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Comment by narag | Hacker News Reader

The article makes a difference between "learned scribes" and "creative people at the margins" forgeting a third possibility: learned scribes working not for the religious or secular bureaucracies, but for the merchants.

A parallelism: programmers have different styles working for an established corporation and for a startup. The bureaucracy tends to stand for the old practices, resisting change. The dynamic environment favours starting from scratch and simplicity.

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>>Remarkably, two recent discoveries from around 1500 BCE do show scribes using the alphabet. But these exceptions prove the rule, because these scribes used alphabetic writing just as sloppily or playfully as its other users did. In an obscure ostrakon from Thebes and a handful of looted cuneiform tablets we find surprising confirmation that even professional writers used it unprofessionally.

Perhaps they were early physicians?

It's interesting how people in this space study twins, and I wonder sometimes if that isn't more on the nose than we give it credit for.

Twins likely created the first languages - who does the first person genetically capable of speech talk to, except someone genetically and environmentally identical? Likely had the first verbal families, and then verbal tribes. Written secret codes might have started the same way, and ended up either being tribal or trade secrets. Success leads to imitation. Partial success leads to theft, or acquisition.

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