I don't need to tell Kossacks that Western White Christian Male civilization owes a lot to the rest of the world, and to women, but specific facts sometimes help when talking to others. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization, that is to say, of living in cities (civitas), and there is a great deal to human culture that we can trace back hundreds of thousands or even millions of years to Africa. However, I am going to start with writing, the foundation of history, philosophy, science, and so much more.
Writing was invented at least three times, maybe four or even five, worldwide. It was the highest of high tech at the time both in terms of shared knowledge and materials, taking its place alongside shipbuilding, bronze tools and weapons, glass, and irrigation. Writing tools and materials have a long and complex history, starting with clay tokens marked with a stylus, and scratches on bones and other materials.
Let's survey where, when, how, and by whom, and note that no Europeans were involved before the Greeks and Romans, who weren't all that White in the US until quite recently.
Mesopotamia
The earliest forms of writing come from Mesopotamia (Uruk then, Iraq now) and Egypt. The picture at the top of this Diary shows the Mesopotamian precursor of cuneiform writing, in the form of clay tokens that were counted out and wrapped in clay to serve as bills of lading. If you can't read it clearly, or would like a closer look at the tokens, you can look at the Original file (5,488 × 2,752 pixels, file size: 1.79 MB, MIME type: image/jpeg).
The symbols indicate an economy based on grain, wool, wood, bronze, and oil, with a sophisticated numbering system. This then evolved over about a thousand years into Sumerian Cuneiform, written with a stylus making a restricted set of wedge-shaped incisions into clay tablets, pointed in various directions.
The table at the top shows tokens for 1, 10, 60, 100, 600, 3,600 and 36,000 that could be combined to represent any number into the hundred thousands. The use of base 60 continues to this day in angle measure (degrees, arcminutes, arcseconds) and time (hours, minutes, seconds).
Cuneiform tablets run about 4,000 small pages to the ton.
Cuneiform is a partly logographic system (one composite sign per word), partly syllabic, and partly phonetic, but with no set alphabet. There were hundreds or thousands of ways to spell one word, and scribes showed off their erudition by using as many variations as possible.
Several other languages came to be written in cuneiform, including Hittite, Akkadian, and Old Persian.
Various Mesopotamian empires gave us astronomy, technologies for vast irrigation systems, the beginnings of trigonometry, the Code of Hammurabi, and the epic of Gilgamesh. They also invented a remarkable method for validating communications. They wrote a message on a clay tablet, baked it, and then put on another layer of clay and wrote the same message on it. This meant that the message could be shown along the way, and then the two versions compared at the destination. It isn't Public-Key Signatures, but it was quite good for the time. It started with those early clay ball bills of lading I mentioned, when they pressed an equal number of tokens onto the outside, making distinctive indentations that could be counted up in transit.
Egypt
It is much disputed whether Babylonian writing had any influence on Egyptian hieroglyphic (priestly) writing. We must assume that Egyptians heard about Babylonian writing early in its development, but Egyptian writing seems to be at least as old, or possibly a few hundred years older. There are indications of Egyptian writing from 3400 BCE.
We will ignore all that. Whether or not any Egyptians had heard about, or seen, or even learned, Babylonian cuneiform, their own writing proceeded on very different principles. They painted their writing on stone, and wrote with pens on papyrus sheets, made from reeds pressed together. Many of the symbols were pictorial or geometric, and not at all limited to the stylus marks of cuneiform. There are pictures of birds, animals, gods, priestly implements, and so on. Individual signs could represent words, sounds or sound combinations, or word classes such as names of gods. There were multitudes of homophones requiring such indicators of word type.
Much later other much-simplified forms of Egyptian writing evolved from hieroglyphics for everyday use. We call them hieratic (priests' writing) and demotic (people's writing). There was also a trend toward spelling words with a more limited set of glyphs. One particular such set is often inaccurately called the Egyptian alphabet.
This eventually gave rise to the Phoenician alphabet, the ancestor of all other alphabets (European, Indian, Korean Hangeul) and other writing systems such as Arabic. Egyptian and Phoenician, like Hebrew and Arabic later on, are Semitic languages. They wrote only the consonants in words, because the vowels were clearly implied by the grammar. Such writing systems are called abjads. Vowels had to be invented later on, in Israel/Judah, Greece, and India, each on very different principles.
When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and installed the first of the Ptolemies as Pharaoh, Egyptians started writing their language in the Greek alphabet. This version of Egyptian is called Coptic.
Egypt gave us geometry, more astronomy, the earliest form of paper, and the Library of Alexandria.
