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.
Weird, seems like such a small number by today’s standards
The Mayans capital was larger at the time of conquest.
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.
We had to develop sapience at some point, but I’d guess it was closer to when we invented cooking than writing. Egypt isn’t even that old by the standards of the human race.
What held the Egyptians back?
Their spines
I bet it was hangover!
Another synapse!! Do you also use a password manager?
Does watching stargate count?
I’m going to have to say yes.
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
Well that’s cool as hell!
So that’s where that penis comes from
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🥒
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Sadly we don’t have the exact modern equivalent 😔🍆💦
Did someone delete my comment? 𓀨
Yes.
Only just got the automod message. Odd choice, but ok.
Meanwhile in China they never stopped using hieroglyphics (cries while loading up more 中文 Duolingo and Lingodeer)
👁️🐦🌊☀️
Eyebirdwavesun?
How dare you call me that.
Back?! lol Homie, it never really stopped. Modern humanity’s about 300,000 years old and we’ve been using various forms of cuneiform and hyroglyphics since waaaaay before even Akkadian was a thing lol
They went out of style for awhile when the printing press was invented.
I refuse to use emojis, you can’t make me! 😤
I still use emoticons.
To answer your question on matching emojis, no, it is way more complex than that. For example check the use cases of this one - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill-country_(hieroglyph)
𓂀. CrDroid logo
Eye of Horus. Was one of my fave high school doodles.
Writing isn’t language, otherwise the thousands of unwritten languages wouldn’t be considered languages.
Idk. I think they can all fall under language, because they’re all a form of communication. Like sign language, or body language
That depends on your definition of “language”, where some definitions are much more scientifically useful than others. Defining language as “a system of communication” is not very useful, since there are important defining characteristics most people, and especially most linguists, believe that language possesses that other more general forms of communication do not.
Under the definition used by most linguists (for the kind of object we’re talking about here, that is - there are many other relevant objects of study that can be called a “language”), spoken/signed human languages have all of the characteristics of language, while “body language”/animal “languages” do not.
Sign language is language, since it has a systematic, unconscious mental grammar that meets all of the characteristics above, and writing is not considered language, since it’s just a means of encoding/preserving a language that already exists.
Another way of stating this is that writing is not itself the output of a mental grammar - it’s the output of a translation algorithm that acts on the output of a grammar, and so can’t be considered language itself (again, under one of the most common definitions of “language” used in the scientific study of human language).
