egyptian, in Mesopotamia there is doubt the users of the first proto-cuneiform writing system spoke Sumerian. However, by the time when phonetic cuneiform signs were introduced, the language of the writers was Sumerian.

In the territory later known as Elam (in the West of present Iran), it is not known what language was spoken by the users of the Proto-Elamite writing system. It could have been an ancestor of the Elamite language spoken a millennium later, or it could have been a completely different language. Elamite is not related to the Indo-European languages that spread much later in that territory, like Old Persian.

kdheiwns• 2 months ago

This is a line of thinking that's very common amongst people who only speak languages that use alphabets but it's not remotely true. Egypt became one of the greatest empires ever with hieroglyphs and those evolved into a phonetic writing system. Chinese and Japanese of course function and they evolved from pictographs. A pictograph is only limiting if a character that resembles a dog can only carry the meaning of a dog and nothing else. But that's not the case in any language. They all evolved to use the symbol of a dog, or any given character, to carry other meanings.

nephihaha5• 2 months ago

It does look complex. These are not mere pictographs but a refined and codified system of representing ideas.

By the way, Chinese uses a modern example of such a script and succeeds in representing such concepts.

jeltz3• 2 months ago

Egyptian hierghlyps had phonetic values too so it definitely would be able to express everything spoken Egyptian could.

The main issue with hieroglyphics is that it was a very convoluted system, where symbols meant different things depending on context. A symbol of a bird could be a literal bird, some abstract concept related to that bird or part of the sounds of the word for that bird.

wl3• 2 months ago

Egyptian hieroglyphs are mostly phonetic. You can represent any abstract concept in it that you could in the spoken version.

netcan7• 2 months ago

Great example.

But... IDK if this (or other clearly advanced writing systems) demonstrate "refinement of millennia."

I think we have a "history is accelerating" bias. Changes in the deep past happened slowly, and the pace of change increases over time. That may be true from a very broad POV... but I don't think it's true on shorter timescales.

There are no hard limitations on going from a newly invented writing system to a professional scribal culture in a single generation. I don't think watershed "revolutions" are something new. Egyptian writing, and Early bronze age egyptian culture more broadly gets very advanced, very quickly. We don't really know what elements have deep histories... but it's hard to explain ancient egypt without allowing for some impressive leaps. Hence aliens.

Also... "common ancestor" can be a lot of things. It could be like the gradual species-like philogenetics of cyrillic, latin, hebrew, arabic and all other alphabets' development from proto-sinaitic and canaanite/punic. The same script gradually evolving in different scriptural islands.

Otoh... "ancestry" can be pure inspiration. The idea of writing, its uses and the certainty that widespread literacy is possible can be the "dna."

The confusing part is that culture does, often, evolve very gradually like species and clades over time. These sometimes leave evidence of the whole process. Sudden explosions can't be deduced from the absence of evidence.

card_zero4• 2 months ago

Mythology is involved in inhibiting invention. I mean, after inventing invention, the concept of it, you have a certain motivation, which is lacking in a culture that tells stories about how its greatest inventions were stolen from the gods by fantasy heroes. We still indulge in those stories slightly, by mythologizing inventors. But at least we don't have a cyclical concept of time where everything's predestined by the fates, and we all have proper roles and places, and there's no progress except round and round. That's a tranquil outlook, but tends to be self-fulfilling.

onlypassingthru3• 2 months ago

The idea of writing, its uses and the certainty that widespread literacy is possible can be the "dna."

It's fascinating that over 400 indigenous tribes lived north of the NA desert border between US/Mexico and there is zero evidence a single one had a written language, while the Maya and Aztecs on the other side of the deserts were writing for centuries.

torben-friis• 2 months ago

We may never truly know when writing was invented

We won't, by definition there's no written record pre writing.

