Question inspired by the image (see attached)
Hieroglyphs are actually not that simple, my ex gf was an Egyptologist, I went to quite a few lectures with her, that was a highly complex language, more akin to Japanese Kanji, with deep layered subtexts. Those desert dudes were crazy. If you have ever have a chance to visit a lecture about hieroglyphs, do it, it’ll blow your mind. Or how they calculated time, or even saw it, culturally and individually, wow. They were so unbelievably far ahead, I sometimes compare them to the octopus of human development, they should rule the world, but there was that one thing, that prevented it. (For the analogy: the octopus dies when their kids are hatching, would they have the ability to pass their knowledge along to them, today eight armed space suits would be en Vogue)
It’s incredibly easy to fall into the trap of seeing modern societies as more advanced. There’s no reason to think they weren’t just as intelligent and resourceful as we are today. They just lived a long time ago. If history can teach us one thing, it’s that nobody rules the world forever, as advanced a civilization can be.
Prior to collapsing, Rome achieved a sustained population in excess of a million people.
This did not occur again anywhere else until the mid 1800s.
I don’t agree with how you seem to be defining “advanced.” You seem to be tying that to intelligence and resourcefulness, as opposed to culturally. I think most use it to talk about the sum of knowledge and technology that a civilization has.
While ancient cultures were able to learn a lot about the world around them, today we know what they knew and a shit ton more. They figured out how planets and stars move. We’ve figured out what they’re made of, how they bend space and time, their distances. We’ve landed machines on some and put them in orbit around others.
They had some cool medical tricks. We have many complex but routine surgeries with high survival rates due to development of drugs, equipment, and sterile environments.
They could write down their learnings to share with others of their culture. We have a global network of scientists sharing massive data sets and inferences.
Their innate capabilities were probably no different than our own, but we have massively advanced the scale and scope of learning shared with each generation. We have a much greater degree of specialized knowledge advancing and branching out at a very high rate.
Maybe it’s an English second language thing, or just how I expressed myself, but yes, I was referring to the first. Our technological capabilities are obviously on a whole other level. Electricity + transistors basically transformed the world. Plus the massive population growth.
Probably the bronze age collapse, quite a scary event that extinguished trade routes and literacy.
(For the analogy: the octopus dies when their kids are hatching, would they have the ability to pass their knowledge along to them, today eight armed space suits would be en Vogue)
Thank you for sending me down that rabbit hole, it was a really interesting read, and I learned something new today.
From an article on the subject…
Octopuses are serious cannibals, so a biologically programmed death spiral may be a way to keep mothers from eating their young.
They also can grow pretty much indefinitely, so eliminating hungry adults keeps the octopus ecosystem from being dominated by a few massive, cranky, octopuses.
There’s an entire code block for hieroglyphs in Unicode. https://symbl.cc/en/unicode/blocks/egyptian-hieroglyphs/
Amusingly penis features in a few of them. https://symbl.cc/en/130B8/
Specifically in the “D parts of the human body” section?! Is there a “V parts…” section as well?
Not that I’m aware of only ‘penis’, ‘penis with emission’, and ‘penis with folded cloth’.
This link has the descriptions https://unicode-explorer.com/c/130B9
Of course this isn’t comparable - hieroglyphs form complete languages and are not just a set of emotion symbols. Probably there’s one or two that are emotions but I somehow doubt that the stone writings that endure contain any personal expressions of emotion.
But the post is funny and it hints at something important. Expressions to co vey emotion are incredibly important to human beings. It’s a language that our bodies are physically built for: our faces are far more changeable and expressive than other animals, and this supported the social bonds and cooperation that put us on top of the world. I’m not saying that across all cultures, one given facial expression means the same thing, but certainly all cultures have a vivid, silent language of facial expressions that is so deeply rooted, we barely think about it.
i mean most emojis aren’t emotions, they’re just… things…
what emotion does a bus have? the joy of not having to sit in traffic?
Yes there’s a long list of country flags and currency symbols and other shit in there too but lets not pretend like adding all that crap changed the fact that these are commonly used for expression. Does a cup of coffee have an emotion? Actually it kinda can, yeah, in the right situation. Let’s not even get into what people make of eggplants and popcorn tubs.
hieroglyphs form complete languages and are not just a set of emotion symbols. Probably there’s one or two that are emotions but I somehow doubt that the stone writings that endure contain any personal expressions of emotion.
Emoji don’t only depict emotions…
ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
Meanwhile in China they never stopped using hieroglyphics (cries while loading up more 中文 Duolingo and Lingodeer)
