Hi fellow Hiveians,
Today I wanted to talk about an interesting topic that sparked a good thought experiment: hieroglyphs!
A Hankering for Hieroglyphs
Hieroglyphs.. we've all learned about them in middle school and high school. Are they more universal than we think though?
This was a thought that I had the other day. I was listening to a podcast, per usual, and it was another one that was talking about Maya and their pyramids and things of that nature. They also talked about Egypt as one would expect but I believe they were saying that they found hieroglyphs in the Maya culture that were very similar or exactly the same as the ones in Egypt. That got me thinking.. could it be universal? They weren't known to be able to easily travel between South America and Africa, so how did it travel?
We speak English and other languages in the physical world as well as type quite a bit of things. That's all normal, however we also have become increasingly reliant on pictures to help tell stories. Memes are the most obvious example of this. Some memes have very minimal words or none at all but they have all kinds of visual information in there. I think we are using it a bit like hieroglyphs to be honest, because they transcend a written language and convey other meanings.
Could people like the ancient Egyptians, and the civilization(s) that lived there before the Egyptians did (let's be honest, there is NO WAY the Egyptians built those fucking pyramids with copper tools.. lol.) have used hieroglyphs because they knew they would be a universal symbol, like memes, for people to find in the future and be able to understand roughly what the messages are trying to represent? Similar things with the Mayans and other cultures that existed hundreds to thousands of years ago. They certainly had complex oral languages but many reverted to using hieroglyphs as a way to have a written form of language. A hieroglyph likely had many words or full sentences that would be condensed into a well-placed picture.
I was then thinking, what do we do today that is like a hieroglyph in that it can be found tens, hundreds or thousands of years in the future? Pretty much nothing if I'll be honest.. sure monuments may be there for the future like Mount Rushmore or some in big cities like D.C. if they aren't destroyed by war, but there is a lot of English writing on them. If we mostly die off and someone finds the monument in 1,500 years, are they going to know what the fuck any of those letters in English mean? Likely no, yet we focus most of our attention on writing English instead of trying to convert things into hieroglyphs so that we can have a more universal and permanent way to describe what went on with the humans that are living right now.
There were the stones in Georgia that had this type of information on them, but they were vandalized and then bulldozed. That was incredibly suspicious in itself.. because there is not really a significant reason to immediately get rid of the thing after it was blown up. Unlikely to be a coincidence, but I digress. Besides the place in Georgia, what else do we have that someone could happen upon and get some insight into what life was like in the time we are living now? The cities that are built right now would all likely be completely gone. The obsession with glass buildings, wood and all that shit means that if nature takes it back, that shit is gone in 15, 20 years. We don't have many stone structures anymore and it's a shame. Those are the ones that last and get found hundreds or thousands of years later.
Going back to the hieroglyphs - I think one of the things that I want to do in my lifetime is try to get some really hard fucking rock like granite, spend some money and just get some stuff carved into it that would be hieroglyph type stuff. I think one of the things I certainly think about more and more is trying to leave something for people many years in the future to find and have some type of understanding of what went on.
What would the message on the hieroglyphs be...? That's a good question!
What do you think should be put on the hieroglyphs, in an honest sense? Do you have anything meaningful to give to people 500 years in the future? Let me know in the comments!
-CmplXty. Real human written content, never AI. All pictures are mine unless otherwise stated
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