Thanks! By doing nothing at all—these are all just Unicode code points :o So if you're quick you can even copy a time as text. The only tricky thing was the symbol for 20 (and just that) didn't work on Android?? so I detect that and replace with two tens
Not to mention his book, about when he found an Cuneiform tablet circa 1800BC telling the story of Noah and the flood, which included more detailed instructions on how to build an ark than the biblical accounts and so he went and built it.
"Cuneiform" is a medium, sort of like "paper" if that included the tool you use to make the marks.
Writing systems using cuneiform include Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian, Ugaritic, Old Persian...
The article states that "Properly written out, these syllables join up into a flowing calligraphy that your average, educated Babylonian would be able to read at a glance", so presumably they're thinking of Akkadian. Why not say so?
(Does it make a difference? Consider that our first attempt to read the name of Gilgamesh came out as "Izdubar".)
The Babylonians also used Sumerian as a prestige language long after it was dead, much like we might use Latin today. Also, reading Akkadian cuneiform involves learning a bit of Sumerian vocabulary, because texts spell out words in Sumerian that were presumably pronounced instead as the appropriate Akkadian word (Sumerograms).
6 years to master a syllabic alphabet seems like a stretch...They seem to be crossing learning the language and learning the writing system.
I studied Greek and Hebrew in college, Latin in high school. In each the very first night's homework was to memorize the characters and their pronunciation.
Multiple ANE cultures used cuneiform (Ugaritic, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, and so on). The time to master each depends on your native language, the target language, and exposure to similar languages. The writing system is not the hard part.
It's true that learning an alphabet shouldn't take as long as learning the entire language. However, there's still a difference with cuneiform:
All of the examples you mentioned are derivatives of the Phoenician alphabet, which have around 20 to 30 characters each. Even with case sensitiveness and diacritics, I think they still add up to under a hundred characters.
Cuneiform character sets are in the order of magnitude of the several hundreds or even thousands, depending on the language[1], so I imagine that the experience is closer to learning to read Chinese or Japanese and less like Hebrew and Greek.
That being said, I've never tried to learn neither cuneiform or hanzi, so I'm just guessing based on the number of characters.
Another quirk is that much of it was highly contextual. e.g. Depending on context, the same numerals might indicate N, N x 60, N x 60^2, etc..
Cuneiform was also used over such a vast period of time that significant evolution took place. e.g. As numbers and mathematics evolved, there were sometimes different symbols for the same numbers depending on what was being counted. Scribes often had to learn several sets of numerals and when it was appropriate to use each of them.
The modern reader needs to learn, not only languages, but contexts and also be aware of how the script evolved over time.
Cuneiform generally evolved to become simpler and less contextual as time went by, but there remained a lot of characters to learn by the common era. The Phoenician alphabet was a huge step forward precisely because it was much simpler and easier to learn. Shaving years off of the learning process turns literacy into a common skill that many can obtain, rather than a select few whose families can afford to send them to a school for many years.
> Another quirk is that much of it was highly contextual. e.g. Depending on context, the same numerals might indicate N, N x 60, N x 60^2, etc..
You mean, like "1" can mean one, ten, one hundred, one thousand, ... or one-tenth, one-hundredth... depending on the context of other digits and an optional decimal?
Yeah, I guess it could take months to learn the ten digits of our current system.
In addition, Akkadian used cuneiform not only for phonemic writing, but also had many signs borrowed as-is from Sumerian as logograms (sumerograms), e.g. for the words for sheep and king. So in that sense it is indeed very similar to Japanese.
Egyptian did that too (and that writing system developed independently as far as we know) -- it's interesting that multiple ancient cultures did that (and as you mention modern Japanese isn't that different)
The writing system is not syllabic. It uses ideograms, logograms, and yes syllables all together. It's also not one singular "writing system," as the set of symbols varied and changed in the context it was used (language or region) and over the two thousand years that people wrote in this style.
Dr. Irving Finkel is an interesting guy. I ran across him shortly after I discovered the Lewis chessmen [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_chessmen], and I found out that Dr. Finkel had loaned his personal set to the Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone filmmakers for Harry and Ron to play Wizard's Chess with. I have since purchased my own Lewis Chessmen reproduction, and it is absolutely beautiful!
Old Persian cuneiform was designed from scratch and is essentially an alphabet. It has almost nothing in common with Sumerian Cuneiform, which is what most people think of if they refer to "cuneiform".
I thought it was a strange choice, not because I think anyone ordering from that site has an opinion on the merits of different types of cuneiform, but because I think the Old Persian glyphs are much simpler and will therefore appear less ornamental than e.g. Akkadian would.
Those who do have an opinion of the merits of different types of cuneiform are ordering custom items from Jeremiah Peterson.
The choice of Old Persian cuneiform is lazy, much like those Egyptian cartouche name necklaces that use a hieroglyphic alphabet rather than even attempting to write out a name as ancient Egyptians would.
Back in the days when a wide variety of removable digital media flourished (floppy disks, various flavors of tapes, ZIP and JAZ drives, Syquest and Bernoulli cartridges, mag-op WORM, etc) a friend and I joked about how we needed a "Cuneiform drive" to write to and bake sheets of clay because, compared to all the storage formats we were using, Cuneiform actually held up over time.
Yes indeed, holding up over time is not characteristic of digital technologies. To be sure I owned all of the "ancient" storage formats you mention, and down in the dark corner of my basement some of the old denizens still abide if not actually used. From time to time it's painfully evident that optical drives have all but disappeared too. We're all writing in electronic sand, endurance of our messages, ideas and creativity seems hardly a high priority.
I think about this when it comes to the internet and AI all the time. all of this knowledge we have access to required a very complex global supply chain and surplus of people with specific technical skills to maintain. if the USA has any major disruptive events - natural disasters, political instability, etc - the burning of the Library of Alexandria will pale in comparison
Well, if you call them kanji, they're Japanese characters. (Japanese characters with a name that literally means "Chinese characters", but still not Chinese characters.) Kanji are very much not syllabic.
