Is writting the epitome of civilization?

Also share different ancient writting systems
This one is Maya which is still beign deciphered slowly.

One of the most interesting and least is known about is Rongorongo from the Easter island people.

But after eslaving raids that devastated the population of the island there was none left who could read it.
"The Bishop questioned the Rapanui wise man, Ouroupano Hinapote, the son of the wise man Tekaki [who said that] he, himself, had begun the requisite studies and knew how to carve the characters with a small shark's tooth. He said that there was nobody left on the island who knew how to read the characters since the Spanish had brought about the deaths of all the wise men and, thus, the pieces of wood were no longer of any interest to the natives who burned them as firewood or wound their fishing lines around them!"

As with most undeciphered scripts, there are many fanciful interpretations and claimed translations of rongorongo. However, apart from a portion of one tablet which has been shown to have to do with a lunar Rapa Nui calendar, none of the texts are understood. It would be one of very few independent inventions of writing in human history.[

>Is writting the epitome of civilization?
yes, it is a stupid idea like having a civilization. oral dialogues are way better. Liberals praise books and their broadcast of liberal knowledge to enlighten the plebs, but 200 years of this and life is still shit and plenty of people educated by liberals still do not behave like liberals want.
Outside of liberal fantasies, writing is at best mediocre tool as long as it is for recording verbatim statements, since otherwise normies claim there are '''''meanings'''''' of the words of a text and they wonder what the author meant.

Incans didn't have writing. They did have a weird-ass record-keeping system (usually a series of knotted cords) that we've barely got a grasp on.

We do have a very good idea about Mayan writing. We've made huge strides in the last few decades. One of the major players being the mentor of my mentor, Michael Coe! YAY I R SMART BY DEGREES OF SEPARATION.

Mayan is better understood than other native scripts. Also (imho) one of the most beautiful in the world, along with Burmese calligraphy and Georgian.

doesn't keep records in knotted cotton

>yes, it is a stupid idea like having a civilization. oral dialogues are way better. Liberals praise books and their broadcast of liberal knowledge to enlighten the plebs, but 200 years of this and life is still shit and plenty of people educated by liberals still do not behave like liberals want.
>Outside of liberal fantasies, writing is at best mediocre tool as long as it is for recording verbatim statements, since otherwise normies claim there are '''''meanings'''''' of the words of a text and they wonder what the author meant.

One of the best posts I have read on this board :D

mnemotechnics m8

Rongorongo is almost certainly more a mnemonic device than writing proper. It was also inspired by the treaty of fuck-you the natives signed with the Spanish in the 18th century, there's no record of its existence prior to this.

Yeah, I was thinking this (the part about mimicing Western writing), but it looked like dude knew more about it than me.

>barely get grasp on it
State of Veeky Forums
Quite opposite.

>According to colonial accounts, khipukamayuq—“knot keepers,” in Ruma Suni—parsed the knots both by inspecting them visually and by running their fingers along them, Braille-style, sometimes accompanying this by manipulating black and white stones. For example, to assemble a history of the Inka empire the Spanish governor Cristóbal Vaca de Castro summoned khipukamayuq to “read” the strings in 1542. Spanish scribes recorded their testimony but did not preserve the khipu; indeed, they may have destroyed them. Later the Spanish became so infuriated when khipu records contradicted their version of events that in 1583 they ordered that all the knotted strings in Peru be burned as idolatrous objects. Only about six hundred escaped the flames.

>All known writing systems employ instruments to paint or inscribe on flat surfaces. Khipu, by contrast, are three-dimensional arrays of knots. Although Spanish chronicles repeatedly describe khipukamayuq consulting their khipu, most researchers could not imagine that such strange-looking devices could actually be written records. Instead they speculated that khipu must be mnemonic devices—personalized memorization aids, like rosaries—or, at most, textile abacuses. The latter view gained support in 1923, when science historian L. Leland Locke proved that the pattern of knots in most khipu recorded the results of numerical calculations—the knotted strings were accounting devices. Khipu were hierarchical, decimal arrays, Locke said, with the knots used to record 1s on the lowest level of each string, those for the 10s on the next, and so on. “The mystery has been dispelled,” archaeologist Charles W. Mead exulted, “and we now know the quipu for just what it was in prehistoric times…simply an instrument for recording numbers.”