It sucks how many instances in the historical record are like "welp, they had settlements that point to thousands of people, they made pots and they buried their deceased" that's kinda all we know about places that stood for millenia.

wongarsu• 2 months ago

In principle there could be images about the invention of writing. The intersection of "those images existed", "they have been preserved", "we find them" and "we interpret them correctly" is however tiny

Even written records of oral history of the invention of writing would work

The bigger issue might be that "the invention of writing" is a rather boring and gradual event. Some administrator starts tracking the state of their grain stores with some symbols, then they start tracking other things and need symbols to differentiate, and over time more and more meaning is encoded in those symbols, until we call it writing

pier25• 2 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Elamite_script

aix1• 2 months ago

I am a bit disappointed by New Scientist's standard of reporting here.

"Has been shockingly overlooked by all but a handful of scholars since its discovery 125 years ago" -- really? I picked up the one popular book on the subject that I own. It was first published almost 25 years ago and has an entire chapter on proto-Elamite, plus about a dozen mentions throughout the book.

Everything seems to have some sort of fake narrative these days to make it more "interesting". <old-man-yells-at-cloud/>

P.S. Highly recommend the book: https://www.thamesandhudson.com/products/lost-languages

poulpy1234• 2 months ago

The clickbaitisation of science vulgarisation (you'll not believe what new scientist did in their next article !)

Panzerschrek• 2 months ago

The fact that elamites suddenly stopped writing is easy to explain. Maybe they have invented paper or something similar and it doesn't last long in the archeological record.

masklinn• 2 months ago

Maybe they have invented paper or something similar and it doesn't last long in the archeological record.

These can last a very long while in the archaeological record if the environment is suitable, and the area covered by elam (the iranian south-west) seems pretty suitable. The oldest surviving papyruses are the 4500 years old "red sea scrolls". Similarly we have paper fragments from shockingly early in the medium's history (~150 BCE, papermaking is believed to have been invented circa 200 BCE).

Given how long Elam lasted, it would be very strange that none of this successor materials would have survived even in telling (e.g. we do not have examples of the oldest chinese bamboo slips, but we do have references to such from later works), and that it would not have spread out of elam either.

poulpy1234• 2 months ago

No, it's easy to hypotheses about but not to explain without more information

GeekyBear2• 2 months ago

Professor emeritus Irving Finkel of the British Museum thinks that we have evidence from much farther back in history.

Controversial theory about Göbekli Tepe | Irving Finkel and Lex Fridman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0BcGMaEV8o

This interview sent me down a Finkel interview rabbit hole, as he makes a delightful guest.

vintagedave• 2 months ago

Is it possible to summarise? I can't watch a video currently.

I'm also aware Göbekli Tepe is a favourite of pseudoarcheologists and conspiracy theorists. Given who Finkel is, it will be nice to see a theory presented by someone who is actually a genuine expert! :)

GeekyBear2• 2 months ago

The link is to a clip of the relevant portion of a longer interview.

One of the artifacts found at a Göbekli Tepe dig was a pictographic seal stone.

card_zero4• 2 months ago

Here's a blog post about it from an involved and irritated archeologist:

https://trowelandpen.com/2025/12/22/hidden-in-plain-sight-di...

Did this small stone represent the very beginnings of writing, about 12,000 years ago? And did archaeologists really overlook such an important find all this time? (Spoiler: No, it doesn’t. And we didn’t.)

Hmm, but later in the post, discussing neolithic symbols from the wider region:

Interestingly, among these depictions there are some which indeed appear to be symbolic substitutes for more complex images, like the bucranium (ox head) in place of a full aurochs, or arrow-like zigzag lines representing snakes, and large birds reduced to a few characteristic lines. These depictions and their “abbreviations” seem to adhere to a certain convention, kind of a standardisation even, suggesting a communication system that uses these stone objects as media to store important information and knowledge.

But totally not writing, yo.