Chinese characters are syllabic in the sense that most Chinese words are just one syllable. But still the characters have a meaning associated to them, that's why there can be dozens of characters that map to the same syllable.
> Chinese characters are syllabic in the sense that most Chinese words are just one syllable. But still the characters have a meaning associated to them
Well, there is semantic information included in the spelling of Chinese words. Far more than is included in other, non-Japanese writing systems.
But that won't stop the script from being syllabic any more than the same phenomenon in every other written language will stop its script from being syllabic or alphabetic. English script is alphabetic even though way is spelled differently from weigh.
Meaning is not used in determining the pronunciation of a Chinese character. (Except to the extent that the same character may have separate uses, as when 長 is pronounced zhang3 if it means 'grow' and chang2 if it means 'long'.) A character indicates a sound, and it always indicates that sound regardless of the meaning of the word in which it appears. This is as pure as syllabaries get.
Kanji do not share those properties. They are not restricted to single syllables. They frequently stand for several different unrelated words. They do not represent any particular sound. They may be drafted into any word with a vaguely appropriate meaning, even if that word is conventionally spelled with other kanji.
You’re right in a politically sensitive context, but practically speaking Kanji and Chinese characters mostly share the same unicode code points, and you might want to ask yourself whether it’s worth nitpicking over for example whether English uses the Latin alphabet when proper classical Latin does not have J or U…
No J, U, W, and, prior to ~230BC, also no G; around that time also no Z which had been disfavored; almost no K which was barely used if at all, and Y was a distinctively Greek-only letter in Roman times, so that gives you 20 or 21 letters: ABCDEFHI(K)LMNOPQRSTVX for the Latin alphabet.
It's post-3rd-century and includes the G; you might have remembered an accurate statistic ("20 or 21 letters") while forgetting to count your alphabet, which only contains 19 or 20.
K is barely used, but you wouldn't be able to argue that it wasn't used at all. It's used in "kal.", which you have to use when you're specifying a date.
> count your alphabet, which only contains 19 or 20
off-by-one errors are to be expected...
K is such a fringe case. I checked back and you're right, it was consistently used for that specific case 'kal.' and for some names. Interestingly though I don't think any (major) romance language retained that spelling afterwards. It's a bit like the British 'ö' in 'Coöperative'. Given that I remember one single time I saw that spelling in the wild while visiting the UK, should I now go and write angry letters to all editors that "English really has 27 letters!!"? How rare is a letter allowed to be used before we declare it "not part of the alphabet"?
> It's a bit like the British 'ö' in 'Coöperative'. Given that I remember one single time I saw that spelling in the wild while visiting the UK, should I now go and write angry letters to all editors that "English really has 27 letters!!"?
Well, no. The 'ö' in 'coöperative' is not a single grapheme; it's two graphemes. The same mark, which we might call U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS, is used with the same significance on any arbitrary letter (OK, any vowel), indicating that the letter is not part of a digraph and should be interpreted alone. This is how the distinction is drawn in writing between a coöp [where hippies work; each 'o' is a separate vowel] and a coop [where chickens live; the 'oo' is a single vowel].
The example I generally use to illustrate the conceptual difference is that, in Mandarin pinyin, é and è represent identical vowels, whereas in French é and è represent two different vowels. There's just one letter "e" in the pinyin example (along with two tone markings), but there are two letters in the French example.
(The French themselves would disagree - they don't include letters like è in their official alphabet - but they are wrong.)
You've gotten so nitpicky that you've apparently started mixing your own terms: graphemes, letters; and you're doing so incorrectly to boot (Muphry's Law, perhaps).
There are characters (U+308 in this codepage), letters ("E" and "e"), accent marks (which require an accompanying letter), and graphemes ("e", but also "ee").
Instead of iteratively correcting each other by refining and redefining words in each response, how about we communicate in good faith on the actual topic: cuneiform.
What do you think I mixed up? I pointed out that é is one grapheme in French and two in Mandarin, and I pointed out that é and è are the same (adorned) letter in Mandarin and two different (unadorned) letters in French. And that ö in English is similar to the Mandarin é, but not to the French é.
You seem to object to the idea that they're distinct letters in French. How would you account for å?
> and graphemes ("e", but also "ee").
Not a universal view, but fully compatible with -- and indeed, suggested by -- everything I said. What are you trying to point out?
> if you call them kanji, they're Japanese characters [...] Kanji are very much not syllabic
@2, the reason Japanese speakers use the designation 'Kanji' is the same reason that English use 'Latin', as a reference to their origin. To insist that Kanji are Japanese and not Chinese would be as strange as insisting that English does not use the Latin alphabet: it's not wrong in the sense that Japanese and English have added to their respective scripts, but it's also wrong in that it obscures the fact that the idea, the system, the forms, and the principle values (semantics and sounds) are inherited.
Put another way, if the British were to deny in the future that they're not using the 'Latin' alphabet but the 'British alphabet' (hard cultural Brexit?) and demand the Unicode consortium to split it off to a dedicated block (as they did for Coptic, which was initially considered a mere variant of Greek), we then have to wonder whether the French, German, Polish, Portuguese languages all should get their own dedicated block. That of course is denying the fact that major parts of Europe all use the same Latin alphabet, each with their own quirks and flavors added according to locale.
So when "you call them kanji, they're Japanese characters" but only with respect to usage, meaning, sound, and sometimes form, but not with respect to the overall system or character repertoire, which is shared with Chinese.
