Writing has existed for 5,000 or 6,000 years. The preliminary forms were developed even much earlier, since man has been using materials with which he can paint, engrave, carve, stamp and write.
Writing was invented by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia approximately 3,500 years BC.
The oldest consisted of a series of marks on stone tablets.
The appearance of writing, thanks to it, it was possible to organize trade, file information, record laws, issue orders and preserve history, customs and traditions.
The first writing systems they evolved independently and at roughly the same time in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but current scholarship suggests that the Mesopotamian script appeared first.
This writing system, invented by the Sumerians, arose in Mesopotamia around 3500 BC. At first, this writing was representative: a bull could be represented by the image of a bull, and a barley pictogram meant the word barley.
When Did the Scripture Arise?
Although the script began as images, this system was inconvenient for conveying more than just nouns, and became increasingly abstract as it evolved to encompass more abstract concepts, taking shape in the world’s oldest script: cuneiform.
An increasingly complex civilization encouraged the development of an increasingly sophisticated form of writing.
Cuneiform came to function both phonetically (representing a sound) and semantically (representing a meaning as an object or concept) rather than just representing objects directly as an image.
History of Scripture
Our writing began to develop about 5,000 years ago. How did pictorial representations become abstract letters? Bureaucracy and commerce played the main role.
The history of writing goes back many millions of years. The first ones are from prehistory.
So at that time, it was written on stone. The human beings of that time, took something like a branch to write on top of the mud It will leave a mark of your writing.
Primitive man resorted to the most diverse signs of expressionboth oral and gestures, or materials, such as knots, and finally drawings.
These drawings are what are known as the paintings. Most of these, unfortunately, have not been able to find the meaning, given their long life.
The history of our writing begins with a banal accounting. At least, if we don’t take into account the cave paintings that people created already 50,000 years ago.
Iraq
In what is now Iraq, formerly known as Mesopotamia, the Sumerians laid the foundation for our writing some 5,000 years ago. They lived in the midst of a thriving temple economy, and where cities and commerce grow, there is also a need for contracts that can be recorded.
You have to count it and manage it. The Sumerians used clay for it. They pressed it with their hands to form flat tablets and carved small signs on it with wooden sticks. The clay was dried in the sun and the signs were filed away for eternity. So far so good.
However, the miracle of writing did not originate in one place and at one particular time. It developed over many millennia, in parallel in various parts of the world, in different advanced civilizations.
The Chinese carved characters on cattle bones, the American Aztecs drew pictorial hieroglyphics. But it is to the Sumerians that the first beginnings of our abstract writing are attributed.
Civilizations in which Writing Developed
It was located between the Neolithic revolution and the urban revolution, where we know of 5 civilizations in which writing was developed:
Mesopotamia: 3,500 years ago, it was cuneiform.Egypt: 4500 years ago and it was hieroglyphic.The Indus River Valley: 4000 years ago. Hieroglyphic writing.Asia: 3000 years ago. She was ideographic.Meso-American: 1500 years ago.
It is believed that it does 3,500 years in Mesopotamia, which were pictographic those that were passing to a more cuneiform representation of those pictograms, and then into cuneiform syllabic writing.
The priests of Mesopotamia were in charge of accounting and tax administrationusing for it some clay tablets.
These tablets suppose the origin of the manuscripts called CUNEIFORMS and the oldest were found in the temple of Uruk (It was an ancient city of Mesopotamia located on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River).
The First Forms of Writing
At first, like other cultures, they still used a pictorial language that worked with pictograms. For example, the word «princess» was represented by the drawings of «woman» and «jewels». There were about 900 such pictographs.
The peculiarity was that the Sumerians moved further and further away from the representation of objects to adopt more abstract forms.
One of the reasons was the burgeoning bureaucracy of the temple, with its enormous need to write: things had to be done faster.
The drawn images were replaced by combinations of wedge-shaped prints.
For this, special triangular stilettos were manufactured. Stamping was easier than drawing curved lines in the clay. The so-called cuneiform writing was created.
Over time, it became a syllabary with fewer and fewer characters. This is because words that sound similar are represented by the same symbol. A character now expressed a sound. A little revolution.
The oldest writing system may originate in the Mesopotamian era (3500 BC), and by the end of the 4th millennium BC. c.
