There's a stele that was discovered in 1986 [1] in Veracruz. You could be forgiven if you think that writing is Maya. But it is not. It some other language. A couple other small fragments like it have been found, but the stele is basically an hapax. It is the only example.
And from the one example, we can see that it a system overflowingly glorious in its maturity and complexity. The scribes belonged to a culture that had been writing for a very long time. That is the refinement of millennia.
There are dates carved on La Mojorra 1; if they are in the same Long Count calendar the Maya used, then the stele appears to be talking about something that happened in the 140s and 150s AD.
The obvious relationship between the Mesoamerican writing systems might be somewhat analogous to the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, or Chinese and Japanese writing. One was adapted to write the other. Or they both evolved out of a common ancestral system. How far back might that have been?
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...
But... IDK if this (or other clearly advanced writing systems) demonstrate "refinement of millennia."
I think we have a "history is accelerating" bias. Changes in the deep past happened slowly, and the pace of change increases over time. That may be true from a very broad POV... but I don't think it's true on shorter timescales.
There are no hard limitations on going from a newly invented writing system to a professional scribal culture in a single generation. I don't think watershed "revolutions" are something new. Egyptian writing, and Early bronze age egyptian culture more broadly gets very advanced, very quickly. We don't really know what elements have deep histories... but it's hard to explain ancient egypt without allowing for some impressive leaps. Hence aliens.
Also... "common ancestor" can be a lot of things. It could be like the gradual species-like philogenetics of cyrillic, latin, hebrew, arabic and all other alphabets' development from proto-sinaitic and canaanite/punic. The same script gradually evolving in different scriptural islands.
Otoh... "ancestry" can be pure inspiration. The idea of writing, its uses and the certainty that widespread literacy is possible can be the "dna."
The confusing part is that culture does, often, evolve very gradually like species and clades over time. These sometimes leave evidence of the whole process. Sudden explosions can't be deduced from the absence of evidence.
It's fascinating that over 400 indigenous tribes lived north of the NA desert border between US/Mexico and there is zero evidence a single one had a written language, while the Maya and Aztecs on the other side of the deserts were writing for centuries.
We won't, by definition there's no written record pre writing.
It sucks how many instances in the historical record are like "welp, they had settlements that point to thousands of people, they made pots and they buried their deceased" that's kinda all we know about places that stood for millenia.
Even written records of oral history of the invention of writing would work
The bigger issue might be that "the invention of writing" is a rather boring and gradual event. Some administrator starts tracking the state of their grain stores with some symbols, then they start tracking other things and need symbols to differentiate, and over time more and more meaning is encoded in those symbols, until we call it writing
How can you tell that a script is "refined", especially from a single example?
单子是自函子范畴中的幺半群
It bears remembering that spoken language existed long before written language, and written language developed as a form of encoding spoken language. Purely pictorial communication utilises a small number of large symbols that make it clear what is being conveyed from pictures alone, but the language depicted is too complex and abstracted to be purely pictorial; it uses a great number of small symbols, and you cannot understand what it is trying to convey merely by looking at it as a series of pictures. For a reader to understand what is written there would require understanding the relation of symbols to spoken language.
By the way, Chinese uses a modern example of such a script and succeeds in representing such concepts.
In middle egyptian (the language you probably assume) "pictures" are just syllables. They are phonetic, not semantic, in the same way letter of modern language correspond to sounds, not meanings.
Egyptians had no problem expressinyg conplex concepts and they also had cursive writing, which is much easier to write.
The main issue with hieroglyphics is that it was a very convoluted system, where symbols meant different things depending on context. A symbol of a bird could be a literal bird, some abstract concept related to that bird or part of the sounds of the word for that bird.
Using the phonetic sign subsets of the Egyptian and Sumerian scripts, it was possible to write any sentence that could be spoken in their languages.
This was the most important advance in writing and both in Mesopotamia and in Egypt there is evidence about this transition from an earlier writing system that could write only a subset of the words of a language, so it could not be used to write arbitrary sentences, but only things like lists of objects with their amounts and owners, like needed for accounting, to a writing system that added phonetic symbols for writing any words that did not have their own symbol.
I cannot read the paywalled article, but it seems that now there is evidence that also the Proto-Elamite writing system has also passed around the same time through this transition from having only symbols for certain words to having phonetic symbols too, e.g. for syllables, which can be used to write arbitrary words and sentences.