Also this entire branch of the thread is dangling from a faulty premise in The Fine Article, viz. "Japan’s kanji alphabet", which screams "writer knows zilch about this". Kanji are not an alphabet. Maybe they mixed it up and wanted to write "Japan's kana alphabet" which is sort-of similar but less wrong. It's acceptable if you think of an 'alphabet' as 'glyph repertoire', but then Cuneiform (or any of the roughly 10~15 orthographies and languages from Sumerian to Ugaritic) would be an 'alphabet' too (only somewhat true for Ugaritic, which is esssentially an abjad).
I have to admit that there's apparently no very commonly used word that comes to mind to complete the phrase "Japan's kana ___" that is not wrong ('alphabet'), or specific ('syllabary'), but general and could also be used to fill the gaps in "the Sumerian cuneiform ___", "Chinese ??? ___", "Egyptian demotic ___", "Egyptian hieroglyphics ___", except for "glyph repertoire". "Inventory" is maybe less arcane but also very generic. "Glyph" in the sense of "symbol used for writing" is maybe too academic for a lot of people. "Characters" is another popular choice. "Chinese characters", "Japanese Kana characters", ... but "Latin characters"? Maybe. "Character set" has become a comparatively widely used term already, so yeah.
> Kanji are very much not syllabic. But Chinese characters are.
The even more interesting aspect that (strangely enough) people like John DeFrancis apparently glossed over when discussing the nature of the CJK writing systems is that Japanese is quite a bit closer to 'ideographic' writing. For one thing, the phonetic clues that DeFrancis rightfully stresses so much are often much less useful in Japanese, and on the other hand, characters often have both a 'borrowed' and a 'native' reading while retaining the basic meaning; for example, 犬 can be read 'ken' (a reading borrowed from Chinese) or 'inu' (an indigenous reading), both signifying 'dog'. These characters work like Hindu-Arabic numerals in that the writing indicates am 'idea', a sense (a numerical value) that can be read out in multiple different sounds depending on language, or even within one language (ex. 3, 3rd, 30; 2, 2nd, 20).
Though English, French, etc sharing the same unicode codepoints is not as far as I'm aware problematic, whereas Chinese and Japanese characters sharing codepoints does cause wrong behaviour (wrong shape of character used in text because renderer has to guess whether to use a Chinese or Japanese font) and has to be worked around by marking up text as "this is Japanese"...
You are technically correct! Alphabets (ABC) are for phonemes, syllabaries are for syllables (hiragana, Cherokee), logograms are for words (chinese characters). Of course, some writing systems are very much hybrids (like Chinese, or hieroglyphics, or even the humble ampersand).
The "How to Write" part seems to be entirely in video form, and the link seems to be a thin blog post introducing it, so it would be good to have a `[video]` tag in the title here.
it's already in the Training Data but as you Can Imagine a Lot of hallucinations Going on. in fact you can try it out with the examples given on the video. It has gotten significantly better
Or that the genetic code has 64 codons and the Book of Çhanges (I Ching) has 64 hexagrams. Obviously a coincidence due to the fact that codons are combinations of 3 instances of 4 bases (4^3 == 64) and hexagrams are 6 lines that can either be broken or unbroken (2^6 == 64), but fun nonetheless.
The problem with that possibility is that nearly all the cuneiform we have makes sense as texts or accountancy. There's a vanishingly small amount of cuneiform that's completely indecipherable.
Not so hasty - I'm pretty sure this was powering the Antikithera Mechanism and the ancient roman Analytical Engine and other such early AI devices - so they would have needed some sort of schematic language.
The Baghdad Battery is the name given to an artifact consisting of a ceramic pot, a tube of copper, and a rod of iron fixed together with bitumen. It was discovered in present-day Khujut Rabu, Iraq in 1936,[1][2] close to the ancient city of Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthian (150 BC – 223 AD) and Sasanian (224–650 AD) empires, and it is believed to date from either of these periods.[3]
Its origin and purpose remain unclear. Wilhelm König, at the time director of the laboratory of the National Museum of Iraq, suggested that the object functioned as a galvanic cell, possibly used for electroplating, or some kind of electrotherapy. There is no electroplated object known from this period, and the claims are universally rejected by archaeologists. An alternative explanation is that it functioned as a container for magic spells for protection, defense or curses.[2]
Ten similar clay vessels had been found earlier. Four were found in 1930 in Seleucia dating to the Sassanid period. Three were sealed with bitumen and contained a bronze cylinder, again sealed, with a pressed-in papyrus wrapper containing decomposed fiber rolls. They had been held in place with up to four bronze and iron rods sunk into the ground, and their cult meaning and use are inferred. Six other clay vessels were found nearby in Ctesiphon. Some had bronze wrappers with badly decomposed cellulose fibers. Others had iron nails or lead plates.[2]
The periods your reference are indeed thousands of years after the periods in the article, before even getting into the debate about any of these needing electronics schematics.
Good stuff, but this has triggered my pet peeve! The title should be:
How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Known Writing System in the World
The added word being: KNOWN
You can argue that, "well, obviously!" but correctness and exactness are what makes science, history, journalism, etc good, and allowing incorrectness like this is a step backwards.
I read a history book when I was a teenager (can't remember which one, unfortunately), and the author wrote a preface that said something along the lines of "Everything in this book is based on the published information I could discover during my research period of April to September 1999. I have chosen to write in absolutes--stating many things as certain and clear--but in reality there is still much we do not know about this time period. No history author should say their writing is fact and any good historian will make it clear that their work is composed of assumptions layered on assumptions. Please read these works with this in mind."
If you don't have a preface like that, you should add "known" to your title/sentence! I will argue with someone all day over this! I will die on this hill!
