A quick check shows that you are indeed correct, it does, probably by way of Khmer :).
Which certainly makes sense as SE Asia was very heavily influenced by India.
- Tamerlane
Nagana, the veterinary cognate of sleeping sickness ( that name specifically refers to the human disease, itself a big problem ), is absolute death on horses and camels and moderately pathogenic for sheep and goats. It is also devastating to the largest, most economically productive ( per unit head ) strain of cattle in Africa, the Zebu, but other cattle strains like the N’dama of West Africa are much more resistant.
This is why historically you could find large armies of mailed calvary being fielded by such Sahel-based states as Mali or Bornu, but none further south.
- Tamerlane
Wouldn’t you say that Egyptia too independantly produced a writing system? The hieroglyphs aren’t related in any way to the mesopotamian writing system…
I think the consensus is that the concept originated in Mesopotamia ( where the evolution of writing can be somewhat gradually traced ) and jumped to Egypt, where writing appears rather suddenly in the records.
- Tamerlane
I believe the Harappan civilization of the Indus River Valley (from before the Aryan conquest of India) also had a system of writing, though few specimens of it survive. And they probably didn’t get it from anybody else.
They did have a system of writing:
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/ANCINDIA/HARAPPA.HTM
“Right at the heart of the mystery, like a person speaking behind sound-proof glass, are the numerous writings on the artifacts that have been unearthed. Harappan writing was a pictographic script, or at least seems to be; as of yet, however, no one has figured out how to decipher it or even what language it might be rendering. The logical candidate is that the Harappans spoke a Dravidian language, but that conclusion, which may not be true, has not helped anybody decipher the script. Like the rest of Harappan civilization, the writing was lost to human memory after the disappearance of the Harappans.”
That nobody has been able to figure it out strongly suggests they didn’t get it from someone else.
It’s pretty impressive that any human societies managed to develop writing at all. Speech appears to be natural in humans, but literacy is not. Learning to read and write usually takes a few years of careful study and practice, and if you don’t master the skills young you’re unlikely to ever be very good at them.
Writing also seems to be more difficult than reading. I heard this when I was studying development of communication technology in college, but I didn’t really understand it at the time. Until fairly recently most women and a lot of men in the West could at best write their names, but apparently a great many were able to read simple words and signs and maybe more. This puzzled me. How can you know how to read without being able to write? Surely if you can recognize written characters and their meaning you could write them down yourself! Or so I thought before I came to Japan. With no formal study and little in the way of conscious effort I was soon able to identify many useful kanji (“entrance”, “exit”, “ladies room”, etc.) and do a semi-decent job of sounding out words in one of the two phonetic systems. But my writing skills barely extend past the ability to pen my own name.
If you’ve already got a writing system in place, it’s probably not terribly difficult for people to learn to read at a very basic level at least. But learning to write is pretty hard even with help, so it must be harder still to invent a functional writing system! This seems to be a major technological breakthrough of the kind that few cultures ever manage on their own. Most just borrowed the idea from their neighbors.
Don’t most historians now find it most probable that the Chinese writing originated from Mesopotamia?
In addition to the stone carvings of the various Mayan and Incan writings we have, there were knotted necklaces that people of the Americas used for record keeping. When the Conquistadors arrived in the Americas, one of the things that they did was to destroy the records written on paper-like materials and put to death those who knew how to interpret the knotted necklaces. (Since they decided that the religious writings of the Native Americans were Satanic in origin. :rolleyes: )
I’ve seen photos of the necklaces, with comments that no one’s been able to translate their meaning. However, it seems to me, that the necklaces were mnemonic devices, with the knots serving as clues to remind the wearer of the oral tradition behind them.
We have evidence of mnemonic devices in the writings of the ancient Greeks, and it seems logical to me that the Native Americans would have been smart enough to figure out something similar. Their oral traditions do go back quite a ways, and I’d be surprised if the same couldn’t be said of Africa.