It's unfair to attack archaeologists, who only busy diligently doing their job, increasing the store of public knowledge, and winning awards from each other. Except sometimes they deserve it, so I'm going to attack them by saying that they hate to be specific. It's a huge risk, you might be wrong, or ridiculed as a crank, or you might attract cranks. Better to couch everything in language that lets you avoid saying the thing.

On the other hand we have the 40,000 year old mammoth carving from Germany (see Sci Am article in a different comment) with decorative cross patterns on it, touted as "statistically complex" and conveying information, when they're just badly carved decoration. In that case they were simultaneously pussyfooting around about stating their case and going off on a flight of fancy, at the same time, in the style of "I'm not saying it's aliens".

KingOfCoders3• 2 months ago

Also,

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stone-age-art-may...

Pre-script about 40.000 years ago

KingOfCoders3• 2 months ago

Ah the new science. 3/4th about how everyone else was wrong, how this was neglected, how this changes everything and then a small portion about what it is.

Recently I found this very interesting, signs of writing about 40.000 years ago.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stone-age-art-may...

poulpy1234• 2 months ago

I've read the paper and I don't find it really convincing. The reasoning works for the proto-cuneiform tablets because we have the historical context in support, but we don't have it in this case.

KingOfCoders3• 2 months ago

What did you find not convincing in particular?

"Our results strongly contradict the hypothesis that the sign sequences of the Swabian Aurignacian constitute writing in this strict sense."

You think it does constitute writing?

netcan7• 2 months ago

Assyriologist Irving Finkel believes Gobekli Tepeh is or is evidence of writing or proto-writing. That's 12,000 bp. There are ice age artefacts that may represent writing-like symbolism.

The super-old artefacts themselves are only a hint... but I think more recent artefacts demonstrate that invention of a writing system is relatively common. We tend to think of invention of core concepts as the magical event, with expansion and proliferation as derivative or even inevitable. But... I think this may be backwards.

In general... I think purely intellectual feats that can be completed by one person happen over and over. Otoh, we intuitively underestimate the role of context. Availability of trade goods like paper and ink. The application of writing to uses like tax collection, trade contracts, religion, scholarship or whatnot. Those all require many people. Whole societies, economic and political structures.

IMO, this is the uniqueness of the early bronze age... for writing and other things.

A lot of the writing dirth of the european dark age relates to the scarcity of papyrus. Writing medium seems like a trivial issue. You can write on skins, or bark or shingles. But... that doesn't scale and doesn't lend to the development of writing as a big deal. The invention of cheap paper-making was as important as moveable type for the "Gutenberg Revolution" to take place.

Rongorongo is an undeciphered script from Easter Island. From the handful of surviving examples, this is clearly a highly developed script... developed independently on a small island. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo#Corpus

The Cherokee Syllabary is a fascinating example. It was invented by Sequoyah. One guy. He had access to paper, ink and examples of english writing. He (seemingly) didn't have any information on how english writing worked. He borrowed letters from english... but he used them to represent syllables with no relation to latin. EG: the letter "D" represents the sound "A."

The ingredients for the invention of a full, advanced, newspaper-ready language were (1) one motivated genius (2) paper and ink (3) an example of how far the idea of writing could take you.

There was no proto-writing stage. It wasn't limited to personal seals, charms, prayers, accounting or short documents. I think the key here is example, a demonstration of potential. Sequoyah had seen books, letters and longform text. So, he went straight to newspapers, constitutional documents and suchlike. He taught his young daughter to read and the timeline from initial conception to widespread, advanced literacy was just 20 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

Writing and proto-writing may have been invented tens of thousands of times. Neanderthal proto-writing would be a paradigm-shifting find... but it wouldn't shock me that much.

The breakthrough inventions that tend to unlock a flood and punctuate our understanding of history... I think these are often more trivial than we expect. What matters is the ethereal and hard to describe "context." The addition of one or more trivial ingredients like a writing medium. Abstract "meta" like "writing should be used to write whole books." The sociability of the inventor.