China
The earliest Chinese writing that survives is on the tens of thousands of oracle bones used in pyromancy in the Shang Dynasty, somewhat over 3,000 years ago. A question would be scratched on the shoulder bone of an ox or on turtle shell, and then it would be put into a fire until a random pattern of cracks appeared. A priest would interpret the cracks, and often the interpretation would be written on the bone or shell, and it would be archived. The oracle bone script started off largely pictorial.
The next major development was Chinese characters on cast bronze vessels and jade seals. These characters are squared off, using only horizontal and vertical elements as much as possible.
In the Warring States period Chinese literati wrote on slips of bamboo with ink and brushes, and in the Han dynasty switched to writing with brush on silk. Later in the Han dynasty, paper made from mulberry leaves was invented. All of these forms of writing are much more like Chinese art forms, in part because calligraphy is taught as the foundation of Chinese painting.
Chinese writing remains somewhat pictographic, with characters representing people, animals (real and mythical), and much more.
China gave us gunpowder, paper, kites, silk, and the magnetic compass. Joseph Needham wrote a ten-volume academic study of Science and civilization in China, and a more popular two-volume version.
The Americas
Several writing systems were created in pre-Columbian South and Central America, and what is now Mexico.
Writing May Be Oldest in Western Hemisphere
Writing appeared in the Americans much later than in the Middle East and China. This new discovery pushes Olmec writing back to about 1000 BCE. Photos of the tablet are extremely hard to make out, but it has been transcribed so that the symbols are clear, even though we have no idea whatsoever what they stand for.
We also have examples of Zapotec, Izapan, and of course Mayan and Aztec writing. We think that Peruvian Inca quipus were used to record information in arrays of knotted strings, but the knowledge of how that was done was lost in the Spanish conquest and the systematic destruction of classic Inca culture. (Compare the wonderful science fiction story Looking through Lace, by Ruth Nestvold.)
Mayan writing is the best understood since fairly recent breakthroughs by Knorosov, Schele, Lounsbury, Coe, and others. [Thanks for correction from mbayrob] It had a sophisticated number system, and a calendar far more accurate than anything in Europe until the age of telescopic observation. Even before we could read Mayan generally, we could understand the calendar dates and much of their astronomy. Richard Feynman got involved in that research, and wrote about his public lecture on the subject in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.
Mayan writing relies heavily on images of gods, animals, and people, among many others. It started off largely logographic, but developed syllabic elements allowing any word to be written. There was nothing in its thousand or so signs even approximating an alphabet.
We have three original Mayan books, the Dresden, Paris, and Madrid Codices [Thanks for correction from ranger995], written on bark; several stories and other works, most famously the Popul Vuh, written down in the Latin alphabet; and multitudes of stone inscriptions. All of the other known codices were burned by the Spanish conquerors in their campaign to destroy Mayan religion and culture. There are rumors that a Mayan priest in Guatemala has a book in the old Mayan writing, and even knows how to read it, but after the attempted genocide in Guatemala during the last civil war, he would understandably not be willing to let outsiders see it, or even know who or where he is.
Aztec writing is thought by some scholars to derive from Zapotec writing, although this is strongly disputed. [Thanks for correction from ranger995.]
The Americas gave us vanilla, chocolate, turkeys, chilies, pineapples, corn, tomatoes, and potatoes, among other things.
Easter Island
Nobody can read the Rongorongo script of Easter Island, and we don't know anything about how it originated, or what kind of writing system it is. There is a suggestion that it might have been a local invention inspired by contact with Spanish explorers, but it seems just as likely to be wholly indigenous.
Easter Island has given us Moais, that is their giant stone statues, and a powerful example of human-caused ecological and economic catastrophe, when they cut down the last of their trees.
Abjads, Alphabets, and Abugidas
The first approach to an alphabetic type of writing was in Egyptian. Phoenicians took the idea and went all the way with it, creating an abjad (phonetic writing system with letters for consonants only) that became the basis for the abjads of Hebrew, Carthaginian Punic, Aramaic, Arabic, Syriac and other Semitic languages. The word "abjad" is formed from the first four letters in the Arabic abjad. The names of the letters were words starting with the given sound, as in Hebrew 'aleph (starting with a glottal stop), ox; bet, house; gimel, camel, which became Greek alpha, beta, gamma.
Arabic civilization spread with Islam among Persians, Berbers, Turks, Kurds, and many others. It gave us algebra and alchemy (both Arabic words) and algorithm, from algorism, from the name of the great algebraist Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khowarizmi, who worked in what is now Persia but published in Arabic. The astronomer, mathematician, and mystic Omar Khayyam lived in what is now Iran and Uzbekistan and wrote in Persian. Arabs, Persians, and others also preserved a great deal of Classical learning in Arabic translation, so that much of it passed into Europe with the great library of Toledo, discussed further below.
