Welcome to Mr Aslanov’s Lessons
QUESTION-TYPE BASED TESTS
FunEnglishwithme +99894 6333230
TEST 7 - THE ORIGIN OF WRITING
Writing was first invented by the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia before 3,000 BC. It was also
independently invented in Meso-America before 600 BC and probably independently invented in China
before 1,300 BC. It may have been independently invented in Egypt around 3,000 BC although given the
geographical proximity between Egypt and Mesopotamia the Egyptians may have learnt writing from the
Sumerians.
There are three basic types of writing systems. The written signs used by the writing system could
represent either a whole word, a syllable or an individual sound. Where the written
sign represents a word
the system is known as logographic as it uses logograms which are written signs that represent a word.
The earliest writing systems such as the Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mayan glyphs are
predominantly logographics as are modem Chinese and Japanese writing systems. Where the written sign
represents a syllable the writing system is known as syllabic. Syllabic writing systems were more common
in the ancient world than they are today. The Linear A and B writing systems of Minoan Crete and
Mycenaean Greece are syllabic. The most common writing systems today are alphabetical. These involve
the written sign (a letter) representing a single sound (known as a phoneme). The earliest known
alphabetical systems were developed by speakers of semetic languages around 1700 BC in the area of
modem day Israel and Palestine. All written languages will predominately use one or other of the above
systems. They may however partly use the other systems. No written
language is purely alphabetic, syllabic
or logographic but may use elements from any or all systems.
Such fully developed writing only emerged after development from simplier systems. Talley sticks
with notches on them to represent a number of sheep or to record a debt have been used in the past. Knotted
strings have been used as a form of record keeping particularly in the area around the Pacific rim. They
reached their greatest development with the Inca quipus where they were used to record payment of tribute
and to record commercial transactions. A specially trained group of quipu makers and readers managed the
whole system. The use of pictures for the purpose of communication was used by native Americans and by
the Ashanti and Ewe people in Africa. Pictures can show qualities and characteristics which can not be
shown by tally sticks and knot records. They do not however amount to writing as they do not bear a
conventional relationship to language.
An alternative idea was that
a system by which tokens, which represented objects like sheep, were
placed in containers and the containers were marked on the outside indicating the number and type of tokens
within the container gave rise to writing in Mesopotamia. The marks on the outside of the container were a
direct symbolic representation of the tokens inside the container and an indirect symbolic representation of
the object the token represented. The marks on the outside of the containers were graphically identical to
some of the earliest pictograms used in Sumerian cuneiform, the world’s first written language. However,
cuneiform has approximately 1,500 signs and the marks on the outside of the containers can only explain the
origins of a few of those signs.
The first written language was the Sumerian cuneiform. Writing mainly consisted of records of
numbers of sheep, goats and cattle and quantites of grain. Eventually clay tablets were
used as a writing
surface and were marked with a reed stylus to produce the writing. Thousands of such clay tablets have been
found in the Sumerian city of Uruk. The earliest Sumerian writing consists of pictures of the objects
mentioned such as sheep or cattle. Eventually the pictures became more abstract and were to consist of
straight lines that looked like wedges.
The earliest cuneiform was an accounting system consisting of pictograms representing commodities
such as sheep and a number. The clay tablets found might for example simply state “ten sheep”. Such
writing obviously has its limitations and would not be regarded as a complete writing system. A complete
writing system only developed with the process of phonctization. This occurs when the symbol ceases to
represent an object and begins to represent a spoken sound, which in early cuneiform would be a word. This