A scribe who does not know Sumerian is not a scribe.
History begins with the invention of writing and the possibility of recording the events of civilizations, but was it really writing that gave rise to history? During Prehistory, cave painting on cave walls was the way our ancestors found to communicate. They were symbolic drawings, made with the aim of representing things, whether animals, objects, or people.
The invention of the State
When man lived in small villages, he was able to remember the names of the people who were part of his group. He knew who each herd belonged to, the amount of grain harvested, among other information. With the emergence of great empires, the group of cities under the command of the ruler of the most powerful city, it was necessary to create a control system that would preserve the information that was of interest to the king and his government for as long as possible.
Everything needed to be kept, the names of the subjects and the taxes paid by them, and the amounts involved in commercial transactions. Writing was created to meet this need, but from this point of view, it seems to me that it was the creation of the State that gave rise to history and not writing. It was the state that invented the laws and all the structures to keep the people under control. Writing made this possible. Soon sacred books, law codes, books on various areas of knowledge and literary works appeared.
The first writing systems
Knowing exactly who discovered writing is almost impossible. Scholars generally agree that the earliest form of writing appeared nearly 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia (now Iraq). The first pictorial signs (protowriting) were gradually replaced by a complex system of characters representing the sounds of Sumerian (the language of Sumer in southern Mesopotamia) and other languages. They happened almost simultaneously in Egypt and China.
The best-known systems are cuneiform, used in Mesopotamia, and hieroglyphics, used in Egypt. These systems were very complex and could only be used by an elite of specialized scribes. However, over time, they were simplified and evolved until reaching the current alphabets. Although it appears that writing spread from a central point, there is little evidence of any links between these systems, each possessing unique qualities.
Mesopotamian cuneiform writing
From 2,900 BC onwards, the Sumerians adopted the technique of printing symbols with the calamus, an instrument made from a piece of reed, carved obliquely or tuned like a reed that ended in a bevel (chamfered tip). When the tip was applied to the clay, a conical figure was obtained from which the name of cuneiform writing comes, from the Latin cuneus (wedge), a form of pictographic writing (representation through drawings). These symbols attempted to physically reflect reality and ended up representing both an idea and a sound.
Printed tablets have been found in Sumerian cities on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The oldest belong to the city of Uruk, considered the first city in history and a pioneer in writing and public administration. Since its origins around 6500 BC.
In Uruk, agriculture, irrigation, the invention of the wheel and the use of domestic animals were developed. In the fifth millennium BC they created cylinder seals, which were rolled over soft clay tablets where they marked the design that would be printed. Then they were baked and packaged together with the goods, indicating who owned them.
Bulla with Token prints. Uruk, 3200-3100 BC
The cuneiform writing process stabilized over the next 600 years. Curves were eliminated, signs simplified and the direct link between the appearance of the pictograms and their original object of reference was lost. They were more complex texts that included professions, deities, institutions and activities. The lines were curvilinear and resembled drawings more than written characters. Even though they are difficult to date, they are considered to belong to a period between 3,400 and 3,200 BC.
The Sumerian language consisted of about six hundred words, each with a sign. Half were used as ideograms or logograms, that is, representing an idea. The other half was used both as ideograms and as syllables due to their sound to compose other words.
Much of what we know today about this period, we owe to the clay tablets with daily, administrative, economic and political records. For three thousand years, cuneiform writing was used in about fifteen different languages, including Sumerian, Syrian and Persian. As it expanded across the Middle East, other forms of writing were developed in Egypt and China.
4,000-year-old tablet recording workers' wages
Akkadians and Hittites
The Akkadian language was the first known Semitic language, inherited by the Assyrian-Babylonians, the Hebrews, the Phoenicians, the Arameans, the Arabs and the Ethiopians. First the Akkadians and then the Hittites, who live further north, took advantage of the Sumerian syllabic system and added it to their own cuneiform writing. These two languages are pioneers, each in its own way. Hittite provided the oldest writings found of an Indo-European language, around 1600 BC, from which Greek and Sanskrit descend.
Cuneiform writing was used until the year 75 AD for more than three thousand years, cuneiform symbols underwent changes that reduced their number, their shape (lost similarity with the reality they referred to) and use (as an expression of an idea ).
Representation of numbers
The first numbers recognized as such belong to clay tablets discovered at the sites of Susa and Uruk, dating back five thousand years. It is likely that man started counting much earlier, by stacking stones or making marks on the wall, at least thirty thousand years ago, but the first notes had to wait for the invention of writing.
