One can imagine all the shepherds and herdsmen throughout time guarding their flocks and whiling away the hours twiddling cord and discovering again and again every knot ever seen by man - then, because there was no means of recording the knot, no one to show it to, it was gone in a flick of the cord, as ephemeral as the flight of an arrow or a perfect sunset.
No, this is the beyond-the-pale behavior that one should NOT imagine,
as there is no evidence of such highly prodigious "twiddling" even today,
under the current lights of inspection, and no reason thus to fantasize
that it occurred under dimmer vision!
R.H. Dana's
Two Years Before the Mast is a classic on
life as a sailor, and there is scarcely any idle twiddling of rope
reported by him in it -- the crew was worked hard on doing
productive things, or busy work at times it might seem, but
productive to the captain (he'd a bit of a task master initially).
Eric Newby's beautifully photo-illustrated
Learning the Ropessimilarly shows, visually, a snapshot of sailor life aboard a fast
4-masted barque, Moshulu (now moored as a restaurant at a
dock in Philadephia, in much different look & feel, alas); there
is no evidence in it of rope twiddling knots invention activity
there, either. (Rather, two of the crew work on miniature models
of the boat, some play chess, some read -- when the wind's down.)
One can also take stock of how much interest there is in general
to such invention, of a population, and consider that for many
of such folk "learning the ropes" is challenge enough, and after
hard time at it aboard ship, one just might care to do something
else than mess around w/more darn rope! -- which is not
to deny the extant examples of fancy work. But in those preserved
knotted items do we see evidence of knots invention of the scale
being imagined for all these ancients? (no)
- - - - - - -
In response to concerns about
recognition of "invention",
we might avoid some pitfalls by being rather objective and
just saying "<whoever> presented the knot <where/when>".
E.g., I'm happy to see that someone might "invent" the Bowline
today, though of course there are other ways to learn that knot.
And I see Wright & Magowan as discoverers of the Butterfly,
even though it is known to have been otherwise discovered
and used prior to their invention.
It is of interest to see where, and how, knots pop up. (And
how they might fall from knowledge, or just not gain currency
& use.)
--dl*
====