Actually I believe that was an older consensus ( that also downplayed Mesoamerican accomplishments as not “true writing”), that was replaced by a newer consensus that they were independent…
*Of the earliest writing systems, scholars said, only the Sumerian, Chinese and Mesoamerican ones seemed clearly to be independent inventions. Reviewing the relationship between early Chinese bronze art, “oracle bones” and writing, Dr. Louisa Huber, a researcher at Harvard’s Fairbanks Center for East Asian Research, concluded, “Chinese writing looks to be pristine.” *
…which is now being slightly challenged again ( but does not yet appear to have formed a new consensus 
).
The above quote from this slight 1999 NY Times article on a conference on the topic:
http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/110/writing.htm
It’s really not inconceivable the idea ( if not style ) of writing may have originated only twice - once in the Old World, once in the New ( any speculation on connection between the two so far seems to fall into the realm of speculative psuedo-science ), but when dealing with topics buried this deep in the past it is hard to tease out the whole story.
- Tamerlane
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/vai.htm
No one’s mentioned the Vai syallabary. There are some other examples of native, indigenous syllabaries but at the moment I don’t recall them. The 1820’s date is certainly well into the colonial era, but the syllabary itself doesn’t appear to derive from any non African writing system.
I learned about the Vai syllabary and the others in an Intro African Lang and Lit course. The prof speculated that this writing system and others didn’t spread because of the tremendous difficulties posed by the sub Saharan environment - crushing rates of crippling diseases, lack of navigable rivers, easily depleted soils etc.
This would explain why the technology for smelting high carbon steel, developed in what is now Tanzania centuries before its appearance in Europe, never spread to the rest of Africa.
The civilization that built the great fortress at Zimbabwe ultimately collapsed due to soil depletion and agricultural collapse, at least according to the theories I’m familiar with.
Along with some of the other posters, I suspect that writing systems may have arisen and then died out.
Ummm, three times if you count Harappa. I’m betting the idea of writing is not such a big deal to come up with. I bet it has a lot to do with the tendency of people to lie when it is to their economic/social advantage to do so. Sooner or later, someone who’s been lied to endlessly by Og about how many shells he got for the chickens, will come up with the idea of making some marks to keep a record so he can nail that bastard Og next time he tries to lie like that. Pictures of of chickens, five marks. Writing.
I never said Mesopotamia was first - maybe it was Harappa and the Sumerians got the concept from them :).
The five marks is not quite the same - that’s just math/accounting. Like the notched baboon thigh I mentioned earlier or the Inca quipu. That alone wouldn’t be enough to qualify. The pictures of chickens with the marks might be, but apparently they weren’t necessary for an immense empire like that of the Incas, so I don’t think the concept is a foregone conclusion.
- Tamerlane
Well, mostly from India, but same difference. Vietnam and Korea both used Chinese characters at first.
As Below states, there was at list one African alphabet natively developed–I think it was from Kush. There might have been some Egyptian influence, I can’t remember.
At any rate, as Jared Whatshisname says in Guns, Germs, and Steel, writing was only invented independently a few times: the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Phoenecians, the Chinese, and the Aztecs.
No European civilization ever came up with a writing system; I believe the Phoenecians were Semitic (correct me if I’m wrong). So it’s just as valid a question to ask why the European barbarians were too uncivilized to come up with writing themselves.
But that points up the difference, don’t you see? The Greeks learned alphabetic writing from the Phoenicians, the Romans from the Greeks, and after the Roman Empire fell, the nations of medieval Europe, who had inherited knowledge of Latin, adapted the Roman letters to their own languages and developed native literatures.
Now, in Africa, there’s not much mystery as to why the cultures of the equatorial zone and further south were illiterate. As has been pointed out in this thread, they were geographically isolated from the outside world and even from other parts of Africa. But what puzzles me is that the Islamized nations of the Sahel region, and immediately south of the Sahel region, were literate, but only in Arabic. Why did they never adapt the Arabic letters to their own languages and develop native literatures? Arabic letters, like Roman letters, are phonetic and adaptable to more than one language – Iranian and a great many other languages are written in Arabic script. It should have been adaptable to African languages.
