Mexicans and Ethiopians had writing long before Danes, Swedes and Norwegians (take that you Aryan slug slime)

[Roma_Victrix]

Scandinavia is a wonderland of social democracy, IKEA products and Nordic model economic success today, and medieval Viking Norsemen were the scourge of Latin Christendom, but in ancient times like Bronze Age, Iron Age, and early Classical Antiquity it was nothing but doodoo, and by that I mean a heady mixture of both pee pee and poopoo.

I'm an American national with partial Sicilian Italian heritage, so there's undoubtedly a good honest Roman in my family tree somewhere, and have Slovenian background so Slavs of the Mediterranean, plus Irish and English, so a bunch of Ogham-rune-writing gingers who at least got Christianized in the Early Middle Ages, and Celtic Britons who at least became Romanized after emperor Claudius invaded. However, curse the day I found out that I had partial Swedish ancestry! How shameful!

Just how shameful, you might ask? I'll show you! Let's use writing as an example and marker of civilization.

Zapotecs and Olmecs were using their own logographic/hieroglyphic/syllabic writing scripts in ancient Mexico at least as far back as 500 BC (i.e. long before even Classical Maya), if not earlier given archaeological evidence suggesting 900 BC with the Cascajal Block. Therefore these go back to the beginning of the global Iron Age if not the tail end of the Bronze Age, even if the Mesoamericans were still living in the Stone Age and Copper Age by the time colonial Europeans came into contact with them. They also built giant cities with enormous pyramid temples comparable to those of Egypt. Like Mesopotamians of Sumer with cuneiform, the Egyptians with their hieroglyphs and hieratic, and Shang dynasty Chinese with logographic Oracle Bone script, Mesoamericans independently created one of the world's primary writing systems.

Ancient Nubians who neighbored Egypt in ancient Sudan used Egyptian hieroglyphs long before their own Meroitic writing circa 300 BC. Contemporary Ethiopians and Eritreans in East Africa had the Ancient South Arabian Script when it was introduced to Ethiopia and Eritrea in the 5th century BC and was used in that region under the late Kingdom of D'mt. Ethiopians and Eritreans also sometimes used the Greek alphabet under Hellenistic influence when Egypt was ruled by Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies. Over the course of the 1st century AD after Rome took over Egypt, the Kingdom of Aksum in Ethiopia and Eritrea developed its own Ge'ez abugida script based on the South Arabian model to write their Ge'ez Semitic language. Also, King Ezana of Aksum was one of the first monarchs to convert to Christianity in the 4th century AD, after Tiridates III of Armenia and Constantine I the Great of Rome. Aksum minted its own coins too much like the nearby Romans, only with Ge'ez instead of Latin legends.

Meanwhile, Scandinavians were rolling around in their own doodoo (probably). Germanic peoples living in the Roman Empire and serving as distinguished auxiliary cavalrymen obviously learned Greek and Latin. However, the Germanic peoples as a whole didn't even have their own writing system until Elder Futhark in the 2nd century AD, a runic alphabet loosely based on the Old Italic Latin Alphabet (itself based on Cumae Greek model, hence ultimately stemming back to the Phoenician alphabet). Even well into the Early Middle Ages most Norsemen were just a bunch of illiterate poopy heads, but they did finally manage to create a simplified Younger Futhark alphabet by the late 8th or early 9th century AD. The Norsemen made some decent metalwork pieces of art, longships, and impressive weapons of war from their smithies, but the Celts had done stuff like that long beforehand. Hell, some pre-Roman Gauls around Massalia (modern Marseille, France) were literate in Greek, minted their own coins in Greek, and the Celtiberians in Spain even invented their own Celtiberian writing script (based on the Northeast Iberian one), and minted coins in that Celtic language before the time of Christ.

Go ahead, prove me wrong, TWC. Prove to me that my Swedish ancestors in the Iron Age weren't just a bunch of illiterate pee pee drinkers who couldn't even write their own names or anything else at a 1st grade level for schoolchildren. They were undoubtedly great navigators, explorers and shipbuilders as Vikings in the Early Middle Ages, but that doesn't absolve it! Even Wikipedia says they didn't do much except build some wheeled wagons, make some neat gold jewelry, and inscribed "picture stones" telling stories with images instead of writing, big whoop! That's what a kindergartner does with crayons! Not impressed! Boo! Barbaroi! Give me ancient Greece and Rome any day, hell even ancient Celtic stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age_Scandinavia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_stone

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...I will say this, though, the Japanese were arguably as bad as the Scandinavians! At least India and Pakistan had Kharosthi script going back to 4th century BC and the Brahmi script by the 3rd century BC (Mauryan Edicts of Ashoka), while Chinese written characters (originating in Bronze Age) were used in northern Korea going back to Western Han colonization of the Korean peninsula under Emperor Wu in the 2nd century BC. Meanwhile, Japanese didn't even have their logographic kanji and syllabic kana writing system until the 4th century AD, during the Kofun period! Han Chinese before that time described Japanese as a bunch of weirdo barbarian dwarves called the "Wa" people. I wonder how many anime weeaboos know that.