Many abjads were extended with various optional ways of indicating vowels with additional symbols, as in Biblical Hebrew. Torah scrolls contain no vowel markings, but they are added in study Bibles.
These abjads were also adapted in various ways to the requirements of non-Semitic languages, including Greek and many others to the West, and Brahmic and many others to the East. Korean Hangeul was entirely invented by scholars educated in Chinese and familiar with Sanskrit written in Devanagari.
Greek turned several letters that they did not need for consonants into the vowel letters alpha, epsilon, eta, omicron (little-O), upsilon, and also added omega (big-O). Greece gave us philosophy, geometric proofs, democracy, and the beginnings of science.
India put its vowel signs over the consonant letters, and then let some extend down the side. There are a dozen Indic scripts in Unicode. India gave us linguistics and Hindu-Arabic numerals, including 0.
And So We Get to Europe
Writing in Europe begins with the Minoans on Crete, who adopted the Phoenician alphabet to their language in the form known as Linear A. Greece took Minoan writing and created Linear B, and the Greek alphabet. Etruscans in Italy adapted that to their language, and the Romans adapted it further to Latin after conquering the Etruscans. Various languages have added letters from time to time, including j, w, z, ð, þ, a wide range of accented letters and ligatures such as æÆœŒ, and punctuation.
Other countries in Europe and the Middle East had other alphabets created for their languages, including Armenian, Georgian, and Bulgarian Cyrillic with later adaptations for more than 200 other European and Asian languages, mostly under Russian rule. Ethiopian, ancient and modern, has a different writing system, in which consonant letters are modified with vowel marks to make syllabic signs. There are also Berber writing systems, Tifinagh and Tamazight, in limited use in North Africa.
In 1085, Spanish Christians under Alfonso VI of Castile captured Toledo from the Arabs and Berbers, and for a wonder did not burn its magnificent library. Alfonso also got the local paper factory, starting the European paper industry nearly a thousand years after the invention of paper in China. Scholars from all over Europe flocked to Toledo to study Arabic and translate books there. Adelard of Bath, from England, made the first Medieval Latin translation of Euclid's Elements. The Romans never translated it from Greek until Boethius, just after the fall of the Roman Empire. A fair amount of Plato, Aristotle, and other Classical Greek material was also there in Arabic translation.
The period of European domination of most of the world was triggered after the beginning of the Renaissance, when trade routes for spices were blocked. The Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople and the rest of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. Many Greeks fled westward, taking books with them, including most of the surviving Greek Classical learning. Aldus Manutius in Italy set up the first Greek language printing and publishing company in Europe. Europe soon had the Reformation and later the scientific revolution. The Age of Discovery started with 15th-century Portuguese and Spanish navigators who discovered the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, and then the route through to India, the East Indies, China, and Japan, and then the Americas. Then they and other Europeans conquered almost every territory they could get to, while Russia conquered Central Asia and Siberia.
Philologists (early linguists), particularly in Germany, mostly decided that Europeans, especially Germans, were racially superior, and that the Indo-European or Indo-Iranian language family was a sign of that genetic superiority, because the Indo-Europeans conquered so much territory and spread their languages so widely, from India to Spain and from North Africa under the Romans to Norway. And look! Now the Europeans were doing it, even more viciously.
The conquerors in India called themselves Aryans (nobles) and now we have groups calling themselves Aryan Christian White supremacists everywhere that there are Whites. Buddhists, on the other hand, hold that one cannot be Aryan by birth, but only by understanding and action, as in the Four Noble Truths (catvāri āryasatyāni) and Eightfold Noble Path (arya-asta-anga-marga).
American and European racism and so on has nothing to do with language or religion, and little to do with actual race. It has to do with entitlement and pure power. Christianity is derived directly from Judaism, but never mind. The Nazis designated the Japanese as honorary Aryans during WW II. The Romani (vulgarly, Gypsies) are of northwest Indian Aryan descent and language, but the Nazis were as determined to kill them as Jews, Gays, Communists and others deemed to be subhuman. White Christian America used to exclude Eastern and Southern Europe, and all Catholics and Mormons, but many immigrant communities and some religions have been promoted after somebody else replaced them as scapegoats.
Links
I will update this Diary with links to more essays as I write them, and will link back from them to here. We will look into the abilities and contributions of women, and various topics in philosophy, religion, science, technology, politics, and government, and whatever else turns up along the way. Feel free to suggest topics and sources.
Note: I have omitted many of the 100+ known writing systems, and nearly all of the more than 7,100 known and documented languages. Look up the Unicode code charts, the Unicode Road Maps, the Conscript Unicode Registry (including Klingon!), and Ethnologue for much more on languages and writing systems.