Riddle Me This

Composition of human languages is pretty tricky. There are the words that sound the same but mean different things. There are the words that have the same meanings but for different contexts. There are bursts of sound that are given meaning despite not having a distinctly spelled counterpart in the dictionary. You can trace the influence of one language on another by the incorporation of certain words or phrasing. The symbols used to write it all down can have ridged sounds or they can change based on the surrounding symbols. Some symbols present whole ideas by themselves, and some make no sense when standing alone.

Across history, the evolution of languages around the globe - regardless of where they are or how isolated their communities were - tend to follow a set trend. The spoken language is constantly growing, with the written counterpart staying loose and fairly unique depending on the writer. Then, when education becomes more widely spread and standardized, the written word does too. A language spread across large distances facilitates the growth of dialects. Advancements in technology enables the bridging of languages, the filling of lexical gaps.

This context is the backdrop to my wonderings about the origin of riddles. They've existed in media for as far back as entertainment goes, it would seem. You can do a base level of 'old' with the Ancient Greek sphinxes famous for doling out riddles. That's very old. It goes even further back with Ancient Egypt, which is incredibly old. [Quick history lesson for reference - Ancient Greece's eras span from about 1200 B.C. to 500 A.D., while Ancient Egypt's eras span from about 3100 B.C. to 332 B.C. The Pyramids of Giza were constructed in the Old Kingdom era of Ancient Egypt, and predate any Grecian poleis (city-states) by at least 1,500 years.] But we can go further back still! The earliest forms of written characters in China that influenced the modern characters used today in both Chinese and Japanese, were dated back to 7000 B.C. That's about 9,000 years ago! And they used riddles to pose puzzles, tell stories, all sorts of things!

Jumping into this journey to find where riddles started has brought me to a fascinating place, mentally. The Euro-centric history that has been so heavily leaned on in elementary U.S. education, trains the mind to cut off two-thirds of the world. It really only concerns itself with South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia when looking to the interactions with Europe and North America. It also adjusts the cultural context for things like language and riddles. Never before had I considered riddles to be math-based though that may be my own personal bias but many riddles found in India, Japan, and China posed mathematical conundrums. The definition of a riddle being based in wordplay is to limit the possibilities and uses of riddles.

My expectation going in would be to find a correlation between the development of standardized written language through education and the increase of riddles in that culture. I was wrong. I was assuming that riddles required a base level of writing to be produced, to allow for double-meaning and wordplay, but all they seem to have needed was a base level of observation. Riddles have long been used as a preservation of culture and thought, to keep the wit and wisdom of the people who brought them about. The general answer to my question of 'where do riddles come from?' seems to be 'everywhere,' with the bonus that they apparently have been around ever since at least two people figured out how to communicate with each other. That's incredible.