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Redoubtable
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Originally posted by GodLied
Communication is the basis of language. Petroglyphs communicate events, conditions, and other notions.
Some petroglyphs had better artists than others.
If you truly considered petroglyphs a language, you'd have written "writers" or "authors," not "artists".
Just as you unintentionally implied, petrogyphs are a form of art. Verily, they communicate, but their messages are completely subjective and often nebulous.
There are no arbitrarily established rules to art, and, thus, it "communicates" whatever the viewer wishes to interpret. I don't see how anything so ponderously ambiguous could be a language.
It contains no axioms or specifications, no standards whatsoever. It's a bunch of drawings.
Originally posted by Voltaire
Petroglyphs are symbols.
They are only symbolic if you want them to be.
I mean, I can draw on a cave wall every whit as well as my primitive forefathers, but if I choose to do so, my scribblings don't have to be portentous or communicative at all. They could just be what they are: DRAWINGS!
There is no Petroglyphic Rosetta Stone by which one could translate these cave drawings as archaeologists and anthropologists do hieroglyphics. They are open for interpretation, be it studious or not. There is no order to it whatsoever.
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