The History of Writing

The dire need to communicate with other humans has long been with mankind. The ways of expressing man and woman's hopes, fears, dreams, ideas and records have varied, but some of these methods, like writing, have left a lasting effect and allowed the generations of the future to learn about what was. From painting simple images on cave walls, of Goddesses or animals that lived in the time, we are able to form a somewhat rough yet hopefully accurate picture about what lived during those time periods, along with the cultures in which they lived.

Cuneiform is one of the earliest forms of writing known in mankind's history. It was invented somewhere in Uruk, Mesopotamia, around 3000BC(5000 years or so ago). The symbols are formed by using a stylus on clay tablets. They were then fired and made hard. They were only just recently deciphered when the Beistun Inscription was found, written by Darius I. He was bragging about his abilities in three languages: Akkadian, Elamite and Old Persian.

Mesopotamia lies within the "Fertile Crescent", a rich land in between the Tigris River and the Euphrates River. Uruk was one of many city-states in Mesopotamia, among Kish, Ligash, Umma and Ur. The Sumerians were intelligent enough to build irrigation ditches for farming, a very useful advance in agriculture, and their record keeping made farming and debts easier to handle. They specialized jobs - unlike most early societies, not everybody was a farmer. Each city-state had a specific set of rules for it. The Sumerian culture was polytheistic, and they believed in roughly 3000 gods that we know of. Their view on life, unfortunately, was pessimistic. They were at the mercy of the gods, and death was not a salvation.

I can not describe hieroglyphics any better than what Encarta has said, so I will quote. But, know that they were created around 3300BC and were increasingly difficult to learn because new symbols were constantly created. As you should already know, hieroglyphics belong to Egypt and come from its early age. They died out sometime in the early AD times. They were first recorded on stone and clay, but later the Egyptians found a better source. The reeds of the Nile River Valley, in which Egypt began, were made into a type of paper that could be used as a scroll to be written on. This paper was called papyrus.

"The hieroglyphic system used in ancient Egypt had between 700 and 800 basic symbols, called glyphs. This number grew in the last centuries of ancient Egyptian civilization, because of an increased interest in writing religious texts. Egyptians wrote hieroglyphs in long lines from right to left, and from top to bottom. They did not use spaces or punctuation.

Egyptian glyphs are divided into two groups: phonograms, which are glyphs that represent sounds, and ideograms, which are glyphs that represent objects or ideas. The Egyptians constructed words by using a combination of the two types of glyphs. Readers must generally use both phonograms and ideograms to determine the significance of a word or phrase."

One more of the earliest types of writing is that of the Mayans. Unfortunately, most of this was lost when it was burned by a Christian Missionary angry at the Mayans for continuing to worship their gods. Only 4 books were saved. The Mayans were very interested in preserving knowledge and the studies of astronomy and mathematics. They were only off by a few minutes when calculating the time of the solar year, and the same for the diameter of the earth.