History Quote by Jared Diamond

“All of these parallels between Mesoamerican and ancient western Eurasian writing testify to the underlying universality of human creativity. While Sumerian and Mesoamerican languages…

— Jared Diamond

“All of these parallels between Mesoamerican and ancient western Eurasian writing testify to the underlying universality of human creativity.”

— Jared Diamond

The earliest known writing probably emerged in southern Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, but for most of recorded history, reading and writing remained among…

— Tom Chatfield

“The earliest use of writing was strictly commercial and economic, not political or bureaucratic. It was trade, entrepreneurship, and stewardship of private property, not…

— Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

— Margaret Atwood

Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

— Toni Morrison

“The Sumerian language was originally that of the hunter and fisher peoples, who lived in the marshland and the Eastern Arabia littoral region, and…

— Margarethe Uepermann

“NINETEENTH-CENTURY AUTHORS TENDED TO INTERPRET history as a progression from savagery to civilization. Key hallmarks of this transition included the development of agriculture, metallurgy,…

— Jared Diamond

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers…

— Claude Levi-Strauss

“It didn’t disturb the Sumerians that their script was ill-suited for writing poetry. They didn’t invent it in order to copy spoken language, but…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Before the spread of alphabetic writing, systems making much use of logograms were more common and included Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya glyphs, and Sumerian cuneiform.”

— Jared Diamond

“Thus, Sumerian writing came to consist of a complex mixture of three types of signs: logograms, referring to a whole word or name; phonetic…

— Jared Diamond