>Based on such evaluations, most Andeanists viewed the Inka as the only major civilization ever to come into existence without a written language. “The Inka had no writing,” Brian Fagan, an archaeologist at the University of California in Santa Barbara, wrote in Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade, his 1991 survey of Native American cultures. “The quipu was purely a way of storing precise information, a pre-Columbian computer memory, if you will.”

>But even as Fagan was writing, researchers were coming to doubt this conclusion. The problem was that Locke’s rules only decoded about 80 percent of khipu—the remainder were incomprehensible. According to Cornell archaeologist Robert Ascher, those khipu are “clearly non-numerical.” In 1981, Ascher and his mathematician wife, Marcia, published a book that jolted the field by intimating that these “anomalous” khipu may have been an early form of writing—one that Ascher told me was “rapidly developing into something extremely interesting” just at the time when Inka culture was demolished.

>The Aschers slowly gained converts. “Most serious scholars of khipu today believe that they were more than mnemonic devices, and probably much more,” Galen Brokaw, an expert in ancient Andean texts at the State University of New York in Buffalo, said to me. This view of khipu can seem absurd, Brokaw admitted, because the scientists who propose that Tawantinsuyu was a literate empire also freely admit that no one can read its documents. “Not a single narrative khipu has been convincingly deciphered,” the Harvard anthropologist Gary Urton conceded, a situation he described as “more than frustrating.”

>Spurred in part by recent insights from textile scholars, Urton has been mounting the most sustained, intensive attack on the khipu code ever performed. In Signs of the Inka Khipu (2003), Urton for the first time systematically broke down khipu into their grammatical constituents, and began using this catalog to create a relational khipu database to help identify patterns in the arrangement of knots. Like cuneiform marks, Urton told me, khipu probably did begin as the kind of accounting tools envisioned by Locke. But by the time Pizarro arrived they had evolved into a kind of three-dimensional binary code, unlike any other form of writing on earth.

>The Aschers worked mainly with khipu knots. But at a 1997 conference, William J. Conklin, a researcher at the Textile Museum, in Washington, D.C., pointed out that the knots might be just one part of the khipu system. In an interview, Conklin, perhaps the first textile specialist to investigate khipu, explained, “When I started looking at khipu…I saw this complex spinning and plying and color coding, in which every thread was made in a complex way. I realized that 90 percent of the information was put into the string before the knot was made.”

To sum your wall of text up (copied from the unimpeachable source of fucking 1491): while the parts of the quipu that encode numbers in base ten are well-understood and uncontroversial, the other parts are not, although there are many competing hypotheses, some of which are more promising than others. The issue is far from settled and is likely to remain so.

In other words, the post you quoted and belittled (not written by me) was absolutely fucking correct.

>State of Veeky Forums
>Quite opposite.

Yay! The khipu were "probably" much more than mnemonic devices, and some scholars "propose" vague things about them and... "no one can read its documents" and "not a single narrative khipu has been convincingly deciphered [etc.]" Wowziez!11!!11three!11

(My gawd man, these are your own words.)

>>barely get grasp on it
Yeah, totally we don't not barely have a grasp on it. It's all clear as poo on a windshield.

>State of Veeky Forums

Exactly, weirdos being dickholes and contradicting themselves for no particular reason for the sheer joy of being a dickhole and lashing out because lashing out.

See? You done had to do it, and now everybody hates you:

They hate truth.

Pic says grolier, but that is the madrid codex.

What do you know of the epi olmec and zapotec scripts? those are the ones I'm interested in. Also Teotihuacan and Aztec syllable glyphs.

hate to admit it, but the dude is actually right.
I mean in some way.
Civilisations need to keep track of shit in order to grow and become mighty.
The romans, the mongols, the japanese and the western civilisations like the british or whatever the fuck.
But apart from this, I don't know.
I actually don't know. More of your thoughts on this???

wonder what it says here

The tablet for the Hurrian hymn to Nikkal, the oldest written musical composition we've got. It's kinda cool how much music notation has changed, and yet how some parts of how we think about music hasn't changed at all, like how the tablet identifies the key / mode of the piece.

woah nice user