Question: What if Indigenous Precolumbian North Americans invented writing?

Could you get one of the Mesoamerican writing systems/proto-writing systems to the Pueblo Indians? And from there, maybe have it get carried across the Great Plains through the trade networks there and to the Mississippians who innovate even more with it?
 
Is there the slight shadow of a possibility that a Phoenician trade ship could get cast away? I know it's a beloved theory but is it plausible?

Very, very little. General widom is that Mediterranean ships of the era had a snowball's chance in Hell in the Atlantic if they went far from the coasts. It looks like the Canaries were more or less the farthest they got into open ocean.
I guess it is not strictly speaking impossible, but plausible? Hell, no.

As an aside, Phoenicians seem to have to done a fairly good job at spreading the notion of alphabetic writing to North Africa and Iberia (and probably also Greece of course) although obviously none of these cases is about a single stranded ship.
Even assuming that somehow some people on the Phoenician ship who have knowledge of the idea of writing (not necessarily literate themselves) it is hard to see them coming into a position where they an introduce writing to th natives.
 
Could you get one of the Mesoamerican writing systems/proto-writing systems to the Pueblo Indians? And from there, maybe have it get carried across the Great Plains through the trade networks there and to the Mississippians who innovate even more with it?

This looks the most realistic possibility to me. I am not familiar enough with the inner mechanics of those writing systems to assess their likelihood to spread to very different languages and social contexts (it seems to be a complicated process with logographic systems because they are strongly adapted to a single language and difficult to learn and master. Of course, over long times this did not prevent their spread in either the Near East or East Asia. Still much more limited than what you see with alphabets/abjads)
 
I don't know anyways I don't think the traders were literate generally. It always strikes me as big racist when people suppose that the natives couldn't invent things themselves no they needed someone else to show them.

The old world peoples had a head start, and from what I'm told here it would take far longer than the timeframe for them to develop a phonetic script on their own because it took the Old Worlders a very long time.
 
Very, very little. General widom is that Mediterranean ships of the era had a snowball's chance in Hell in the Atlantic if they went far from the coasts. It looks like the Canaries were more or less the farthest they got into open ocean.
I guess it is not strictly speaking impossible, but plausible? Hell, no.

As an aside, Phoenicians seem to have to done a fairly good job at spreading the notion of alphabetic writing to North Africa and Iberia (and probably also Greece of course) although obviously none of these cases is about a single stranded ship.
Even assuming that somehow some people on the Phoenician ship who have knowledge of the idea of writing (not necessarily literate themselves) it is hard to see them coming into a position where they an introduce writing to th natives.

That's disappointing but I suppose you can't really deny that implausibility otherwise you'd have crypto phoenician colonies in the new world, or Malians, or any number of contacts.
 
Could you get one of the Mesoamerican writing systems/proto-writing systems to the Pueblo Indians? And from there, maybe have it get carried across the Great Plains through the trade networks there and to the Mississippians who innovate even more with it?

This would be difficult but not impossible. The only Mesomerican writing system likely to be in a position to spread into the Southwest would a largely pictographic system equivalent to the Central Mexican (Aztec) system. Fat change getting Mayans with their fully developed written language up there. This had virtually no systematic phonetic component, but was well suited to recording trade or tribute transactions. This would have been the kind of things that Mexican Pochteca traders and the elites in Anasazi communities may well have been involved with. Also a system of simple pictographs and numerical logographs would be easily adopted by other groups because they are not tied closely to a spoken language. The problem is getting such a system to spread across the Great Plains. Prior to the 1500's the Plains farming communities would not have been particularly attractive trading partners for either MesoAmericans nor the Anasazi in that the resources they could provide (corn, other crops, hides and furs) were not the sort of things elites traded in. Also they had not yet adopted equestrian hunting and the mobility than conferred.

More likely, if you want to go this route, have Cahokian/Mississippian traders come into contact directly with MesoAmerican Pochteca along the Texas gulf coast or Louisiana. There is no solid archaeological evidence for this, but given the many superficial similarities between Mississippian culture and formative/preclassic MesoAmerica in architecture, social organization, art styles, etc. Together with the presumed nature of Mississippian culture as a trade "empire" centered at Cahokia, they'd certainly have a reason to adopt a MesoAmerican pictographic script. But as noted by others, the invention of true phonetic scripts is very rare. More likely the Mississippians would simply continue to use and modify the Central Mexican tribute pictography in the economic realm.
 
Conceivably, there are only two inventions of writing whose mutual independence is almost watertight: Near East and Mesoamerica.

(There's also a small case for the Vinca symbols, by the way, but we have nothing like significant proof that it was actually writing - and little chance to ever get any; I am under the impression that we simply don't know enough about them, and we are unlikely to discover something that changes this).

