I expected most of my students to be gone by yesterday, since everyone leaves early for spring break, so I covered all the exam-relevant material earlier in the week and left Friday free. I ended up digging out some air-drying clay, searching the local Asian restaurants to find chopsticks with square ends instead of round ones, and taught the remaining students the basics of cuneiform.
Once they’d had some practice, I asked them to think about why people used this writing system for thousands of years. It feels difficult and complicated: what benefits does it have? Why were those benefits more important than the drawbacks, in ancient Mesopotamia? What is our current writing system optimized for, and why are those things important for us?
It was a fun time. Though my handwriting is atrocious, since I’ve been spending so long working on ways to typeset it instead:
WE CONCLUDED THE GONCHAROV TTRPG CAMPAIGN AND NO MAJOR CHARACTERS DIED! Joel really came through in carrying the plot along. Basically: Valery thought that he had successfully killed Goncharov and went back to Yugoslavia, Katya and Sofia ran off to Toronto with Joel and the Devereaux mafia and were happily ever after in love, Goncharov is abandoned by his wife, employer, and friends, and Andrey disappears into the backwaters of the narrative like the espion he always was. Joel, the so called ‘one good man in Naples’ saves the day for the girls. None of the main cast died in the greatest mafia mewvie ever made… we’re so good at being so bad at genre convention adherence. Even with Goncharov’s 3 close encounters with rolling for death saves.
Next week we get to meet Manon’s version of Razac for the Butterfly Court TTRPG and I’m doing a silly little happy cat dance about it.
I made a cool tower out of blocks for my son, then realized I could balance this little gnome we have at the very tippy-top, which was great because 1) my son deeply enjoyed knocking it over, and 2) the whole setup prompted me to recall that there’s a specific term for a hermit who lives on top of a pillar and doesn’t come down (he - and let’s be real, it’s a he - is called a stylite).
-The marks are an intuitive way to write numbers and do simple addition/subtraction. Mathematics inspired writing in many ancient writing cultures, the first examples often being trade transactions.
-Papyrus/parchment/vellum were way too labour intensive and valuable for daily use or weren’t developed yet. Stone is hard, heavy and difficult to mark (and perhaps not readily available in Mesopotamia). Clay is everywhere (Two rivers and fertile soil. Must mean there’s clay around somewhere.). It allows for easy marking and can be erased and reused when soft or kept in a permanent record of sorts when baked.
-Clay doesn’t allow for fluent marking. Straight lines are easier to draw and easier to read. Curves will probably have deformations making them difficult to interpret.
-While expert writers will have had their personal stylus, pens are everywhere on the reedbanks of the river or in the form of tough grass/grain stems. Their hollow-pointedness combined with the soft surface of clay causes the specific nail-like appearance of the markings.
How’s that? Probably missing a bunch of factors, but this is what came into my head when I read your post.
If I had a nickel for every word I’ve learned referring to a specific type of hermit who self-imposes an extremely restrictive living situation (anchorite and now stylite!), I’d have 10 cents. which is not a lot, but is more than zero or five cents!
My oh my I laughed so hard I am crying… I am going to blatantly steal this quote from Sun Tzu (copyright no doubt expired by now) to incorporate as a custom response. Thank you for brightening my day.
You’ve got a lot of them! Clay is everywhere, and marking it like this—pressing a stylus down into the surface, instead of “drawing” with it—means you don’t make a mess of your surface. So it’s actually a lot faster than trying to “draw” on the clay. (If you try dragging the point of a pencil through clay, you’ll see your lines get very messy as displaced clay piles up on the edges.)
It’s also extremely space-efficient, and space-efficiency was more important than time-efficiency: when you’re trying to carry pieces of clay across the whole known world without them breaking, you want them to be as small as possible! The empires that used cuneiform could support a class of scribes whose entire job was to read and write, but even then, evidence suggests that “fluent reading” (scanning a line of text only once and getting all the words on it as you go) wasn’t possible with cuneiform; reading it was a whole process. But the scribes taking a few more minutes to decipher the text is a lot better than the tablet breaking in transit and needing to be re-sent.
As a side benefit, the system lets the individual scribe decide how they want to trade off between clarity and space-efficiency. You can write every word in the language with just a couple dozen signs if you want (the phonetic signs, which encode sounds), but it’ll take at least five or six signs per word. If you instead let yourself use all the hundreds of signs available (the logographic signs, which encode whole words), it’ll be harder to read, but need only one sign per word. Certain types of documents, like books about magic and divination, could be written with 90% logograms—very space-efficient, and as a side benefit, completely inscrutable to anyone without the proper training!
Then they would have had to invent TCP! Unless it was streaming data, of course. But in that case, it would need to be easily decodable, which you said wasn’t true.
Justin Schmidt, of the Schmidt pain scale index, died recently. That is, of course, terribly sad news- (he did so much for general science communications and sparking conversations with laymen and even other people already interested in the sciences but found studying Arthropoda boring, because there was a stunt man dare devil like quality to his index- but he was also a personal favourite of mine because of how many more people he opened up the world of parasitoid wasps to indirectly, with his ranking of the velvet ant) but just like when another of my personal heroes died (Mary Oliver, I have the journal where I had a tear stained and smudged entry from furiously writing in my highschool library when the news broke of her passing), there is a comfort in solidarity from other people who were touched by their work and memory.
Doodled my main Butterfly Court meowmeows. It was nice to just sketch- you can tell from the lineweight and stiffness in the initial drawing of Andrey that it was when I was still warming up- I’m most fond of the Enoch on that page, and then I did a silly little height chart for my own sake- I love sneaking in a goofy looking Zeke the kitty when I draw Enoch.
Jinx compiled this fantastic gamebook that compiles the lore inside of the Butterfly Court campaign about like, magic, religion, and character relationships, and I’m still laughing about how Taran is just full of seething hatred and Rory has so mewny friends on the relationship chart. (It doesn’t have all of the additional NPCs added onto it, since we’ve all plonked down a fresh handful of meowmeows recently, but it’s really good.)
Saw the sun still while exiting my night class. The sky is still faintly blue, the way evenings and early mornings are in the summer time. It took me by surprise.