Before phonetic symbols began to be used, we cannot know the language spoken by the users of a proto-writing system.
While in Egypt there is little doubt that the first users of writing spoke some kind of Old Egyptian, in Mesopotamia there is doubt the users of the first proto-cuneiform writing system spoke Sumerian. However, by the time when phonetic cuneiform signs were introduced, the language of the writers was Sumerian.
In the territory later known as Elam (in the West of present Iran), it is not known what language was spoken by the users of the Proto-Elamite writing system. It could have been an ancestor of the Elamite language spoken a millennium later, or it could have been a completely different language. Elamite is not related to the Indo-European languages that spread much later in that territory, like Old Persian.
These can last a very long while in the archaeological record if the environment is suitable, and the area covered by elam (the iranian south-west) seems pretty suitable. The oldest surviving papyruses are the 4500 years old "red sea scrolls". Similarly we have paper fragments from shockingly early in the medium's history (~150 BCE, papermaking is believed to have been invented circa 200 BCE).
Given how long Elam lasted, it would be very strange that none of this successor materials would have survived even in telling (e.g. we do not have examples of the oldest chinese bamboo slips, but we do have references to such from later works), and that it would not have spread out of elam either.
Recently I found this very interesting, signs of writing about 40.000 years ago.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stone-age-art-may...
"Our results strongly contradict the hypothesis that the sign sequences of the Swabian Aurignacian constitute writing in this strict sense."
You think it does constitute writing?
"Has been shockingly overlooked by all but a handful of scholars since its discovery 125 years ago" -- really? I picked up the one popular book on the subject that I own. It was first published almost 25 years ago and has an entire chapter on proto-Elamite, plus about a dozen mentions throughout the book.
Everything seems to have some sort of fake narrative these days to make it more "interesting". <old-man-yells-at-cloud/>
P.S. Highly recommend the book: https://www.thamesandhudson.com/products/lost-languages
The interpunct is a centered dot [·] Greco semicolon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_count
Or in Asia the Dongba script, which to me looks like a series of cartoon panels:
The Dongpa symbols look like they have some influence from Chinese characters somewhere down the line (much like some of the North American syllabaries are influenced by the Roman alphabet).
> Controversial theory about Göbekli Tepe | Irving Finkel and Lex Fridman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0BcGMaEV8o
This interview sent me down a Finkel interview rabbit hole, as he makes a delightful guest.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stone-age-art-may...
Pre-script about 40.000 years ago
I'm also aware Göbekli Tepe is a favourite of pseudoarcheologists and conspiracy theorists. Given who Finkel is, it will be nice to see a theory presented by someone who is actually a genuine expert! :)
https://trowelandpen.com/2025/12/22/hidden-in-plain-sight-di...
> Did this small stone represent the very beginnings of writing, about 12,000 years ago? And did archaeologists really overlook such an important find all this time? (Spoiler: No, it doesn’t. And we didn’t.)
Hmm, but later in the post, discussing neolithic symbols from the wider region:
> Interestingly, among these depictions there are some which indeed appear to be symbolic substitutes for more complex images, like the bucranium (ox head) in place of a full aurochs, or arrow-like zigzag lines representing snakes, and large birds reduced to a few characteristic lines. These depictions and their “abbreviations” seem to adhere to a certain convention, kind of a standardisation even, suggesting a communication system that uses these stone objects as media to store important information and knowledge.
But totally not writing, yo.
It's unfair to attack archaeologists, who only busy diligently doing their job, increasing the store of public knowledge, and winning awards from each other. Except sometimes they deserve it, so I'm going to attack them by saying that they hate to be specific. It's a huge risk, you might be wrong, or ridiculed as a crank, or you might attract cranks. Better to couch everything in language that lets you avoid saying the thing.
On the other hand we have the 40,000 year old mammoth carving from Germany (see Sci Am article in a different comment) with decorative cross patterns on it, touted as "statistically complex" and conveying information, when they're just badly carved decoration. In that case they were simultaneously pussyfooting around about stating their case and going off on a flight of fancy, at the same time, in the style of "I'm not saying it's aliens".
One of the artifacts found at a Göbekli Tepe dig was a pictographic seal stone.
