This is only tangentially related, but if you like history and ship wrecks and live near Kansas City, go to the Steamboat Arabia museum.
They're digging up a steamboat that sunk, and they found after the river changed its course. It's super cool. When we went the last time we were driving across the states, one of the guys actually doing the excavating was there. He gave our kids a guided tour and talked about all the exhibits with them. It was super cool.
Loved the one in Kansas City! There are some great, thematically-similar museums in other countries as well, if you ever find yourself there:
- the Vasa in Stockholm, Sweden is a ship dredged from the harbor and stabilized, sank in 1628
- the Mary Rose in Portsmouth, England is a Tudor ship that sank in 1545 that was raised and stabilized
In both cases a ton of work was done to stabilize and preserve the remains of the ships that is, imo, almost more interesting than the ship itself.
Cool indeed but 1856CE is not quite as incredible as 300BCE.
What was in the 1856 wreck has rewritten the history of commerce on the Mississippi.
You'll never guess what happened next!
did it rewrite the slave trade part as well or did that remain as it is written?
It’s not a competition.
Yeah but the one from 19th century seems bit random for this thread.
Agreed, it is a very cool museum. Go early on a weekend morning in the spring and hit the market while it’s bustling, love that part of the city.
FYI 2600 and 2.6k use the same number of characters.
Could use the electronics convention and save a character: 2k6
It doesn't mean the same though, 2.6k implies somewhere between 2550 and 2650 years ago and 2600 an exact number of years.
That is intriguing I had never seen xk used in that sense. Is that a common convention?
Popular in finance. Often you dont need the details.
2600 only has 2 significant digits. It's not an exact number.
Unless the precision (resolution) is known (stated), it is unclear whether the trailing zeroes are significant or not, one may only guess (while such a guess looks reasonable in this case). A convention for writing that unambiguously is to avoid insignificant trailing zeroes: e.g., writing it as 26e2 or 2.6e3. Then the written number carries along its precision.
Doesn't writing out the trailing zeroes mean that you clain 4 significant digits? At least in the physics context.
I would guess that sentence: "that sank 2600 years ago" would imply that we are not talking about exact date. But more explicit word like: "that sank about 2600 years ago" would help.
Using different number formatting instead of word or sign (~) is still implicit and not explicit.
Has the advantage that you can't confuse it with 2600BCE.
"The wreck will be conserved, protected and eventually reassembled".
I wonder if Phoenicians labelled the parts of ships like their fellow Carthaginians (Chanani)? Or is this a Carthaginian ship but it's referred to as Phoenician?
A good book to read more or less related to this shipwreck:
https://www.amazon.com/How-World-Made-West-History/dp/059372...
Phoenicia will rise again
Bring on the Sea Peoples (maybe)
Different set of people (although they both traveled on the sea).
Preserved ancient shipwrecks are why I don't believe when people say some material "degrades in X years".
The extreme lack of ancient shipwrecks should convince you that those materials do degrade, almost every time.
In most waters, wood will be consumed by various life forms fairly quickly. No ancient shipwrecks are found there.
The exceptions include the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the deep ocean.
Don't know what saved this old boat though.
In water yes, but ancient shipwrecks are found all over the place because they've been buried under sediment. That is the case with this one, you'll notice in the article that they say, "the sand protection is leaving", which I take to mean that while it was discovered in 1993, it was covered up with sand and so protected from issues such as water movement, sun, and life forms. The sand is now eroding away and leaving the ship unprotected, hence the move, hence the article.
In Stockholm there now is, in addition to the well known Vasa museum, a museum about wrecks. It is called Vrak (Wreck) and is about wrecks in the Baltic Sea mainly. It is more of the interactive kind, no big wrecks on display, but smaller artifacts and audio/video/VR and so on. Interesting for those curious about the subject.
Of course the Titanic has been continuously rusting away too, along with being eaten by bacteria.
> They spent 560 hours diving at the wreck site to make detailed diagrams of its many cracks and fissures.
I feel a bit jealous of them, me being in tech, doing hard work like this to preserve the history of humanity.
How did people come up with alphabet? Phoenicians were one of the first to invent this technology, but I assume language existed way before that? How did that happen? Like, how did people agree on saying certain things to mean specific things? Starting from the mind of the first humans who didn't have language, how did we get to where we had language and it was so ubiquitous that even ancient civilizations like Phoenicians put it in writing?
There is a decent BBC documentary "The Secret History of Writing" which is all about the origins of writing. If you are interested in how it developed in all its different forms it's worth a watch.
Canaanite workers who went to Egypt to work in the mines saw these picture things used on walls. They had an idea to use it only instead of a picture per word the just used them for sounds. The Ox Head they saw they used for their Aleph sound. It was adjusted and rotated a bit then later on rotated again until we get our modern letter A.
> but I assume language existed way before that
Way, way, way older.
Writing is an incredibly novel development. There are still today linguistic communities without writing, although they're becoming much rarer. Writing was unknown in parts of the world until quite recently - the Aborigines of Australia didn't have it, nor did many pre-Columbian civilisations.