The growing appreciation of Elamite sophistication adds to the shockingly large corpus of large, advanced civilizations that have existed in history. There are so many of them... and we don't even know what most were called.

card_zero4• 2 months ago

Heh, that's a fun point. Maybe even a deep point. They don't have to leave a long trail of artifacts of incremental groping toward the concept of written language, starting with seal icons and tally marks and then account ledgers and then complaint letters. Instead, somebody could just have the idea, all of a sudden, if conditions are right to suggest it. Or several people could. But this raises the question of how big an idea it's possible for one person to have all at once, without handing it between multiple people in evolutionary stages. I guess there's no real limit on that, it's just that excellent ideas require excellent zeitgeist conditions (like the availability of paper that you mention).

netcan7• 2 months ago

So... The "big idea" would be "a writing system that fully represents a language."

Everything else can develop gradually. But... gradually doesn't necessarily mean generations. It can be one person expirementing, working on the project and until completion.

Think of it as a "master work" or a PhD. Big, but not beyond the right person's ability to complete over a decade.

Think Newton, Galileo or Tolkien. They didn't just "have an idea" that fully worked. But... they worked on their ideas for years, got a lot done themselves, and had fruitful projects.

People are people. What is possible in one century is possible in another, unless prerequisites are not present.

In the case of language... the centuries of development mostly contribute the ambition itself.

The inventor may not be doing some great project. They might be just inventing something small to help keep track of sales... or they're just inventing a gambling game that uses symbols.

lproven• 2 months ago

There was no proto-writing stage.

Sequoyah was a great man, a genius, no doubt... but I think it is important to note that he didn't go straight to an alphabet.

It was his third try.

The first go was logograms: he made up symbols for words. Then he realised this would be too complicated and hard to remember, which speaking as an adult who learned to write a few words of Chinese and Japanese, I fervently agree with.

Then his second go was ideograms: symbols for ideas instead. The problem is similar and he dismissed that, too.

His third try was the Cherokee syllabary: one symbol per syllable, similarly to Hiragana and Katakana for anyone else who suffered through beginner's Japanese.

In a way, I think this makes it considerably more impressive. He worked through millennia of the evolution of writing in a decade or so. It's astounding.

(And I can't read it, and I'm ashamed by that, but then I do not know a word of Cherokee and live on a different continent.)

netcan7• 2 months ago

This is true.... but considering the timeline, I would call all this part of the process of. inventing.

Logograms and ideagrams were ideas that he tried out. An MVP before pivoting to a better one. That's how invention works, through expiremention.

To me the example represents the fact that it doesn't take a millenia. If the right person is on the job... it can be a one person job.

nephihaha5• 2 months ago

The roots of writing appear to be in the Stone Age. Pre-literate societies have a certain degree of symbology. You can see this with native Australians into the modern period and ancient rock art.

tdeck• 2 months ago

Another example are the winter counts used by Plains tribes, which used various symbols to remind the "reader" of particular memorable events:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_count

Or in Asia the Dongba script, which to me looks like a series of cartoon panels:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongba_symbols

nephihaha5• 2 months ago

The Winter Count is more in that ballpark, and looks like an independent creation. The first recognised alphabet in the Americas would be runic, but practically every supposed example outside Greenland seems to be controversial. I do believe that Mesoamerican script would have evolved into an alphabet eventually and a number of North American tribes were moving towards a script independently.

The Dongpa symbols look like they have some influence from Chinese characters somewhere down the line (much like some of the North American syllabaries are influenced by the Roman alphabet).

egorfine• 2 months ago

I read "ancient script" and my first though was: what kind of script? Like, REXX for OS/2? ksh? Maybe even perl?

user2722• 2 months ago

The half of the story which was available was indeed fascinating.

Dates I'll retain, 1.7 million years and 5000 years. Two different, if associated, marks of civilization.

rballpug• 2 months ago

Right to left, left to right. Circular.

The interpunct is a centered dot [·] Greco semicolon.

A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it began

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