Knowledge is power

Writing marched together with weapons, microbes and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest.

Once again the question that Diamond raises is: why did some areas obtain writing while others did not? What is the discrepancy here? By now I know his writing patterns and I can already guess that he will give us a brief introduction to the history of writing. Oh how I am right!

Fertile Crescent-Origin of Sumerian cuneiform, which has spread throughout the fertile crescent, noticeably to the Mesopotamian civilization and the Egyptian Civilization

The first independent invention of writing that is known comes from the Sumerian cuneiform, which as you can see from the website is a simplified form of drawing specific places, items or actions into lines and dots. Furthermore, the clay that it was written on was carved out with pointed tools and later with reed styluses. The Sumerian writing style also foreshadowed a significant rule present today about writing: "writing should be organized into ruled rows or columns and the lines should be read in a constant direction from left to right".

To develop writing further, these pictorial descriptions must be translated so that phonetics and sounds that can be derived from them can transmit the information on the clay tablets. This would help resolve the difficulty in describing words that could not be portrayed by drawings, such as life.

Besides the Sumerian civilization, the Mayan/Mesoamerican writing is organized similarly to the Sumerian writing form. They both use logograms (referring to a whole word or name) and phonetic signs. Furthermore, similar syllabic signs were found among many languages such as Japan's kana and the Mycenaean Greece's Linear B and the two languages described earlier. This show the "universality of human creativity" where a language that was developed in 3000 B.C (Sumerian) is shown up at 600 B.C (Mayans).

Most of the writing found across the world has been a derivative or a descendant of a systematic writing modified from the Sumerians or Mesoamericans. The spread of writing can be classified by two methods:
1) Blueprint copying: one copies or modifies an available language/blueprint
2) Idea diffusion: one receives little or no information than the basic idea and reinvents the details by oneself. From this, the solution that one thinks of may be completely different that the original that one first saw.

Prime example of blueprint copying and idea diffusion is not because of writing as Diamond states is how the Russians were able to build their own atomic bomb. I thought it was interesting to compare this to writing, but the idea makes sense. Did the Russians have spies that took 'blueprints' of the bomb and created them or did the Russians realized the devastating effect it had on Japan and thus went to create their own with next to nothing instruction?

Similar questions arise from the history of development of wheels, pyramids and gunpowder

Kind of reminds you of the paradoxical question "did the chicken come first or the egg?". It's a mind-boggler and nonetheless it got me thinking. I still do not have an answer nor will I in the close future.

Jared's example of idea diffusion is the Korean hangul, which was derived from the block format of Chinese characters but was developed differently so that by grouping letters of different syllables, one can produce a letter and combine the different syllables into one and be able to pronounce it together. How to Learn Korean

But this shows idea diffusion because we know that Korea was in close contact with China and was able to derive its language from that.

Other languages that are significant include the Chinese language, which is known to be independently created and not influenced by any other language. I am surprised that Diamond did not examine the Chinese language with much emphasis because the Chinese language developed so much over its growth into the traditional representation we know today. As a former resident in China, I went to various museums that plotted the growth of the Chinese language, and I must say although it may look different now, it was in the beginning similar to the Sumerian cuneiform, where simple lines were used to create representations of items of the world. Evolution of Chinese language.

Egyptian Hieroglyphics is the other heavyweight among the early writing systems, but Diamond, along with myself, are critical to the actual proof that it was developed out of nothing compared to the Chinese who were too far from the Indus valley civilization and the Sumerian civilization. Looking at the earlier map plotting the Fertile Crescent, I assumed that the Egyptian civilization would have at least had some contact from the Sumerian civilization to obtain some influence for their writing.

That is, Egyptians and other peoples may have learned from Sumerians about the idea of writing and possibly about some of the principles, then devised other principles and all the specific forms of the letters for themselves.

Tricky indeed.

So after much history of writing, we end up at the conclusion and the final few paragraphs to answer our question from the beginning. Obvious discrepancies occur with the ability of food production along with political agendas needed for writing. Hunters never got around to writing because they lacked the agriculture and social needs to feed scribes and to use writing. It is also obvious to note that hunters do not really need writing because they rarely need to tally and distribute foods among people. Diamond also notes isolation as a cause for an absence of writing, notably in Hawaii and Tonga and other places such as the Andes, West Africa's kingdoms and the mouth of the Mississippi river which were blocked out by water and mountains.

The history of writing illustrates strikingly the similar way in which geography and ecology influenced the spread of human inventions.

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