It's a safe bet that writing first emerged out of a need for accounting and this thus closely tied to larger agricultural civilisations. That's why we find it in places like Mesopotamia and Egypt first. Of course, those weren't alphabets yet, but logosyllabic writing (characters could stand for either meanings or syllables). The alphabet is a specifically Phoenician innovation, although similar systems (such as abugidas), which are also phonetic, have emerged elsewhere.
> There are still today linguistic communities without writing, although they're becoming much rarer.
From a 1969 study of preindustrial societies (though I'm not sure if they are all contemporary or if some are historical):
39.2%: No writing
37.1%: Pictures only
23.7%: Writing
> the Aborigines of Australia didn't have it, nor did many pre-Columbian civilisations.
No need to go that far, the Slavs didn't write down their languages until ~800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script
> No need to go that far ..
Seems relative .. I literally grew up on Aboriginal land in the Kimberley and attended school with multi lingual kids that had non English speaking parents.
Most are still not writing in their own language.
What is "Far" for you is neighbours from school and locals of the town I now live in.
Certainly these are closer in space and time than Slavs from a few hundred years past.
Perthite Brit here. I’m hugely curious about the situation before the Europeans came. Was there really no writing? Were there really no boats? It’s all so murky because the history was literally not written by the aboriginal communities. But has a story been passed down?
No writing but a lot of drawing and oral transmission .. spending a few hours on a sand drawing while reciting a story that changes little across generations is another kind of map (and features in a massive tome on historic maps).
No "boats" ala coracles or oak keel ships but (regionally) plenty of canoes .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Canoes isn't set on the Swan River.
Perth, of course, once had many lakes and swampy wetlands before all the market garden bore went in and drainage ditches.
> But has a story been passed down?
Many, all over. DM from up where I grew up touched up pretty old paintings and told stories: https://magabala.com.au/products/yorro-yorro
There were|are a lot of language areas each with stories of their own: https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...
Thank you for this. I’m lucky to live near Galup (Lake Monger). It’s wonderful but I’m always reminded how much has been lost of the original wetlands.
1492 is nearer than the 800s
I didn't mean far in time or space, I meant culturally. These people knew writing (in Latin) just not for their language. They had agriculture, domesticated animals, feudal society, some of them were already Christian, their language was very similar to English conceptually so their concepts would be similar to ours (well at least mine)
> Writing is an incredibly novel development.
Stating this as fact is misleading. Lack of evidence isn't proof of absence.
Humanity in its current form has existed for 300,000 years. The idea that writing spontaneously emerged 13,000 years ago, independently in multiple locations all over the world, coincidentally right after glaciers melted and sea levels rose 300-900 feet, reshaping the world’s geography, is —at best— an assumption, not a certainty.
We have many artefacts dating 20 to 50,000 years old. They don't have writing on them. It's strong evidence.
Except writing didn’t emerge 13,000 years ago but 5000 for writing and 9000 for proto-writing.
It also wasn’t discovered simultaneously. China is 3000 years ago, and Maya 2300 years ago. Sumerian or Egyptian were close to same time which probably means they were connected.
Also, writing didn't just spontaneously appear at random locations. It emerged in the most highly developed societies of the time, which had cities, agriculture, irrigation, sophisticated central governments, and so on.
Is that necessarily true? Likely we know much more about the most highly developed societies so that's where we would more likely discover ancient writing.
If you have no records, then we fundamentally cannot know about it yes?
Literally lost to history.
Actually, the alphabet invention was precisely that the same alphabet could be used for different languages.
They did not agreed on using certain sounds for specific things. They already did that on their own languages, each with their specific sounds. What the Phoenician Alphabet did was transcribing those sounds that already existed to a writing system that was common.
The Phoenicians did not invent the alphabet but they used it so much that developed it a lot. They used it for communication as a Lingua Franca for commerce in the Mediterranean.
It actually became a language on its own. They will use a native word from the native language of some particular good or commodity and then everybody around the Mediterranean Sea will use that written name and sound for referring to that thing.
It was extremely useful, so people used it more and more creating over time latin and greek scripts.
> Actually, the alphabet invention was precisely that the same alphabet could be used for different languages.
No. Multiple languages were written with the same alphabet because of the borrowing of that technology by speakers of other languages, not because it was designed as such.
Actually the process of borrowing is fondamental to the emergence of alphabets: the three biggest (by corpus size) logographic scripts all gave birth to more phonetic scripts across language boundaries. That happened with hieroglyphics (the case we are discussing), but also with Sumerian cuneiform > Akkadian writing and Chinese characters > Japanese kanas.
We have the notes from a zoom meeting between the priests of Ba'al and some early Phoenician scribes when they were designing the alphabet and outside of sacrificing children they were actually really concerned about accessibility standards
We're currently evolving back to pictograms.
You might be confusing language (a natural human skill which we evolved) and writing (a technology invented by humans, within the last 5-10 thousand years - very roughly).
As far as I’m aware, there no evidence that modern humans ever existed without language. And other recent hominid species that until recently co-existed with our ancestors probably had language too.