The point is, however, that, unlike other cases where evidence for inspiration or derivation is actually there, we do not have any evidence whatsoever for Near Eastern influence, derivation or ispiration upon the earliest known writing in China. It is true, on the other hand, that the earlist phases of development of writing in China are essentially not documented at all (unless recent discoveries I am not aware of have been made). The aspect of the Shang characters, however, with its pictographic features, strongly suggests independent development. Furthermore, to best of my knowledge there is no known venue of contact that could provide the idea of writing to the Chinese from the Near East in the relevant timeframe. I am not aware of a single potsherd of anything resembling writing East of Elam and West of China in the mid-to-late Bronze Age (that would be big news). There's Indus Valley script before that (and possibility of some sort of writing remaining in use in India on perishable materials after its collapse, although no proof), but, AFAIK, there's not any sort of documented contact between India and China at the time (which would be centuries before the Shang oracle bones). And let's not even begin with the question if the Indus Valley script was actually a script (there's been some fairly nasty dispute about it; I am inclined to think it was, FWIW).
So, at the present state of knowledge (or lack thereof), I think that the case for independent writing in China is reasonably solid.

Much less so for Egypt indeed.
The full sequence of writing development is only fully documented in Mesopotamia. We can therefore assume with good confidence that the Early "Sumerians"* between the Late Uruk and Pre-dynastic periods, in the late fourth millennium BC, made the invention on their own, through a series of decently clearly understood steps, as an evolution of early methods of centralized bureaucratic accounting used by temples and palaces. Simple considerations of geographical and chronological proximity make the idea of contact/inspiration from Mesopotamia to Egypt far more plausible than it is the case for China.
However, currently available evidence does not support it. Recent discoveries point to writing existing in Egypt earlier that previously thought (and closer to a time when it had just barely emerged in Sumer) and also suggest a pretty different employ, and possibly origin, that is not as tighly related with accounting and bureacracy, and more closely to ritual/funerary contexts. This might be, however, a fluke of what documens made it to us.
One could posit the reverse way (Egyptian inspiration to Sumer) but this is unlikely in the view of the aforementioned decently clear internal sequence we have in Mesopotamia.
There is also no writing whatsoever known in the intervening regions in the relevant time, although this is not a clear proof of much since we DO have good reason to believe that trade contacts between Sumer and Egypt existed even that early.
In the end, some degree of cross-fertilization or influence, or Mesopotamian inspiration, is certainly possible with regard to writing. We simply do not have any sort of evidence about it, and some hints pointing to the contrary.
I am of two minds on the topic myself.

I feel reasonably safe saying (as I will tomorrow, to my students) that writing was invented independently probably three times, and possibly four. But the end, of course, we don't know.

I admit, anyway, that is based on the absence of proof, not on the proof of absence**.

* Quotation marks because it is not to be intended in ethnic terms, and the Sumerian identity of the written language can only be ascertained in the period, when writing was already developed.
** I cannot think of how absence of contact can be proven.

I agree with all of that
 
I agree with all of that

This is a fair end to the verdict.

In the end, even if it did happen, nothing short of a simplified syllabary or Abjad would really radically change history- more of the precolumbian history would just be available in written form. And those have been rendered highly unlikely by the evidence put forward here.
 
On the other hand, the alphabetic principle appears to have been invented only once. To the best of my knowledge, all abjads, alphabets and abugidas ever attested in the world, with very few partial exceptions like Meroitic and perhaps Ogham, are ultimately clearly derived or strongly inspired from the orginal Levantine abjad attested in the Ugaritic tablets, Proto-Canaanite fragments and (most probably) Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions.

What about Hangul?
 
A few minutes after you posted/ I read this, I learned that the Chinese had phonetic writing and then they abandoned it for cultural reasons.


While I hate using memes, nothing else sums up my feelings right now:

I AM DISSAPOINT.

Woah , you're talking about Phags-pa here? That was always more like the International Phonetic Alphabet we have today and never intended to replace Chinese characters in its entirety.

IIRC some Chinese women used a syllabic variant of characters, which could have been more interesting (and what you are talking about?)
 
What about Hangul?

Hangul was created long after the Proto-Sinaitic writing, so the idea of alphabetic writing was already out there. As for immediate influence, I suspect Chinese characters and Mongolian/Cyrilic for the alphabetic part.
 
Hangul was created long after the Proto-Sinaitic writing, so the idea of alphabetic writing was already out there. As for immediate influence, I suspect Chinese characters and Mongolian/Cyrilic for the alphabetic part.

Certainly not Cyrillic.
The steppes north of China, however, had been open to influence from Indian (Buddhist) and Near Eastern (Nestorian Christian, possibly Manichean and Jewish, islamic) religious traditions with scriptures attached, mediated by Central Asia and Tibet. Various alphabetic (intend the term broadly as including abjads and abugidas) traditions developed there (all probably of ultimate Imperial Aramaic origin, either through Iranic/central Asian and/or Indian/Tibetan channels; note that the Arabic script also evolves from Imperial Aramaic through Nabatean). Uyghurs, Manchus and Mongols all adopted similar systems at various times, and AFAIK, Phags-pa is also a product of that environment. Note that derivations of Chinese characters were also used to write a Mongolian variety (Khitan, though the script is still poorly understood).
 
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