Sure, but you could also endlessly add clarifying details to be more exact
How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Known (by the author) Writing System on Earth, the third planet from the Sun in the Milky Way galaxy, as of 2025 as long as you're a human without a major disability that would prevent you from using these techniques or are at least a being with similar hands and arms also able to obtain the necessary materials and can read and comprehend modern English if you aren't too busy doing other things and expect to live long enough to complete the task
You often get nitpickers going after some small technically correct detail which may be true but no reasonable person in the intended audience would ever actually need to be told. No one reading the original title would assume that the author had omniscient knowledge of the whole human history of writing beyond present archaeological fact and this doesn't need to be pointed out.
> If you don't have a preface like that, you should add "known" to your title/sentence! I will argue with someone all day over this! I will die on this hill!
Of course, if you’re a fallibilist you believe that it’s always possible that you’re making a mistake. It seems unnecessary to always add “unless I am mistaken,” because that hedge always applies.
In principle I agree with you, but in practice people really seem to forget this basic premise of science and jump right to the “that’s how it is,” stage. So I think it’s helpful to continually remind ourselves that this enterprise is a skeptical one.
This is a good hill to die on. I’m a middle school teacher and explain this concept often to my class. I explain that what I say now is what we know, yet these ideas can and do change, so keep this in mind as you continue your education.
Exactly, knowing what we know about anthropology, it's extremely unlikely cuneiform was the oldest writing. What's more likely is that other human groups must have invented ways for storing information, but they didn't survive.
Not necessarily. Logically, there must have been a first writing system (even if cuneiform wasn't it), so you can't show cuneiform wasn't the first on the basis of "something must have come before it".
Writing has been independently invented two to four times that we know of in the last five millennia. (Some scholars debate whether cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese writing were all independently invented, with Mesoamerican writing being the other almost indisputably independent invention.) Anatomically modern humans date back at least 200,000 years and probably would be capable of inventing writing long before our known examples.
Why do we not see more writing in the archeological record? Maybe agrarian societies both motivate writing and are required to provide the free time to invent it? Or perhaps it was written on media that's subject to decay? If some society developed writing on tree bark 100,000 years ago, none of that is going to survive and we'd never know.
The Egyptian and the Sumerian culture were very strongly linked with near identical cultic symbols and building plans for temples up until 3100BC. Chinese writing came suddenly over 1000 years later (minus some shamanic symbols), connectable via the Anu seal (which of course is tentative and will be denied by Chinese nationalist)
> The Egyptian and the Sumerian culture were very strongly linked with near identical cultic symbols and building plans for temples up until 3100BC.
There was prehistoric (i.e. pre-writing) trade between Sumer and Egypt. Scholars have argued that the idea of writing based on the rebus principle—but not a specific writing system—may have been communicated one way or another through this trade contact.
Your claim that the cultures were "very strongly linked with near identical cultic symbols and building plans for temples" is a new one for me—and I volunteer at a museum of ancient near eastern archeology. The material culture of pre-Dynastic Egypt and Sumer are rather distinct from each other. And when we do get writing describing their religion, those are also rather distinct from each other.
I'd settle for "earliest known", without an assumption that there was probably an older one.
Much like fossils, the vast majority of human writing is quickly lost to posterity. Paper, bark, and string decompose; clay and rock break; all writing materials can be repurposed for other writing (palimpsets) or other uses (reshaped to wall stones).
Still, given the paucity of known, independently invented writing systems... We may well know of all of them.
Other than the usual suspects being Lemurian and Atlantis civilizations from which everyone and everything have descended from, what actual evidence do we have for and against earlier writing systems?
Petroglyphs are not a form of writing, and the Kush tablet along with a few others are considered to be precursors of the proto-writing – at best.
So I reached for my trusted Ouija board to ask whether writing predates Sumer. It spelled, with unsettling clarity: «Y E S . B U R I E D . D E E P». Then it paused. «N O T Y E T M E A N T T O B E R E A D». Mysterious? Yes. Confirming? Not quite.
I made a Unicode Cuneiform clock recently! Watching it for a minute should teach you the important numbers: https://oisinmoran.com/sumertime
Some discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44280168
This is fun to watch. Question... For 5, 7, and 9, how did you get the right most golf tee to levitate?
Thanks! By doing nothing at all—these are all just Unicode code points :o So if you're quick you can even copy a time as text. The only tricky thing was the symbol for 20 (and just that) didn't work on Android?? so I detect that and replace with two tens
The expert from the videos, Irving Finkel, is a wonderful speaker and personality.
I highly recommend watching his lectures and British museum feature on YouTube if you’re interested in the ancient world.
Not to mention his book, about when he found an Cuneiform tablet circa 1800BC telling the story of Noah and the flood, which included more detailed instructions on how to build an ark than the biblical accounts and so he went and built it.
Nice article: https://www.telegraphindia.com/7-days/the-ark-that-finkel-bu...
Excellent lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I
I like his video about playing the royal game of Ur too.
"Cuneiform" is a medium, sort of like "paper" if that included the tool you use to make the marks.
Writing systems using cuneiform include Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian, Ugaritic, Old Persian...
The article states that "Properly written out, these syllables join up into a flowing calligraphy that your average, educated Babylonian would be able to read at a glance", so presumably they're thinking of Akkadian. Why not say so?
(Does it make a difference? Consider that our first attempt to read the name of Gilgamesh came out as "Izdubar".)
The Babylonians also used Sumerian as a prestige language long after it was dead, much like we might use Latin today. Also, reading Akkadian cuneiform involves learning a bit of Sumerian vocabulary, because texts spell out words in Sumerian that were presumably pronounced instead as the appropriate Akkadian word (Sumerograms).
6 years to master a syllabic alphabet seems like a stretch...They seem to be crossing learning the language and learning the writing system.
I studied Greek and Hebrew in college, Latin in high school. In each the very first night's homework was to memorize the characters and their pronunciation.
Multiple ANE cultures used cuneiform (Ugaritic, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, and so on). The time to master each depends on your native language, the target language, and exposure to similar languages. The writing system is not the hard part.
