Writing Quote by Jared Diamond

“Perhaps the most important single step in the whole history of writing was the Sumerians’ introduction of phonetic representation, initially by writing an abstract…

— Jared Diamond

“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

“Sumerian substratum is obvious not only in the use of a cuneiform system of writing, but also in the weakness of Laryngeal and Pharyngeal…

— Angel Sáenz-Badillos

“This ‘archaic’ stage of Sumerian script is not wholly understood by modern scholarship; and Sumerology is a tightly-knit, somewhat secretive academic discipline, which does…

— Geoffrey Sampson

“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

“The kings of the First Babylonian Dynasty wrote their votive inscriptions sometimes in Sumerian, sometimes in Semitic Babylonian; at other times they employed both…

— Leonard William King

“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

“M. Halévy started a theory to the effect that Sumerian was not a language at all, in the proper sense of the term, but…

— Leonard William King

“As the number of inhabitants grew, so did the amount of information required to coordinate their affairs. Between the years 3500 BC and 3000…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“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

“The first to overcome the problem were the ancient Sumerians, who lived in southern Mesopotamia. There, a scorching sun beating upon rich muddy plains…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Logograms pose a more difficult question. An increasing number of persons and institutions, from archy and mehitabel to PostScript and TrueType, come to the…

— Robert Bringhurst