At first, numbers were only used for counting and signs were added up to ten when a different sign was made. It is possible that the invention of zero was made by the Chinese, but its use is recorded for the first time in India, where the Arabs learned it. This numerical system, known as Arabic, spread throughout Islam, and was introduced to Europe by the Italian Leonardo Fibonacci, the first great European mathematician of the Middle Ages, who had studied in Algeria at the beginning of the 13th century.
The three types of writing in Ancient Egypt
In 1997, a German expedition found three hundred clay pots and tablets in the necropolis of Umm el-Qaab, Abydos, which were carbon-14 dated to between 3,300 and 3,200 BC. Small ivory tablets were used as labels for grave goods in the tomb of the king Horus Scorpio I (there were no pharaohs yet), and the signs he presented could it be the oldest of anything ever written.
Discoveries of large-scale incised ceremonial scenes at the El-Khawy rock art site in Egypt date to around 3,250 BC and show features like early hieroglyphic forms. Some of these plaques carved into the rock are almost half a meter high.
Carved and written characters have close dates. This suggests that writing in Egypt had two functions, ceremonial (carving) and administrative (writing). Papyrus, a type of paper produced from a plant of the same name, was also used as a writing support.
The Egyptians developed three types of writing, hieroglyphic, based on the use of printing, hieratic, a simplified form of hieroglyphic and used for commercial purposes, and demotic, a simpler and more popular form of hieratic writing, used in recent periods.
Hieroglyphic Writing
Hieroglyphs are created based on cuneiform writing. Some signs took on a phonographic representation, sometimes of a letter, other times of entire words. It is a complex script used in religious representations. The inner walls of the pyramids were full of hieroglyphic texts that spoke about the lives of the pharaohs, prayers and messages to ward off potential looters.
The Rosetta Stone
Egyptian writing was deciphered thanks to the study of the Rosetta Stone, found in 1799 by Napoleon Bonaparte's soldiers. It was a basalt stone that had three inscriptions in Greek, demotic and hieroglyphic. Due to the arrangement of the texts, scholars at the time realized that the three reproduced the same text. Hence, they established the value of Egyptian signs that corresponded to Greek letters.
After translating the Greek inscription, scientists started from the idea that hieroglyphs represented images and, therefore, words. The Frenchman François Champollion intuited that hieroglyphic images were “letters”, or rather, signs representing sounds.
The Rosetta Stone inscription contained the news of certain manifestations of the priests to King Ptolemy Epiphanes. They then suspected that the word surrounded by a margin or frame (cartridge) could be the king's name. Champollion compared this word to another painting known to be Cleopatra's name and proved the coincidence of signs 2, 4, and 5 with symbols 4, 3 and 1 of Ptolemy's name. Thus, the doors of ancient Egypt were opened.
Mesopotamia or Egypt?
For years it was believed that writing was invented in Mesopotamia and from there it passed to Egypt. Current data indicates that this may not have been the case, each culture invented it separately. It is likely that in Egypt it happened a few centuries earlier.
According to Diego Corral, associate professor in the Area of Hebrew and Aramean Studies at the Department of Spanish Language, in the 1960s, diffusionist hypotheses proliferated, arguing that writing had only been invented in Mesopotamia and that it would have expanded from there. Although the relationship between the birth of writing in Egypt and Mesopotamia is not at all clear, today, this hypothesis is in decline.
Egyptian limestone stele with hymn to Osiris, showing 3,600-year-old classical hieroglyphics.
Most who today study early writings prefer to treat them as independent processes. Many of the themes about the emergence of writing in Egypt and Mesopotamia that were almost undisputed until the 1990s have been questioned and rethought in recent years. The chronological sequence also no longer works because the first testimonies in which we can recognize writing are no longer in Mesopotamia, but in Egypt.
One of the criteria for classifying different writings is the way the signs are made. The hieroglyph is not exclusive to the Egyptians, although the term began to be applied to this specific writing refers to the fact that in signs we recognize elements of reality such as animals, plants, buildings and people, for example.
In cuneiform, the units that make up signs are strokes and wedges, although the most remote records show a stage more similar to what we understand as hieroglyphics. Defining a writing system as just hieroglyphic or cuneiform is a weak argument because it does not say anything about how the graphic sign relates to language, which is perhaps the most significant.