It's true that learning an alphabet shouldn't take as long as learning the entire language. However, there's still a difference with cuneiform:
All of the examples you mentioned are derivatives of the Phoenician alphabet, which have around 20 to 30 characters each. Even with case sensitiveness and diacritics, I think they still add up to under a hundred characters.
Cuneiform character sets are in the order of magnitude of the several hundreds or even thousands, depending on the language[1], so I imagine that the experience is closer to learning to read Chinese or Japanese and less like Hebrew and Greek.
That being said, I've never tried to learn neither cuneiform or hanzi, so I'm just guessing based on the number of characters.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#Sign_inventories
Another quirk is that much of it was highly contextual. e.g. Depending on context, the same numerals might indicate N, N x 60, N x 60^2, etc..
Cuneiform was also used over such a vast period of time that significant evolution took place. e.g. As numbers and mathematics evolved, there were sometimes different symbols for the same numbers depending on what was being counted. Scribes often had to learn several sets of numerals and when it was appropriate to use each of them.
The modern reader needs to learn, not only languages, but contexts and also be aware of how the script evolved over time.
Cuneiform generally evolved to become simpler and less contextual as time went by, but there remained a lot of characters to learn by the common era. The Phoenician alphabet was a huge step forward precisely because it was much simpler and easier to learn. Shaving years off of the learning process turns literacy into a common skill that many can obtain, rather than a select few whose families can afford to send them to a school for many years.
> Another quirk is that much of it was highly contextual. e.g. Depending on context, the same numerals might indicate N, N x 60, N x 60^2, etc..
You mean, like "1" can mean one, ten, one hundred, one thousand, ... or one-tenth, one-hundredth... depending on the context of other digits and an optional decimal?
Yeah, I guess it could take months to learn the ten digits of our current system.
In addition, Akkadian used cuneiform not only for phonemic writing, but also had many signs borrowed as-is from Sumerian as logograms (sumerograms), e.g. for the words for sheep and king. So in that sense it is indeed very similar to Japanese.
Egyptian did that too (and that writing system developed independently as far as we know) -- it's interesting that multiple ancient cultures did that (and as you mention modern Japanese isn't that different)
The writing system is not syllabic. It uses ideograms, logograms, and yes syllables all together. It's also not one singular "writing system," as the set of symbols varied and changed in the context it was used (language or region) and over the two thousand years that people wrote in this style.
I was responding to the claim in the article:
> Like Japan’s kanji alphabet, the oldest writing system in the world is syllabic.
Memorizing thousands of characters is a lot more work, but the memorization isn’t the main part of learning a language…
Dr. Irving Finkel is an interesting guy. I ran across him shortly after I discovered the Lewis chessmen [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_chessmen], and I found out that Dr. Finkel had loaned his personal set to the Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone filmmakers for Harry and Ron to play Wizard's Chess with. I have since purchased my own Lewis Chessmen reproduction, and it is absolutely beautiful!
Trivia: Le Guin's 'Roke' is an Old English form of 'rook', both in the sense of persian rook, chesspiece, fortress tower, and also rook the bird.
Seems relevant to mention https://dumbcuneiform.com/ here. I haven't ordered from them, but was always amused by the idea.
Dang. They lead by saying they'll translate your short message. And their marketing image shows the message "Girl, are you a beaver? Cuz daaaammmm!"
I was really looking forward to seeing how that got translated into something other than English.
But in the fine print, they say this instead:
> We take the letters from your message and transliterate by syllable, as nearly as we can, into [Old Persian] cuneiform.
Old Persian cuneiform was designed from scratch and is essentially an alphabet. It has almost nothing in common with Sumerian Cuneiform, which is what most people think of if they refer to "cuneiform".
I thought it was a strange choice, not because I think anyone ordering from that site has an opinion on the merits of different types of cuneiform, but because I think the Old Persian glyphs are much simpler and will therefore appear less ornamental than e.g. Akkadian would.
Those who do have an opinion of the merits of different types of cuneiform are ordering custom items from Jeremiah Peterson.
The choice of Old Persian cuneiform is lazy, much like those Egyptian cartouche name necklaces that use a hieroglyphic alphabet rather than even attempting to write out a name as ancient Egyptians would.
now see this is an online business.
all you need is essentially a basic website and billing + $0.30 of clay + basic kiln or oven + broken reed or bamboo stick.
chances are the orderer won't even know if you just made it up.
Back in the days when a wide variety of removable digital media flourished (floppy disks, various flavors of tapes, ZIP and JAZ drives, Syquest and Bernoulli cartridges, mag-op WORM, etc) a friend and I joked about how we needed a "Cuneiform drive" to write to and bake sheets of clay because, compared to all the storage formats we were using, Cuneiform actually held up over time.
Yes indeed, holding up over time is not characteristic of digital technologies. To be sure I owned all of the "ancient" storage formats you mention, and down in the dark corner of my basement some of the old denizens still abide if not actually used. From time to time it's painfully evident that optical drives have all but disappeared too. We're all writing in electronic sand, endurance of our messages, ideas and creativity seems hardly a high priority.
I think about this when it comes to the internet and AI all the time. all of this knowledge we have access to required a very complex global supply chain and surplus of people with specific technical skills to maintain. if the USA has any major disruptive events - natural disasters, political instability, etc - the burning of the Library of Alexandria will pale in comparison
> Like Japan’s kanji alphabet, the oldest writing system in the world is syllabic.
I think they have that mixed up with hiragana and katakana. Kanji are Chinese characters.
Well, if you call them kanji, they're Japanese characters. (Japanese characters with a name that literally means "Chinese characters", but still not Chinese characters.) Kanji are very much not syllabic.
But Chinese characters are.
Chinese characters are syllabic in the sense that most Chinese words are just one syllable. But still the characters have a meaning associated to them, that's why there can be dozens of characters that map to the same syllable.
