The history of writing
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A history of writing Who invented the first systems of writing? What did they look like? How have they changed over time?
description
A brief overview of the history of writing - who invented the first writing system, where and for what purpose. From Mesapotamia tax records to modern-day emoticons and txt spk : )
Transcript of The history of writing
A history of writing
Who invented the first systems of writing?
What did they look like?How have they changed
over time?
What came first?
Long, long before writing, humans were talking to each other and for thousands of years, ideas and information were passed down through the spoken word and story-telling.
Simple drawings of animals have been found carved or painted onto cave walls that are over 30,000 years old! But the real purpose of these drawings simply isn’t known.
It was much later that real systems of writing were created. Writing seems to have been invented in different parts of the world at more or less the same time.
Some early cave art
RIGHT: Cave painting from France, possibly as old as 40,000 years.
LEFT: A cave engraving of an antelope from Algeria.
How many sheep..?Writing as inventory
The earliest writing seems to have been to keep a record of property - how many animals you had, how much land or how many measures of grain your neighbours owed you.
‘Counting tokens’ made of clay were used for this purpose to trade around 6,000 years ago.
For example, a token with a shape of a coin and with a cross carved on it indicated a sheep; a cone-shaped token meant a measure of corn, an egg-shaped indicated a flask of oil, etc. For 20 sheep, people needed to use 20 sheep tokens.
Clay trading tokens
Later, these tokens became smaller, more like today’s coins, and the had a symbol on them to show which animal or item they represented. Number systems developed so that a single coin could represent 10 or 20 of that object.
1. Earliest writing – In Sumer
Historians agree that one of the first groups of people to start real writing – and not simply cave pictures – were the Sumerians.
Sumer was an ancient civilization based in modern-day Iraq and part of the area once known as Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia means ‘between rivers’. Can you see the two rivers on the map?
The Sumerians & Writing
The Sumerians were the first people to inhabit the area of Iraq, over 6,000 years ago.
They made great progress with writing: They kept records of taxes They wrote down laws They also worked out a calendar.
They divided the day into 24 hours and an hour into 60 minutes.
Sumerian writing - Pictographic
Sumerian writing began about 5000 years ago as pictures – pictographs – that represented what they were.
The pictures were carved into clay tablets then baked in an oven.
What do you think the pictographs mean here?
Cuneiform (kyu-ney-uh-form)
Eventually, the pictographs were simplified as straight lines made using a wedge-shaped stick called a stylus. This early writing is called Cuneiform. The word comes from the Latin word for ‘wedge’.
Look at the tip of the stylus
Cuneiform example
What do you think it says?
Cuneiform writing spread across the ancient Middle East. The straight wedges were easier to make than curved lines.
How do you think the circular holes were made?
2. Earliest writing - Egypt
At around the same time as the Egyptians also developed their own system of writing. Hieroglyphics.
The Egyptians didn’t write on clay tablets but used papyrus (an ancient paper made from the papyrus grass plant).
Papyrus paper - rolled into scrolls.
Hieroglyphics
Many hieroglyphics are also pictograms, often drawn sideways.
The word ‘hiero’ means ‘sacred’ and ‘glyph’ means ‘carved’ or ‘engraved’. For the Egyptians, writing was something sacred and divine.
The oldest hieroglyphics are thought to be about 6,000 years old.
Some hieroglyphics represented a complete word but many others stood for syllables.
They had even more symbols than the Sumerians did, as many as 5,000!
The Egyptians used their hieroglyphics for thousands of years.
Hieroglyphics
Writing was time-consuming and, in both Egypt and Mesopotamia, it was an activity reserved for professional people called scribes.
They were highly trained, important people.
No vowels?!
According to experts, the Egyptians didn’t include vowels when they wrote. This makes it very difficult for us today to decipher how to pronounce many words.
Can you imagine our writing without any vowels?
t wld b vry dffclt t rd!
Pictogram Problems
Also, what problems might you have if your writing system was all made from pictures?
Can you ‘draw’ every word as a picture easily?
Which words can you think of that might be difficult to draw as a picture?
Rebus to the rescue!To solve the problems of writing all words through pictures, sometimes hieroglyphics were used to represent a sound rather than represent the object drawn.
This is known as the rebus principle. It meant complex words could be written using hieroglyphics.
A rebus is a message spelt out in pictures using the pronunciation of each picture . For example, what do these two pictures mean together?
+ = ?
Did you guess it correctly?
‘eye’ + ‘deer’ makes…. ‘idea’!
↵ Here are some more. Can you think of your own?
Phoenician alphabet • The next big change in writing came
nearly two thousand years later, around 3,000 years ago.
• At that time people called the Phoenicians lived on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, where Israel is today.
• The Phoenicians sailed all over the Mediterranean buying and selling things. They needed an easy way to keep records of what they bought and sold so they invented their own writing system.
Phoenician Alphabet 2
Unlike in hieroglyphics and Cuneiform, the Phoenicians realized that there would be far, far fewer symbols in their writing if they didn’t have a symbol for each syllable but instead used shorter sounds.
So instead of having one symbol for "al" they one for "a" and one for "l".
The Phoenician alphabet had just 22 letters -- even fewer than ours.
Because the Phoenicians were such great travellers and their alphabet was so easy to use, many other peoples learned to use it too.
The Greeks developed their alphabet based on the Phoenicians', and the Romans based theirs on the Greeks'. The letters that you are reading right now are based on the ones that the Romans used.
Other ancient writing systems
CHINA: The oldest traces of Chinese scripts date from the Shang dynasty (3,500 years ago). It was made of pictograms and mainly for religious purposes.
MEXICO: Writing appeared around 2,700 years ago. It seems that the Mayas derived their writing from an older writing, used by other peoples. The Maya's writing was syllabic and was used to describe the most important events in the most powerful families.
Today.. Pictures still important
Pictures for signs are still used to communicate today:
Modern-day Pictograms
Writing – still developing
What are ‘emoticons’?
Why were they created?
Now your turn!In pairs, read the text ‘A history of writing’ and see if you can answer the following questions in your Unit notebooks:
1. Why was writing first invented?
2a. In which two places in the world did writing systems develop?
2b. What were these two writing systems like?
3. Who were the Phoenicians and how was their writing system different?
4. Which two alphabets were created after the Phoenician alphabet?