The first forms of writing were logographicbased on pictographic elements and ideographic.
However, in the middle of the 3rd millennium B.C. c., the Sumerians had developed a syllabic annexreflecting the phonology and syntax of the spoken Sumerian language.
It was called that way because it was written on clay plates with stilettos which were wedge shaped.
In its beginnings, these manuscripts was similar to the iconography of the Egyptiansthe famous hieroglyphs, but over time the symbols were synthesized, becoming abstract symbols.
The first alphabet in the world is known which originated in Egypt in 2000 B.C. of C, and was based on hieroglyphics. Later, the alphabet spread to the rest of the world.
It is also important the invention of parchment in the west. Parchment has been in use since 1500 BC
Your name comes from Pergamum, a Greek city. In this city is where a high quality material was produced to make scrolls.
It was used consistently for many years. But it was not, until the year 200 BC, that the parchment began to replace the Egyptian papyrus.
The hieroglyphics are too elaborate
This form of Sumerian writing turned out to be more flexible and practical than all other known writing systems, such as hieroglyphics, which existed in the Nile Valley at the same time.
Egyptian hieroglyphics, the «sacred indentations,» were cumbersome and took a long time to produce. Not surprisingly, they mainly had religious significance.
However, along with Sumerian cuneiform texts, Egyptian hieroglyphs are considered to be the oldest written documents of mankind.
Marine Phoenicians invent the alphabet
The first alphabet of phonetic symbols was developed by the Phoenicians, a seafaring people from the area of present-day Lebanon and Syria. A functional deed was important to their trade, for example to record the goods that ships had loaded.
In the year 1200 BC, the Phoenicians used a writing system in which all consonants were represented by 22 characters.
In his travels along the Mediterranean coast, his system spread everywhere and little by little replaced cuneiform. It is the basis of the current Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic alphabets.
The Greeks add vowels
The Greeks, a major trading partner, adopted the Phoenician script around 800 BC and added the missing vowels. To do this, they converted the letters that were not necessary in Greek.
The Phoenician letter Aleph, which derives from the stylized representation of a bull’s head (alef = cattle), was simply inverted by the Greeks. Today, this is our A. Thus, the still recognizable figurative origins were erased from the letters. Now they were completely abstract.
The development of the first writing instruments in antiquity
In ancient Mesopotamia, carved clay balls facilitated bookkeeping and also aided in communication across language barriers.
The city of Uruk, on the banks of the Euphrates, in what is now Iraq, was a thriving commercial center around 3,500 BC, where various goods changed hands, from grain to livestock.
As proof, there were the little clay balls, which were used as tally marks. For example, an official would carve the symbol for grain into three small clay balls to acknowledge receipt of three sacks of grain.
Phonetic transcriptions emerge
But remembering all the pictorial characters took a long time, and it took a long time to chisel them out. A simpler and faster writing system was needed.
Over the centuries, hieroglyphic writing became phonetized. This transforms the simple pictorial language into a scientific language that also allows expressing abstract contexts.
From then on, it worked with the help of pictograms and so-called phonograms for sounds, a kind of precursor to letters.
Pictograms can mean exactly what they show, or they can be understood in the abstract. Special separators, called determiners, clarify how the signs are to be interpreted.
For example, the sign of the locust, on the one hand, concretely represents the insect, but it can also promise «destruction» in a figurative sense.
From there, other scriptural variants develop, such as hieratic and demotic, which allow for even greater abstraction. Papers were written on medicine, astronomy, and the measurement of time.
first alphabets
The history of writing continues in the Mediterranean region. Various syllabic scripts were developed there in ancient times. Some of them remain undeciphered today.
Thus, over the millennia, cuneiform and hieroglyphics were replaced by more modern syllabic and alphabetic scripts. The Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic writing systems derive from one of the oldest alphabetic scripts: the Phoenician, which originated 3,100 years ago.
By the way, the first two letters of the Phoenician Abc are also responsible for the term «alphabet»: «aleph» (Greek: alpha) and «beth» (Greek: beta).
The Phoenician alphabet served the ancient Greeks as a model for their writing system, from which the other European scripts developed: Cyrillic characters, our Latin letters…