It was the final shot of a virtual photo walks, a story on virtual photo walks. pictographs or whether it's written or through song or whatever, whatever they did, they told us how to -- what they encountered, what to watch out for, how to have
So in conclusion, just to say, we're at this point in the course of human and social evolution where the demands of survival converge The pictograph was very, very illuminating.
to be saved and written by my ethnic group, which is Mixtec. And there are many pictographs that show us these different characters that lived in our pre-Hispanic past. Some of them have beautiful names, like "Eight Deer," and "Nine Herb,"
- Yeah, absolutely. Do you think it's possible we might find much, much older-- - I do - ... cuneiform type tablets? - Or, or pictographic type tablets, before the cuneiform and it's drawing type, and I'll tell you why. Because there's this marvelous site in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe.
But even with that, it took 50 years of effort to decode hieroglyphics. That's also another good example of how bad really pictographic languages are. And we often think, oh, if you want something to last for a really long time, just draw pictures and everyone will understand.
for the first time seems to me very, very unlikely. So, among these Mesopotamians around 3500, they started to do this. They made up signs which everybody understood and they could write simple pictographic messages. Foot is a foot, leg is a leg, and barley is barley. Then very, very gradually, they had the idea of how you could represent numerals.
We have 26, let's say they had 50 signs that would create the sound, they could write anything without any further trouble. So, I find it very bewildering that they started off with the least flexible and the least adaptable system of pictographs , and then they moved on to the sound. I don't know why they bothered with it. And my hunch is that the archeological evidence that we have on this score is ultimately misleading, because I think this, that probably for a
for whom pictures would suffice. So, if merchants come and they have three sheep to sell, so they draw three little sheep. You know how much it is and what they are and so forth. And so I think that what happened with the Sumerians, with their pictographic signs, is that those signs are right at the end of a very, very, very long period of time, when somebody thought, "What we can do is take these stupid inhibited no smoking signs and write language."
But it's also alphabets. If I write letters, even-- . pictographics. Hieroglyphics were very distinct symbols.
Once this happened, some probably very, very imaginative and clever persons had a kind of light bulb moment when they realized that they could develop a whole panoply of signs which could convey sound. And once you had that, you're liberated from pictographic writing into a position where you can record language. So language, grammar, and all the rest of it, and before long, proverbs and literature, and all the other things that got written down.
- Exactly. - But to actually write down sound is a genius invention. - Well, I think it's rather paradoxical, because the first generation or so of tablets that we have are written in these pictographic signs where each sign means what it looks like. So, this is a very limited method of recording messages, and it doesn't lend itself to recording grammar. And then the secondary phase,
shows that they had writing. That was an official who sealed this, got the stuff or whatever it was, or it was his dad's name or whatever it is, got a wiggly snake and a wiggly this. That is pictographic writing. Maybe even as phonetic writing, I don't know, but it was writing thousands of years before in the south. And that's what I think it is. You know, people came with metal from, or precious stones from Anatolia. They knew that
cigarette with an X through the middle. Everybody in the world knows what that means. They don't know what the word for cigarette is in this language or cancer or filter or tobacco, it doesn't matter. That's pictographic writing. We still use it. And, and it's, it's, it's above all kinds of mess. And I think that was the prevailing system because I honestly believe that the people at this time were not stupid. They weren't gorillas. They weren't less advanced than