So probably there was never a human without language. Any non-lingual ancestor of ours was not human and probably pre-dates humans.
As for writing, to be reductionist, it is essentially arbitrary.
We co-evolved with language - the evidence is our adaptations to control over the voicebox, tongue, lips, etc.
Man's first words were:
awk grep ping biff ip yum du curl sedand don't the most important of them all, neofetch, it is posited that they used it for colorful displays to attract mates. How successful it was, we do not know ;)
The Phoenician alphabet started as the Proto-Sinaitic script. For context, if you're trying to write things down in the Sinai, you're logging the wares carried by caravans going back and forth from Egypt to the Phoenician heartland and back. You don't need the full range of hieroglyphs, so you don't need the training of an Egyptian priest. So you start with a reduced list of symbols.
Someone in this position started using those symbols to register the sounds of the Semitic languages, and the rest is literally history.
Here is a good history, by an expert, of how writing evolved from a counting system to a full written language:
https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing...
The Phoenicians did not invent their alphabet, they inherited an older alphabet.
Nevertheless they had a very important role in spreading the alphabetic writing system to many other populations, which was a consequence of their travels and commercial relations with everybody around the Mediterranean and even farther away.
Because of this, the ancestry of the majority of the alphabetic systems, even of some far away in South Asia can be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet.
Because of the importance of the commerce with Phoenicians and because of the many Phoenician colonies, the Phoenician language has also been spoken by many non-Phoenicians. This had as a consequence a simplification of the pronunciation of the Phoenician language, because for most foreigners it was difficult to pronounce some of the sounds specific to the Semitic languages.
The result of this simplification in pronunciation was that the number of letters of the Phoenician alphabet has been reduced to 22 letters from the 27 letters of the older North-Semitic alphabet inherited by the Phoenicians, because some of the sounds that were written with different letters in the older alphabet have evolved towards an identical pronunciation, so eventually the redundant letters from each pair with the same pronunciation have been dropped.
22 letters is a too small number for most languages, which has forced those who have adapted the Phoenician alphabet to other languages to add supplemental letters, like in the Greek alphabet, then in the Latin alphabet.
The small number of letters has created problems also for the writing of other Semitic languages, like Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic, which did not have the simplified pronunciation of Phoenician. The older North-Semitic alphabet from which the Phoenician alphabet had been derived would have been perfect for such Semitic languages, but by the time when writing has spread from the Phoenicians to their Semitic neighbors the older Semitic alphabet had been forgotten, exactly in the same way (and probably for the same reasons) as the Mycenaean writing had been forgotten in Greece (i.e. toward the end of the 2nd millennium BC there have been a few centuries of "Dark Ages" when much prior knowledge had been lost, after the destruction of many cities).
Because the older Semitic alphabet had been forgotten, the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters derived from the Phoenician alphabet through the Aramaic alphabet, despite the fact that this number was not enough to write all the consonants of ancient Hebrew. One Hebrew letter has now 2 variants distinguished with diacritic marks, i.e. "shin" and "sin", because originally it was used to write 2 different sounds, one of which no longer existed in Phoenician (modern Hebrew has lost that sound, so now "sin" and "samekh" are pronounced in the same way).
Writing has been invented independently in many places around the world, but in almost all writing systems the written symbols have been used to denote either syllables or words.
The Egyptian writing system and the alphabetic writing systems, all of which have been derived from the Egyptian writing system, are the exception.
A subset of the symbols of the Egyptian writing system was used to denote single consonants, while the remainder were used to denote multiple consonants, regardless of which vowels were pronounced together with the consonants.
The ancient Semitic alphabet has simplified the Egyptian writing system by retaining only the symbols that denote a single consonant. The ancient Semitic alphabet has retained thus the principle of writing only the consonants, and it has also inherited from the Egyptians the direction of writing from right to left, which has been preserved in the Hebrew and Arabic writing systems. Besides changing the meaning of some Phoenician letters from consonants to vowels, developing thus the first alphabetic writing system in the restricted meaning of the term "alphabet", i.e. with an approximately one-to-one mapping between all phonemes and letters, not only between consonants and letters, the Greeks have reversed the writing direction and this has been inherited in the other European writing systems.
This is basically unknown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language
People come up with new things all the time. It happens in this very moment, all around the world. I don't see how this is astonishing.
Realize that any successful language came from a close family with repeative daily tasks. To be successful they would need common terms to cooperate.
Unknown, but I'd hazard a guess that old cave art that depicts animals and sizes probably had sounds associated with them too. Humans like to tell stories, so probably cave art had oral history of some kind, and pictures probably became progressively more precise to handle progressively more complex stories, maybe about seasons, places, counting to keep track of things, etc.
That is a sound idea, but it makes more sense for hieroglyphs and ideograms.
My guess for phoenicia is that their alphabet comes from numbers (or maybe other smaller individual set of symbols) borrowed from another culture, but I wouldn't be able to determine from who or where.
try to recreate reality and a limited but repeatable form. roar like a lion, sing like a bird. remove everything that a thing looks like in order to leave what it is. break it into components and try to recompose them in new ways. general principals of intelligence, I'd say.