> Chinese characters are syllabic in the sense that most Chinese words are just one syllable. But still the characters have a meaning associated to them
Well, there is semantic information included in the spelling of Chinese words. Far more than is included in other, non-Japanese writing systems.
But that won't stop the script from being syllabic any more than the same phenomenon in every other written language will stop its script from being syllabic or alphabetic. English script is alphabetic even though way is spelled differently from weigh.
Meaning is not used in determining the pronunciation of a Chinese character. (Except to the extent that the same character may have separate uses, as when 長 is pronounced zhang3 if it means 'grow' and chang2 if it means 'long'.) A character indicates a sound, and it always indicates that sound regardless of the meaning of the word in which it appears. This is as pure as syllabaries get.
Kanji do not share those properties. They are not restricted to single syllables. They frequently stand for several different unrelated words. They do not represent any particular sound. They may be drafted into any word with a vaguely appropriate meaning, even if that word is conventionally spelled with other kanji.
> most Chinese words are just one syllable
This is false; they're mostly two syllables.
Or multiple syllables for some characters depending on context, like 了 being le or liao. Chinese characters really aren't syllabic.
What? Le and liao are both syllables.
You’re right in a politically sensitive context, but practically speaking Kanji and Chinese characters mostly share the same unicode code points, and you might want to ask yourself whether it’s worth nitpicking over for example whether English uses the Latin alphabet when proper classical Latin does not have J or U…
No J, U, W, and, prior to ~230BC, also no G; around that time also no Z which had been disfavored; almost no K which was barely used if at all, and Y was a distinctively Greek-only letter in Roman times, so that gives you 20 or 21 letters: ABCDEFHI(K)LMNOPQRSTVX for the Latin alphabet.
A lot of Pompeii graffiti is the alphabet. For example: https://www.ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/graffito/AGP-EDR167...
21 letters.
It's post-3rd-century and includes the G; you might have remembered an accurate statistic ("20 or 21 letters") while forgetting to count your alphabet, which only contains 19 or 20.
K is barely used, but you wouldn't be able to argue that it wasn't used at all. It's used in "kal.", which you have to use when you're specifying a date.
> count your alphabet, which only contains 19 or 20
off-by-one errors are to be expected...
K is such a fringe case. I checked back and you're right, it was consistently used for that specific case 'kal.' and for some names. Interestingly though I don't think any (major) romance language retained that spelling afterwards. It's a bit like the British 'ö' in 'Coöperative'. Given that I remember one single time I saw that spelling in the wild while visiting the UK, should I now go and write angry letters to all editors that "English really has 27 letters!!"? How rare is a letter allowed to be used before we declare it "not part of the alphabet"?
> It's a bit like the British 'ö' in 'Coöperative'. Given that I remember one single time I saw that spelling in the wild while visiting the UK, should I now go and write angry letters to all editors that "English really has 27 letters!!"?
Well, no. The 'ö' in 'coöperative' is not a single grapheme; it's two graphemes. The same mark, which we might call U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS, is used with the same significance on any arbitrary letter (OK, any vowel), indicating that the letter is not part of a digraph and should be interpreted alone. This is how the distinction is drawn in writing between a coöp [where hippies work; each 'o' is a separate vowel] and a coop [where chickens live; the 'oo' is a single vowel].
The example I generally use to illustrate the conceptual difference is that, in Mandarin pinyin, é and è represent identical vowels, whereas in French é and è represent two different vowels. There's just one letter "e" in the pinyin example (along with two tone markings), but there are two letters in the French example.
(The French themselves would disagree - they don't include letters like è in their official alphabet - but they are wrong.)
You've gotten so nitpicky that you've apparently started mixing your own terms: graphemes, letters; and you're doing so incorrectly to boot (Muphry's Law, perhaps).
There are characters (U+308 in this codepage), letters ("E" and "e"), accent marks (which require an accompanying letter), and graphemes ("e", but also "ee").
Instead of iteratively correcting each other by refining and redefining words in each response, how about we communicate in good faith on the actual topic: cuneiform.
What do you think I mixed up? I pointed out that é is one grapheme in French and two in Mandarin, and I pointed out that é and è are the same (adorned) letter in Mandarin and two different (unadorned) letters in French. And that ö in English is similar to the Mandarin é, but not to the French é.
You seem to object to the idea that they're distinct letters in French. How would you account for å?
> and graphemes ("e", but also "ee").
Not a universal view, but fully compatible with -- and indeed, suggested by -- everything I said. What are you trying to point out?
> Japan’s kanji alphabet
> if you call them kanji, they're Japanese characters [...] Kanji are very much not syllabic
@2, the reason Japanese speakers use the designation 'Kanji' is the same reason that English use 'Latin', as a reference to their origin. To insist that Kanji are Japanese and not Chinese would be as strange as insisting that English does not use the Latin alphabet: it's not wrong in the sense that Japanese and English have added to their respective scripts, but it's also wrong in that it obscures the fact that the idea, the system, the forms, and the principle values (semantics and sounds) are inherited.
Put another way, if the British were to deny in the future that they're not using the 'Latin' alphabet but the 'British alphabet' (hard cultural Brexit?) and demand the Unicode consortium to split it off to a dedicated block (as they did for Coptic, which was initially considered a mere variant of Greek), we then have to wonder whether the French, German, Polish, Portuguese languages all should get their own dedicated block. That of course is denying the fact that major parts of Europe all use the same Latin alphabet, each with their own quirks and flavors added according to locale.
So when "you call them kanji, they're Japanese characters" but only with respect to usage, meaning, sound, and sometimes form, but not with respect to the overall system or character repertoire, which is shared with Chinese.
