The First Ever Manuscript?

[cacian]

known to humans?

Trying to figure the origin of manuscript.
and the very fisrt ever to be given that title?
manu comes from hand
script comes from scripture but not necessarily a written language , it could be anything from symbols to paintings/images to drawings to stone arragement, because that is done by hand and anything that is arranged in a fashion that is trying to say something.

[Des Essientes]

It appears that script was first invented in Sumer. So the first manuscript would be a clay tablet incised with a wedge in the writing system known as cunneiform. The oldest known work of literature is The Epic Of Gilgamesh from Sumeria. The Egyptians and the Indus Valley civilization also had very ancient systems of writing which were, unlike cunneiform, pictographic. The Indus Valley's system of writing still eludes translation.

[stlukesguild]

Actually the Sumerians are latecomers if we are following cacian's definition of manuscript as anything (images/words/symbols) graven or painted.

There is some evidence that the preference for the aesthetic emerged in the Middle Paleolithic, from 200,000 to 50,000 years ago. Some archaeologists have interpreted certain Middle Paleolithic artifacts (such as the flint as early examples of artistic expression.

Denis Dutton made some rather intriguing explorations of the evolution of aesthetics which are briefly outlined here:

http://www.denisdutton.com/aesthetic...psychology.htm

Fundamental to sexual selection in the animal kingdom is female choice, as the typical routine for most species has males displaying strength, cleverness, and general genetic fitness in order to invite female participation in producing the next generation. With the human animal, there is a greater mutuality of choice. Geoffrey Miller holds not only that sexual selection is the source of the traits we tend to find the most endearingly human-qualities of character, talent, and demeanour — but that artistic creativity and enjoyment came into being in the Pleistocene in the process of women and men choosing sexual partners. The notion that we can alter ourselves through sexual selection is well accepted: there are striking examples of human sexual selection at work even in recent, historic times. The Wodaabe of Nigeria and Niger are beloved by travel photographers because of their geere wol festivals, where young men make themselves up, in ways that look feminine to Europeans, and dance vigorously to display endurance and health. Women then choose their favourites, preferring the tallest men with the biggest eyes, whitest teeth, and straightest noses. Over generations, the Wodaabe have grown taller than neighbouring tribes, with whiter teeth, straighter noses, etc. If it is possible to observe this kind of change in a few centuries, it is clearly possible to remake or refine Homo sapiens in tens of thousands of generations. As with natural selection, just slight choice bias over long time periods could radically reform aspects of humanity, giving us species features of personality and character that we have in effect created for ourselves. Our ancestors exercised their tastes for “warm, witty, creative, intelligent, generous companions’as mates, and this shows itself both in the constitution of our present tastes and traits, and in our tendency to create and appreciate art.

It is sexual selection, therefore, that is plausibly responsible for the astonishingly large human brain, an organ whose peculiar capacities wildly exceed survival needs on the African savannahs. The human brain makes possible a mind that is uniquely good at a long list of features that are found in all cultures but are difficult to explain in terms of survival benefits: “humor, story-telling, gossip, art, music, self-consciousness, ornate language, imaginative ideologies, religion, morality”. From the standpoint of sexual selection, the mind is best seen as a gaudy, over-powered home entertainment system, evolved to help our stone-age ancestors to attract, amuse, and bed each other.

As a telling example of the human self-created overabundance of mental capacity, consider vocabulary. Nonhuman primates have up to twenty distinct calls. The average human knows perhaps 60,000 words, learned at an average of ten to twenty a day up to age 18. As 98 per cent of daily speech uses only about 4,000 words, and no more than a couple of thousand words at most would have sufficed in the Pleistocene, the excess vocabulary is well explained by sexual selection theory as a fitness and general intelligence indicator. Vocabulary size is strongly correlated to intelligence, which is why it is still used both in scientific testing and more generally by people automatically to gauge how clever a person is. Such an indicator is especially telling in courtship contexts. Indeed, extravagant, poetic use of language — including a large vocabulary and syntactic virtuosity — is associated worldwide with love, being a kind of cognitive foreplay. But it is also, he points out, something that can “give a panoramic view of someone’s personality, plans, hopes, fears, and ideals.” It would therefore have been an essential item in the inventory of mate selection criteria.

