#Ancient glyphs how to

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System in the World: A Short, Charming Introductionĭiscover the Oldest Beer Recipe in History From Ancient Sumeria, 1800 B.C. Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Painting the Earliest Form of Cinema? The very first system of writing, shared by early humans all over the world for tens of thousands of years. In other words, under her theory, “cave and rock would represent a modality of linguistic expression.” And the symbols surrounding that art might represent an elaboration on the theme. Cave art might show early humans “converting acoustic sounds into drawings,” notes Sarah Gibbens at National Geographic. Lesure says her research “suggests that the cognitive mechanisms necessary for the development of cave and rock art are likely to be analogous to those employed in the expression of the symbolic thinking required for language.” So argues MIT linguist Cora Lesure and her co-authors in a paper published in Frontiers in Psychology last year. Of course, it’s also possible that both the signs and the animals were meant to convey ideas just as a written language does. As the Bradshaw Foundation notes, when it comes to the European symbols, eminent prehistorian Jean Clottes argues “the signs in the caves are always (or nearly always) associated with animal figures and thus cannot be said to be the first steps toward symbolism.” Von Petzinger believes, writes George, that “the simple shapes represent a fundamental shift in our ancestor’s mental skills,” toward using abstract symbols to communicate. These symbols traveled: they aren’t only found in caves, but also etched into deer teeth strung together in an ancient necklace. “We’ve been building on the mental achievements of those who came before us for so long,” she says, “that it’s easy to forget that certain abilities haven’t already existed,” long before the formal written records we recognize. In her TED Talk at the top, von Petzinger describes this early system of communication through abstract signs as a precursor to the “global network of information exchange” in the modern world. “This does not look like the start-up phase of a brand-new invention,” she writes in her book The First Signs: Unlocking the mysteries of the world’s oldest symbols. “For tens of thousands of years,” Jacobs points out, “our ancestors seem to have been curiously consistent with the symbols they used.” Von Petzinger sees this system as a carryover from modern humans’ migration into Europe from Africa. She discovered 32 signs found all over the continent, carved and painted over a very long period of time. The symbols she found ranged from dots, lines, triangles, squares and zigzags to more complex forms like ladder shapes, hand stencils, something called a tectiform that looks a bit like a post with a roof, and feather shapes called penniforms.” Von Petzinger spent years cataloguing these symbols in Europe, visiting “52 caves,” reports New Scientist’s Alison George, “in France, Span, Italy and Portugal. While burrowing deep underground to make cave paintings of animals, early humans as far back as 40,000 years ago also developed a system of signs that is remarkably consistent across and between continents. The study of symbols carved into cave walls all over the world-including penniforms (feather shapes), claviforms (key shapes), and hand stencils-could eventually push us to “abandon the powerful narrative,” writes Frank Jacobs at Big Think, “of history as total darkness until the Sumerians flip the switch.” Though the symbols may never be truly decipherable, their purposes obscured by thousands of years of separation in time, they clearly show humans “undimming the light many millennia earlier.”

And what’s more, it may be possible, suggests paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger, that those prehistoric forms of writing, which include the earliest known hashtag marks, consisted of symbols nearly as universal as emoji. But it may also be possible that the earliest writing systems predate 5000-year-old cuneiform tablets by several thousand years. The archaeological evidence so far supports the theory. We may take it for granted that the earliest writing systems developed with the Sumerians around 3400 B.C.E.