A brief history of (ancient) systems thinking « Framework 21 - Daniel Montano
Monday, May 17, 2010 at 10:06PM Systems thinking is not new. I have been thinking about its ancient history and so far this is what I have gathered: * 600 B.C. – philosophers used systems thinking to organize their thoughts (e.g. Lao Tze) * 2,700 B.C. – Egyptians, like Imhotep, showed evidence that he was using systems thinking during his roles as architect, physician and engineer in Egypt. * 4,000 B.C. – Cuneiform, a system of writing appears thanks to the need to keep track of multiple economic transactions. * (date pending) – the beginnings of economic (value exchange systems). My assumption here is that value exchange systems were designed by systems thinkers. * (90,000 B.C.) – the beginnings of organized belief systems. You can find traces of these belief systems going back as far as 90,000 B.C. [1]. Rather than being “designed” the earliest belief systems may have emerged at the individual level. People may have organized, and synthesized them into coherent systems.