The human tendency to create amusements, to elaborate and decorate everywhere in life, is therefore a result of mate choices, accounting for the evolution of dancing, body decoration, clothing, jewellery, hair styling, architecture, furniture, gardens, artefact design, images from cave paintings to calendars, creative uses of language, popular entertainments from religious pageants to TV soaps, and music of all kinds. Artistic expression in general, like vocabulary creation and verbal display, has its origins according to sexual selection in its utility as a fitness indicator: “Applied to human art, this suggests that beauty equals difficulty and high cost. We find attractive those things that could have been produced only by people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy, endurance, hand-eye coordination, fine motor control, intelligence, creativity, access to rare materials, the ability to learn difficult skills, and lots of free time”. This view accords with a persistent intuition about art that can be traced from the Greeks to Nietzsche and Freud: art is somehow connected, at base, to sex. The mistake in traditional art theorizing has been to imagine that there must be some coded or sublimated sexual content in art. But it is not the content per se that sexual: it is the display element of producing and admiring artists and their art in the first place that has grounded art in sexuality since the beginnings of the human race.

excerpted from Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology, Denis Dutton

The oldest undisputed works of art were found in the Schwäbische Alb, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. These include a number of "Venus" figures, the most famous being the Venus of Willendorf, the oldest dating c. 40,000 years old:



This may not, however, fit your definition of "manuscript" as writing or painting or depicting upon a surface. We should then turn to the caves of Southern France and Northwestern Spain, including those at Lascaux...



Altimira, Pech Merle and Chauvet. The paintings found at Chauvet are generally considered to be the oldest known, some dating c. 35,000 years ago...



... although claims have been made for even older depictive artifacts including
carved deer bones and depictions of deer that may be as much as 40,000 years old found in a cave in South Korea.

The oldest accepted petroglyphs (or stone engravings) commonly dated c. 10- 12,000 years old. Among these are included the site of Tassili n'Ajjer, Algeria. From 10,000 BCE to the first centuries CE, successive peoples left many archaeological remains, habitations, burial mounds and enclosures which have yielded abundant lithic and ceramic material:



"Writing" seems to have evolved with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to more permanent agrarian encampments in the area known as Mesopotamia, when it became necessary to count ones property, whether it be parcels of land, animals or measures of grain... or even to account for the passage of time. Clay tokens employing various pictographic symbols were used to represent commodities, and perhaps even units of time spent in labor...




and their number and type became more complex as civilization advanced. Eventually, a degree of complexity was reached when over a hundred different kinds of tokens had to be accounted for, and tokens were wrapped and fired in clay, with markings to indicate the kind of tokens inside. These markings soon replaced the tokens themselves, and the clay envelopes were demonstrably the prototype for clay writing tablets. Record keeping eventually evolved c. 4000 BCE into a system of "writing" using a triangular-shaped stylus pressed into soft clay to create numerical records. By 2900 BCE this had evolved to the point of allowing for the "writing" of simple phonetic elements, and by 2600 BCE we have the system of cuneiform applied to the elements of the spoken Sumerian language, and thus becoming "writing" as we know it. This technique of cuneiform writing spread throughout the region to Akkadian, Hurrian, Hittite, Ugaritic and Old Persian.

The stuff we had to study as part of Art History!

[cacian]

wow stlukesguild this is great.
There is lots there to read about.
Thank you.

[cafolini]

Very nice, S. This is the kind of stuff you are best at. Good work regarless of anyone wanting to argue whether or not sex was indeed the big drive. Very interesting.