Well it is likely that literacy in Arabic script was initially mostly the province of the religious class and it was long considered necessary for proper religious writing to be in Arabic.
But that aside, my understanding is that at least a few languages were being written in Arabic script by the time of the European conquest. The Hausa were literate in Arabic from the 15th century and by at least the early 19th Hausa itself was being written in Ajami, an adaptation of Arabic script ( remember they weren’t brought under European control until the late 19th ). I believe Swahili literature dates back even further, to the early 18th.
The biggest factor was probably time - the diffusion of literacy in Africa just happened late in history. Had it occurred a few centuries earlier, native scripts might have been much more common.
- Tamerlane
As Below states, there was at list one African alphabet natively developed–I think it was from Kush. There might have been some Egyptian influence, I can’t remember.
The Vai syllabary - I’ll fix the link - was developed in what is now Liberia in the 1820’s. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/vai.htm
The part of Kush that had a writing system is usually referred to as Meroe, the name of that civilization’s major city, to distinguish that particular culture from others that existed in the region at various times in history. The language is called Meroitic. http://explanation-guide.info/meaning/Meroitic.html
The above site says that Meroitic may be related to modern day Nilo Saharan languages spoken by the Dinka, Nuer and other Nilotic peoples. I thought it had been proven conclusively that Meroitic was Nilo Saharan, but I’m not up on the latest.
Apparently the Meroitic writing system meets the conditions that BrainGlutton laid out for an adaptation of a foreign writing system to a native sub Saharan language (assuming that you consider Nilo Saharan languages to be sub Saharan.) Not just adaptation, but a fair amount of innovation as well: http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/198304/the.meroitic.mystery-from.nubia.the.land.of.kush.a.language.lost.in.history.htm
Quote:
Apart from Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Meroitic writing system was the oldest in Africa. It was also in many ways superior to the Egyptian system. The people of Meroe reduced the multitude of hieroglyphic signs to 23 basic signs - an alphabet. Again, unlike the Egyptian system, this alphabet also included vowel sounds, a great improvement over the hieroglyphic system, as well as including a sign marking the division of words, an uncommon feature in ancient writing.
There are two kinds of Meroitic script: hieroglyphs, apparently adapted from Egypt’s system, and the so-called “cursive” or demotic writing, which seems to be a distinctive Meroitic invention, though it may have been influenced by the Egyptian demotic.
I don’t want to be accused of Afrocentrism, but I will note that even some non Afrocentrist scholars see the division of the Sahara and ancient Egypt from the rest of Africa as artificial and wrong-headed. Ancient Egyptian is part of the Afro-Asiatic language family, and it’s thought that ancestors of Afro-Asiatic language speakers originated in the highlands of East Africa, what is now Ethiopia and Kenya. They would then have migrated into the Nile Valley, West Africa, and the Arabian peninsula.
Somthing that has been touched upon upthread, but not really examined in detail is why did writing emerge in the places that it did? I think part of the reason stems from 2 factors: 1) depedence on agriculture (more specifically, crop production/harvesting) as the primary food source and 2) population pressure (high population densities/growth). Of course, physical geography probably played a role as well. At some point, simpler means of keeping track of food (oral communication, simple counting devices, etc.) needed to keep pace with population growth.
My guess is that many of the Sub-Saharan African civilizations (those existing civilzations prior to cc. 1000-1200) didn’t have population densities/growth rates) necessitating the need for a permanent writing system.
IIRC the current thinking is that the Mesopotamian writing systems developed from exactly this type of accounting system (accountants RULE!), with scrathes on bones/wood migrating to a more standardized system of marking on clay, which eventually was extended to more and more concepts outside of the original “picture of cow + a scratch for each cow”. Chinese may have evolved from a similar non-verbal base used as a memnonic for interpreting omens/fortunes. The Inca system might, given time, have evolved into a pictographic or stylized representation of knotted cords and then spread just as the Mesopotamian system did.