Also this entire branch of the thread is dangling from a faulty premise in The Fine Article, viz. "Japan’s kanji alphabet", which screams "writer knows zilch about this". Kanji are not an alphabet. Maybe they mixed it up and wanted to write "Japan's kana alphabet" which is sort-of similar but less wrong. It's acceptable if you think of an 'alphabet' as 'glyph repertoire', but then Cuneiform (or any of the roughly 10~15 orthographies and languages from Sumerian to Ugaritic) would be an 'alphabet' too (only somewhat true for Ugaritic, which is esssentially an abjad).
I have to admit that there's apparently no very commonly used word that comes to mind to complete the phrase "Japan's kana ___" that is not wrong ('alphabet'), or specific ('syllabary'), but general and could also be used to fill the gaps in "the Sumerian cuneiform ___", "Chinese ??? ___", "Egyptian demotic ___", "Egyptian hieroglyphics ___", except for "glyph repertoire". "Inventory" is maybe less arcane but also very generic. "Glyph" in the sense of "symbol used for writing" is maybe too academic for a lot of people. "Characters" is another popular choice. "Chinese characters", "Japanese Kana characters", ... but "Latin characters"? Maybe. "Character set" has become a comparatively widely used term already, so yeah.
> Kanji are very much not syllabic. But Chinese characters are.
The even more interesting aspect that (strangely enough) people like John DeFrancis apparently glossed over when discussing the nature of the CJK writing systems is that Japanese is quite a bit closer to 'ideographic' writing. For one thing, the phonetic clues that DeFrancis rightfully stresses so much are often much less useful in Japanese, and on the other hand, characters often have both a 'borrowed' and a 'native' reading while retaining the basic meaning; for example, 犬 can be read 'ken' (a reading borrowed from Chinese) or 'inu' (an indigenous reading), both signifying 'dog'. These characters work like Hindu-Arabic numerals in that the writing indicates am 'idea', a sense (a numerical value) that can be read out in multiple different sounds depending on language, or even within one language (ex. 3, 3rd, 30; 2, 2nd, 20).
Though English, French, etc sharing the same unicode codepoints is not as far as I'm aware problematic, whereas Chinese and Japanese characters sharing codepoints does cause wrong behaviour (wrong shape of character used in text because renderer has to guess whether to use a Chinese or Japanese font) and has to be worked around by marking up text as "this is Japanese"...
Additionally, syllabaries (like the kana) are not alphabets.
You are technically correct! Alphabets (ABC) are for phonemes, syllabaries are for syllables (hiragana, Cherokee), logograms are for words (chinese characters). Of course, some writing systems are very much hybrids (like Chinese, or hieroglyphics, or even the humble ampersand).
To be sure, 'logogram' is an even worse word than 'ideograph' for what the Chinese writing system is.
Nonsense.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alphabet
> al·pha·bet
> a set of letters or other characters with which one or more languages are written especially if arranged in a customary order
And then it shows an Alphabet Table beginning with Hebrew and Arabic.
The "How to Write" part seems to be entirely in video form, and the link seems to be a thin blog post introducing it, so it would be good to have a `[video]` tag in the title here.
Or a [2017] tag given the age of the video
There are cuneiform code points in Unicode in the supplemental multilingual plane. Fonts are available.[1] There is keyboard input for MacOS.
Now all we need is LLM support for translation. Is there enough cuneiform content available for training?
[1] https://www.hethport.uni-wuerzburg.de/cuneifont/
it's already in the Training Data but as you Can Imagine a Lot of hallucinations Going on. in fact you can try it out with the examples given on the video. It has gotten significantly better
Errrr.... actually that looks like ancient electronics schematics language.
Has anyone considered that possibility?
Reminds me of the coincidence between the 5th century Armenian alphabet and the periodic table
Or that the genetic code has 64 codons and the Book of Çhanges (I Ching) has 64 hexagrams. Obviously a coincidence due to the fact that codons are combinations of 3 instances of 4 bases (4^3 == 64) and hexagrams are 6 lines that can either be broken or unbroken (2^6 == 64), but fun nonetheless.
The problem with that possibility is that nearly all the cuneiform we have makes sense as texts or accountancy. There's a vanishingly small amount of cuneiform that's completely indecipherable.
Yes, I did, once in college.
But the marijuana made it hard to keep up my GPA, so I quit.
The ability to harness electricity had not been invented yet, by a few thousand years.
This seems unlikely.
Not so hasty - I'm pretty sure this was powering the Antikithera Mechanism and the ancient roman Analytical Engine and other such early AI devices - so they would have needed some sort of schematic language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery
The Baghdad Battery is the name given to an artifact consisting of a ceramic pot, a tube of copper, and a rod of iron fixed together with bitumen. It was discovered in present-day Khujut Rabu, Iraq in 1936,[1][2] close to the ancient city of Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthian (150 BC – 223 AD) and Sasanian (224–650 AD) empires, and it is believed to date from either of these periods.[3]
Its origin and purpose remain unclear. Wilhelm König, at the time director of the laboratory of the National Museum of Iraq, suggested that the object functioned as a galvanic cell, possibly used for electroplating, or some kind of electrotherapy. There is no electroplated object known from this period, and the claims are universally rejected by archaeologists. An alternative explanation is that it functioned as a container for magic spells for protection, defense or curses.[2]
Ten similar clay vessels had been found earlier. Four were found in 1930 in Seleucia dating to the Sassanid period. Three were sealed with bitumen and contained a bronze cylinder, again sealed, with a pressed-in papyrus wrapper containing decomposed fiber rolls. They had been held in place with up to four bronze and iron rods sunk into the ground, and their cult meaning and use are inferred. Six other clay vessels were found nearby in Ctesiphon. Some had bronze wrappers with badly decomposed cellulose fibers. Others had iron nails or lead plates.[2]
No part of the Antikythera mechanism showed any indications of being electrically powered, rather all reconstructions show it was operated by hand.
