This covers Chapters 1-4 from Meggs’ book.
Chapter One – Early Writing
Reading over the sections about prehistoric man’s cave drawings and the early writing of the Sumerians, I was struck by the universal humanness of needing to “keep track”. Early man didn’t have vessels of wine and dried foodstuffs to label, but he still needed to draw animals on cave walls for what we presume is ritualistic in nature, but I think there’s a case to be made for their need to keep track of a particularly large kill or rare animal as well. I have a folder in my personal wiki labelled “keeping track” and it occurs to me that it is a nice euphemism for “remembering”. And truly, writing is remembering. Even with the oral tradition of our earlier cultures that kept the main myths and stories alive for future traditions, writing things down means they get remembered. Of course this assumes you have a substrate that will survive humidity, fire, water, and conquerors. Without clay tablets, we’d have never known even a small part of what we know today about early writing systems. Modern man could learn a lot from the Sumerians about thinking about making your writing last, our digital formats aren’t much better than papyrus in a non-desert climate.
Question: would the Sumerian, Egyptian, Chinese, Phoenician, Greek, and Roman civilizations have existed without writing? Is writing a defining characteristic of an organized society? How far can you get without writing?
I think the answer is yes, writing is essential for any civilization that wants to move past villages and farmland. I’d like to know more about how the Sumerian culture grew step in step with the development of its cunieform writing.
Question: how instinctual are the principles of web design, namely, using grid structures, use of white/negative space, and using images and colors to emphasize and annotate content.
I was struck with how similar the elements of Egyptian funerary texts are very close to the elements of web design! We modern humans sometimes think we have invented everything to do with modern technology, but that is so not true, as evidenced by the format and look of a funerary text. Obviously the writing looks different and they didn’t have photos in Ancient Egypt, but even ancient people wanted their text to be in grid format (albeit simple), with even margins and spacing for easier reading, images to illustrate and making the text come alive, and most interesting, the use of white space (or negative space) to keep the page from being overwhelming and hard to read. Papyrus was precious, but they still had margins and white space.
Chapter 2 Alphabets
Question: Did the Sumerians trade with the ancient Chinese? The Egyptians? How about the Phoenicians? It is known that the Greeks and Romans knew and used the Silk Roads (Routes for some historians) to trade with the Far East cultures (not just Ancient China), but how far back does this go?
Meggs tends to understate the communication and interaction between some of the cultures and civilizations in its chapters about early writing. Trade over central Asian (the steppes) land routes were in use far earlier than previously understood, and there is some evidence that the Phoenicians at least did have some interaction with – at the very least – products and ideas from China if not the actual people, since they might have only interacted with the merchants who did the long caravan trips to the east. There is evidence of silk in Egyptian mummies that date to 1000 BC, which is after our earliest evidence of the sui generis writing in 2000 BC, but one wonders how early that trade route existed.
The reason I am wondering about this is because it was the exchange of ideas over the Silk Roads that had such an impact on world history (and is also the reason why Chinese inventions like the compass, gunpowder, and most importantly, paper made it the West later on) and there might have been some cross-fertilization of writing ideas between all of these cultures, The explanation for the Phoenicians coming up with an alphabet was particularly sparse (understandable, since we don’t much left of their writing), but it seems pretty clear that they had access to a wide range of writing ideas and made use of that to refine the alphabetic system, if not actually inventing it. Could you include Sumerian and Chinese writing among their influences? Were the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Chinese too deep into using their pictographic systems that even exposure to a superior alphabetic system wasn’t enough to get them to change?
Sources on the SIlk Roads and how old they are:
https://member.worldhistory.org/article/881/trade-in-the-phoenician-world/
https://member.worldhistory.org/Silk_Road/
https://www.thoughtco.com/along-the-silk-road-167077
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2015, 645 pp., $30.00, ISBN 978-1-101-94632-9.
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-barbarian-empires-of-the-steppes (This is a Great Courses link and is a 36 hour video course about the history of tje tribes and peoples of Central Asia, These tribes were a critical part of the SIlk Roads even if they get little attention in regular history books.