DBWI: Writing was invented in ancient times, rather than early modern times?

Phonetic writing was created for the first time at the beginning of the scientific revolution as a more versatile version of the numeral systems and semi-phonetic runes that had been used for most of history.

What if writing was invented much earlier -- at around the time that farming, animal husbandry, and city-states became commonplace?

Off the top of my head, there might be an elite "scribe" class that recorded knowledge. Religions might have "holy books" to delineate their doctrines. History would be written down, rather than preserved only as oral legends and myths, that we can test with archaeology but never know for certain.
 
Well, Demotic was a much simplified form of Hieroglyphs

I don't know much about the STRUCTURE of Linear B but I don't think it had THAT MANY signs?

Greek and Latin are basically phonetic, aren't they

-----------------

OK, so your basic point is to push alphabetic writing systems back to around 3000 BC? Or if we are looking at Catalhoyuk etc 9000 BC?

The Harappan cities had SOME sort of proto-writing, but it's hard to decipher as much of the context is lost

I imagine that the carving found tossed into the bottom of a well said enough to locals at the time to say what the city was called, and how. Symbolic rather than alphabetic

----------------

So, for 9000 to 3000 BC if there was an alphabetic system?

As you say, it would be difficult to have this spread around much

Lots more people can read than can write - an example, in Saint David's Cathedral, Wales is a tablet in Greek. I was able to stand there for 20 minutes and work it out. But NEVER could I have written the thing

So we are looking at more easily understood texts, but not necessarily more people writing them?
 
Gosh, both the visual arts and mathematics would be far less important in this world than they have been in our historical tradition. A written historical tradition would focus more on narrative and less on imagery (diagram, illustration, painting) and quantitative data.

The art of memory and the role of the public symposium in sharing and producing ideas would not have the honored role they have for all history. The culture of messengers and safe passage of messengers that existed to spread and share scientific, religious and philosophical discourse might be replaced by a written equivalent.

We'd have a completely different understanding of what languages were spoken in the past - we know that people spoke languages in the past which are not preserved at all by the oral tradition.

I can't imagine writing would achieve much more than status as a curiosity before printing and mass production paper (technologies that we all know were developed to allow the replication of accounts, mass produced sheet music, visual arts, wallpaper, money, etc. before their use was turned to phonetic writing).
 
As Grey Wolf suggests do you actually mean alphabetic? Because Sumerian cuneiform was phonetic but happened to be syllabic. Most of Egyptian hieroglyphs were phonetic.
 
It might actually hamper things. Its been proven that phonetic writing is actually more difficult for people to learn at every age group than pictorial forms. I could see a situation where domination of writing by phonetic styles would actually have lead to a significantly reduced literacy rate as compared to OTL.
 
Well, Demotic was a much simplified form of Hieroglyphs

I don't know much about the STRUCTURE of Linear B but I don't think it had THAT MANY signs?

Greek and Latin are basically phonetic, aren't they

-----------------

OK, so your basic point is to push alphabetic writing systems back to around 3000 BC? Or if we are looking at Catalhoyuk etc 9000 BC?

The Harappan cities had SOME sort of proto-writing, but it's hard to decipher as much of the context is lost

I imagine that the carving found tossed into the bottom of a well said enough to locals at the time to say what the city was called, and how. Symbolic rather than alphabetic

As Grey Wolf suggests do you actually mean alphabetic? Because Sumerian cuneiform was phonetic but happened to be syllabic. Most of Egyptian hieroglyphs were phonetic.

OOC: I mean that neither alphabetic nor syllabic writing systems emerge (or if they emerge, they die out in something like the Bronze Age Collapse). However there is still non-linguistic writing in the form of tally marks, numerals, mathematical notation, and semasiographic proto-writing where the symbols are more associated with their obvious visual meaning than with linguistic sounds.

Basically, everyone's literacy situation before the scientific revolution, is somewhere between the Inca Empire (no writing at all) and the Aztecs (pictographic proto-writing). In Aztec writing (which actually lost some features of Maya writing) a phonetic transcription is not possible but can be approximated by using rebuses and puns.

Gosh, both the visual arts and mathematics would be far less important in this world than they have been in our historical tradition. A written historical tradition would focus more on narrative and less on imagery (diagram, illustration, painting) and quantitative data.

The art of memory and the role of the public symposium in sharing and producing ideas would not have the honored role they have for all history. The culture of messengers and safe passage of messengers that existed to spread and share scientific, religious and philosophical discourse might be replaced by a written equivalent.

We'd have a completely different understanding of what languages were spoken in the past - we know that people spoke languages in the past which are not preserved at all by the oral tradition.

I can't imagine writing would achieve much more than status as a curiosity before printing and mass production paper (technologies that we all know were developed to allow the replication of accounts, mass produced sheet music, visual arts, wallpaper, money, etc. before their use was turned to phonetic writing).
Interesting points about symposiums and agreed conventions on messengers. Would there be less of a shared diplomatic tradition if each language had its own phonetic writing system?

Polyglots acting as messengers, and learning to speak several languages is one thing, but learning to read and write entirely different scripts would be much more difficult and seems like it would greatly restrict cultural contact.

Though "scribes" could perhaps be trained in a specific trade language adopted by many countries.
 
Top