There was no "Analytical Engine" in ancient Rome. I don't even know what this could be referring to.
As your link mentions, the "Baghdad Battery" was debunked long ago, it's just a jar for storing scrolls.
The modern symbology of circuit diagrams was invented in the 20th century.
None of those cuneiform structures even work as circuit diagrams.
It's coincidence. The Dendera lightbulb isn't a lightbulb either.
The periods your reference are indeed thousands of years after the periods in the article, before even getting into the debate about any of these needing electronics schematics.
It helps single guys too. Since women love a man in cuneiform.
Love the spyware download, great post
Good stuff, but this has triggered my pet peeve! The title should be:
The added word being: KNOWNYou can argue that, "well, obviously!" but correctness and exactness are what makes science, history, journalism, etc good, and allowing incorrectness like this is a step backwards.
I read a history book when I was a teenager (can't remember which one, unfortunately), and the author wrote a preface that said something along the lines of "Everything in this book is based on the published information I could discover during my research period of April to September 1999. I have chosen to write in absolutes--stating many things as certain and clear--but in reality there is still much we do not know about this time period. No history author should say their writing is fact and any good historian will make it clear that their work is composed of assumptions layered on assumptions. Please read these works with this in mind."
If you don't have a preface like that, you should add "known" to your title/sentence! I will argue with someone all day over this! I will die on this hill!
Sure, but you could also endlessly add clarifying details to be more exact
How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Known (by the author) Writing System on Earth, the third planet from the Sun in the Milky Way galaxy, as of 2025 as long as you're a human without a major disability that would prevent you from using these techniques or are at least a being with similar hands and arms also able to obtain the necessary materials and can read and comprehend modern English if you aren't too busy doing other things and expect to live long enough to complete the task
You often get nitpickers going after some small technically correct detail which may be true but no reasonable person in the intended audience would ever actually need to be told. No one reading the original title would assume that the author had omniscient knowledge of the whole human history of writing beyond present archaeological fact and this doesn't need to be pointed out.
> If you don't have a preface like that, you should add "known" to your title/sentence! I will argue with someone all day over this! I will die on this hill!
Of course, if you’re a fallibilist you believe that it’s always possible that you’re making a mistake. It seems unnecessary to always add “unless I am mistaken,” because that hedge always applies.
In principle I agree with you, but in practice people really seem to forget this basic premise of science and jump right to the “that’s how it is,” stage. So I think it’s helpful to continually remind ourselves that this enterprise is a skeptical one.
This is a good hill to die on. I’m a middle school teacher and explain this concept often to my class. I explain that what I say now is what we know, yet these ideas can and do change, so keep this in mind as you continue your education.
Exactly, knowing what we know about anthropology, it's extremely unlikely cuneiform was the oldest writing. What's more likely is that other human groups must have invented ways for storing information, but they didn't survive.
And it would seem safe to assume that cuneiform developed from something else
We have examples of cuneiform as it developed from pre-writing symbols, so that’s not necessarily the case.
Not necessarily. Logically, there must have been a first writing system (even if cuneiform wasn't it), so you can't show cuneiform wasn't the first on the basis of "something must have come before it".
What discoveries in anthropology make you think that cuneiform is unlikely to be the oldest?
Writing has only been invented independently a few times in history, so it seems reasonable that cuneiform could be the first.
Writing has been independently invented two to four times that we know of in the last five millennia. (Some scholars debate whether cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese writing were all independently invented, with Mesoamerican writing being the other almost indisputably independent invention.) Anatomically modern humans date back at least 200,000 years and probably would be capable of inventing writing long before our known examples.
Why do we not see more writing in the archeological record? Maybe agrarian societies both motivate writing and are required to provide the free time to invent it? Or perhaps it was written on media that's subject to decay? If some society developed writing on tree bark 100,000 years ago, none of that is going to survive and we'd never know.
The Egyptian and the Sumerian culture were very strongly linked with near identical cultic symbols and building plans for temples up until 3100BC. Chinese writing came suddenly over 1000 years later (minus some shamanic symbols), connectable via the Anu seal (which of course is tentative and will be denied by Chinese nationalist)
> The Egyptian and the Sumerian culture were very strongly linked with near identical cultic symbols and building plans for temples up until 3100BC.
There was prehistoric (i.e. pre-writing) trade between Sumer and Egypt. Scholars have argued that the idea of writing based on the rebus principle—but not a specific writing system—may have been communicated one way or another through this trade contact.
Your claim that the cultures were "very strongly linked with near identical cultic symbols and building plans for temples" is a new one for me—and I volunteer at a museum of ancient near eastern archeology. The material culture of pre-Dynastic Egypt and Sumer are rather distinct from each other. And when we do get writing describing their religion, those are also rather distinct from each other.
You must have seen the facaded temples and these artifacts: https://github.com/pannous/hieros/wiki/susa-egypt.png ?
I'd settle for "earliest known", without an assumption that there was probably an older one.
Much like fossils, the vast majority of human writing is quickly lost to posterity. Paper, bark, and string decompose; clay and rock break; all writing materials can be repurposed for other writing (palimpsets) or other uses (reshaped to wall stones).
Still, given the paucity of known, independently invented writing systems... We may well know of all of them.
Good candidates would be the arc of Vinca, Cucuteni, Maykop down to Mesopotamia
Other than the usual suspects being Lemurian and Atlantis civilizations from which everyone and everything have descended from, what actual evidence do we have for and against earlier writing systems?
Petroglyphs are not a form of writing, and the Kush tablet along with a few others are considered to be precursors of the proto-writing – at best.
So I reached for my trusted Ouija board to ask whether writing predates Sumer. It spelled, with unsettling clarity: «Y E S . B U R I E D . D E E P». Then it paused. «N O T Y E T M E A N T T O B E R E A D». Mysterious? Yes. Confirming? Not quite.