Dates I'll retain, 1.7 million years and 5000 years. Two different, if associated, marks of civilization.
The super-old artefacts themselves are only a hint... but I think more recent artefacts demonstrate that invention of a writing system is relatively common. We tend to think of invention of core concepts as the magical event, with expansion and proliferation as derivative or even inevitable. But... I think this may be backwards.
In general... I think purely intellectual feats that can be completed by one person happen over and over. Otoh, we intuitively underestimate the role of context. Availability of trade goods like paper and ink. The application of writing to uses like tax collection, trade contracts, religion, scholarship or whatnot. Those all require many people. Whole societies, economic and political structures.
IMO, this is the uniqueness of the early bronze age... for writing and other things.
A lot of the writing dirth of the european dark age relates to the scarcity of papyrus. Writing medium seems like a trivial issue. You can write on skins, or bark or shingles. But... that doesn't scale and doesn't lend to the development of writing as a big deal. The invention of cheap paper-making was as important as moveable type for the "Gutenberg Revolution" to take place.
Rongorongo is an undeciphered script from Easter Island. From the handful of surviving examples, this is clearly a highly developed script... developed independently on a small island. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo#Corpus
The Cherokee Syllabary is a fascinating example. It was invented by Sequoyah. One guy. He had access to paper, ink and examples of english writing. He (seemingly) didn't have any information on how english writing worked. He borrowed letters from english... but he used them to represent syllables with no relation to latin. EG: the letter "D" represents the sound "A."
The ingredients for the invention of a full, advanced, newspaper-ready language were (1) one motivated genius (2) paper and ink (3) an example of how far the idea of writing could take you.
There was no proto-writing stage. It wasn't limited to personal seals, charms, prayers, accounting or short documents. I think the key here is example, a demonstration of potential. Sequoyah had seen books, letters and longform text. So, he went straight to newspapers, constitutional documents and suchlike. He taught his young daughter to read and the timeline from initial conception to widespread, advanced literacy was just 20 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
Writing and proto-writing may have been invented tens of thousands of times. Neanderthal proto-writing would be a paradigm-shifting find... but it wouldn't shock me that much.
The breakthrough inventions that tend to unlock a flood and punctuate our understanding of history... I think these are often more trivial than we expect. What matters is the ethereal and hard to describe "context." The addition of one or more trivial ingredients like a writing medium. Abstract "meta" like "writing should be used to write whole books." The sociability of the inventor.
The growing appreciation of Elamite sophistication adds to the shockingly large corpus of large, advanced civilizations that have existed in history. There are so many of them... and we don't even know what most were called.
Sequoyah was a great man, a genius, no doubt... but I think it is important to note that he didn't go straight to an alphabet.
It was his third try.
The first go was logograms: he made up symbols for words. Then he realised this would be too complicated and hard to remember, which speaking as an adult who learned to write a few words of Chinese and Japanese, I fervently agree with.
Then his second go was ideograms: symbols for ideas instead. The problem is similar and he dismissed that, too.
His third try was the Cherokee syllabary: one symbol per syllable, similarly to Hiragana and Katakana for anyone else who suffered through beginner's Japanese.
In a way, I think this makes it considerably more impressive. He worked through millennia of the evolution of writing in a decade or so. It's astounding.
(And I can't read it, and I'm ashamed by that, but then I do not know a word of Cherokee and live on a different continent.)
Logograms and ideagrams were ideas that he tried out. An MVP before pivoting to a better one. That's how invention works, through expiremention.
To me the example represents the fact that it doesn't take a millenia. If the right person is on the job... it can be a one person job.
Everything else can develop gradually. But... gradually doesn't necessarily mean generations. It can be one person expirementing, working on the project and until completion.
Think of it as a "master work" or a PhD. Big, but not beyond the right person's ability to complete over a decade.
Think Newton, Galileo or Tolkien. They didn't just "have an idea" that fully worked. But... they worked on their ideas for years, got a lot done themselves, and had fruitful projects.
People are people. What is possible in one century is possible in another, unless prerequisites are not present.
In the case of language... the centuries of development mostly contribute the ambition itself.
The inventor may not be doing some great project. They might be just inventing something small to help keep track of sales... or they're just inventing a gambling game that uses symbols.
