Not being /pol/ or anything, but how is it that the indigenous writing came about in Egyptian through various descendants managed to create indigenous writing systems in europe, india, south east asia, the middle east and even korea. But some how never managed to go south down the nile (besides ethiopia which sort of falls into the MENA sphere of influence) to other parts of Africa?
In other words why did subsaharan africa neither develop their own written language nor were able to adapt/adopt the written languages of either Egypt, the Berbers or Ethiopia (or perhaps others).
The first writing system of subsaharan africa seems to have been Arabic, adapted for Hausa langauge in around 15th century, and only a little bit later would portuguese people start transcribing KiKongo language in latin script.
But prior to that there was nothing? Was it isolation from writing? Was it a lack of a need for writing? Was there some resource impediment to writing (perhaps a lack of materials to write with or to write on)?
>calling fucking Cyrilic a "Slavic" alphabet
Russocentrism much?
>>382657
>nitpicking
>implying i made this
>>382661
It's addressed to whichever fucktard made it.
Also Egypt wasn't the first to invent writing.
>>382669
not the first, but it is what essentially sparked all major used writing systems of today
sans chinese-based ones.
don't see cuneiform being used for anything?
>>382638
>go south down the nile
South is up the Nile.
It's hard to say because I don't know much about it but I've always assumed it's due to isolation, especially if you buy into the idea that the various scripts built on top of one another like OP image shows.
Take a look at a globe sometime and just how far away it is and what treacherous landscape you have to go through to get there. There was salt and slave trade across the Sahara but that in itself was pretty rough so it must have been pushing the limits of trade and exchange.
The Nile is really fucking long, goes past and and through rough terrain, exploring it means traveling towards the equator, and it's not like there was an ancient China on the other side for any potential explorers to trade with in the first place. The southern hemisphere is pretty empty in terms of landmass in the first place so it's unsurprising not many ancient civilizations existed down there but I'm guessing the tropical climate and isolation fucked with whatever potential there was.
>>382765
>terrain map showing elevation
>>382694
>muh papyrus paper
Cuneiform tablets were around for millennia and were the start of people being able to document traded services and goods for prices that could come later, papyrus was just easier to make in abundance
>>382809
His point is that pretty much all western scripts are ultimatelly derived from the Egyptian one.
You generally go:
Agriculture->Kings->Taxes->Numbers->Writing
No good livestock -> No writing
>>382638
There was this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsibidi
Not an Alphabet but an ideographic script used for record keeping among other things.
developed gradually from 400-1400 AD
