Picture by José-Manuel Benito, by way of Wikimedia Commons
Some consult with the written Chinese language as ideographic: that’s, structured according to a system by which every symbol represents a particular concept or concept, whether or not summary or concrete. That’s true of certain Chinese characters, however solely a small minority. Most of them are actually logographs, every of which represents a phrase or a part of a phrase. However for those who dig deep sufficient into their history — and the history of other Asian languages that use Chinese-derived vocabulary — you’ll discover that some begined out way back as pictographs, designed visually to repredespatched the factor to which they referred.
That doesn’t maintain true for Chinese alone: it seems, in reality, that every one written languages started as types of pictographic “professionalto-writing,” no less than judging by the earliest texts curleasely recognized to man. If we take a look at the outdatedest of all of them, the limestone “Kish pill” unearthed from the positioning of the eponymous historical Sumerian metropolis in modern-day Iraq, we will in some sense “learn” several of the symbols in its textual content, even 5 and a half millennia after it was written. “The writing on its surface is purely pictographic,” says the narrator of the temporary IFLScience video beneath, “and represents a midlevel between professionalto-writing and the extra sophisticated writing of the cuneiform.”
Cuneiform, previously featured right here on Open Culture, was utilized by the traditional Childlonians to label maps and report stew recipes, amongst other important duties. “First developed round 3200 B.C. by Sumerian scribes within the historical city-state of Uruk, in present-day Iraq, as a method of reporting transactions, cuneiform writing was created through the use of a reed stylus to make wedge-shaped indentations in clay tablets,” says Archaeology magazineazine. Over 3,000 years, this earliest proper script “was utilized by scribes of multiple cultures over that point to put in writing a number of languages other than Sumerian, most notably Akkadian, a Semitic language that was the lingua franca of the Assyrian and Childlonian Empires.”
Cuneiform was additionally used to put in writing the Scheil dynastic pill, which dates from the early second millennium BC. Which means 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 cities. We should always word that the Scheil dynastic pill can be, someinstances, known as the “Kish pill,” which certainly causes some confusion. However for the anonymous author of the earlier Kish pill, who would have lived about two millennia earlier, the emergence of cuneiform and all of the civilizational developments it will make possible lay far sooner or later. His pictographic textual content could never be deciphered properly or mapped to a historically documented language, however no less than we will inform that he should certainly have had arms and ft roughly like our personal.
Related content:
How Writing Has Unfold Throughout the World, from 3000 BC to This Yr: An Animated Map
40,000-Yr-Previous Symbols Present in Caves Worldbroad Could Be the Earliest Written Language
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facee book.