From this perspective, the distances between hieroglyphics and cuneiform decrease a little, even in the case of cuneiform it is somewhat difficult to choose a single model. The same system has been used for Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Elamite, Hurrian or even Persian.
Both hieroglyphics and cuneiform present signs or sets of phonetic signs, that is, they represent sounds or groups of sounds, as our Latin alphabet does, and other types of signs that refer to concepts (ideograms) or specific words within the language (logograms).
The first alphabet
It is believed that the history of the alphabet began during the rise of Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, around 2,000 BC, almost two millennia after the emergence of writing itself. As you may have already noticed, there is controversy among experts in these studies. Although the writing systems of Mesopotamia and Egypt were very advanced, they were difficult to learn and use.
For some scholars, those responsible for developing the first alphabet were the Phoenicians, a trading people who lived on the coast of modern-day Lebanon. Composed of a syllabary of 22 letters, it was used to maintain commercial and administrative records.
Syllabary is a set of writing symbols that represent syllables that make up words. A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional consonant sound followed by a vowel sound. In a true syllabary there is no systematic graphic similarity between phonetically related characters.
In this alphabet, only consonants were represented. The Greeks introduced vowels and spread the alphabet to the surrounding areas. This is how the Greek alphabet and, later, the Latin alphabet emerged. Almost all existing alphabets in the world emerged from the consonant alphabet or were inspired by it.
All the alphabets in India could be derived from Aramaic and its non-Semitic variant, whose mother would be Davanagaric, from which Sanskrit, Tamil and Burmese derive. The Cyrillic alphabet is also derived from Greek, created in the 9th century by a group of religious people from Constantinople led by Saint Cyril.
The Latin alphabet was later imposed on Europe and North Africa during the Roman Empire. It was inherited by the Romance languages, many of which were later imposed on their American colonies, all with more or less the same alphabet. It would also be used by Germanic languages: German, Polish, Anglo-Saxon and Nordic languages.
Modern Roman alphabet font.
The Roman alphabet
In the Roman alphabet there were only capital letters. However, at the time they began to be written on parchments, with the help of bamboo stalks or feathers from ducks and other birds, a change occurred in their original form. Later, a style of writing called uncial was created, characterized by large, rounded letters. The new style lasted until the 8th century and was used in beautifully written Bibles.
Writing in China
The first examples of writing in China were found near present-day Anyang, on a tributary of the Yellow River, 500 km south of Beijing. The kings of the late Shang Dynasty (1300–1050 BC) founded their capital and performed divination rituals using animal bones. The first Chinese writing system known as Jiaguwen, used markings carved into bones and turtle shells and were used in divination practices.
For centuries, bone fragments have been found by farmers and sold for use in Chinese medicine as “dragon bones.” It was not until 1899 that politician and scholar Wang Yirong (1845–1900) recognized characters carved on the surface of some of these bones and realized their meaning.
“Oracle” bones
These “oracle” bones (ox shoulder blades and tortoise shell structure) record questions that were asked of royal ancestors on topics as diverse as crop rotation, war, childbirth, and even toothache. To date, almost 150,000 examples of these bones have been found, containing more than 4,500 different symbols, many of which can be identified as the ancestors of the Chinese characters still in use today.
Indecipherable writings
Most of the characters on the oracle bones remain undeciphered. Even characters that can be identified have evolved considerably in terms of function and form. Not only did pictographic characters gradually become more abstract, but as the written vocabulary expanded, more compound forms developed.
Chinese oracle bone. They were used for divination more than 3,000 years ago in China.
Basic components were shared to reflect similarities in pronunciation or meaning. Thus, since ancient times, Chinese characters have been able to represent concepts and sounds of spoken language to varying degrees.
The bones show a fully developed writing system that must have been formed many years – perhaps centuries – earlier, although earlier materials have not yet been discovered, perhaps not even survived.
Chinese writing is made up of around 40 or 50 thousand characters, but not all of them are necessarily used. They can represent a sound, an entire word or even a concept. Although it has undergone changes, it is still used.
Phoenician writing
By 1100 BC, the Phoenician alphabet was emerging in the Middle East. Unlike cuneiform and hieroglyphic, which used thousands of symbols, the Phoenician system used about two dozen symbols representing sounds, making it simpler and more accessible. The Phoenician alphabet greatly influenced the development of other writing systems, including Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.
In Ancient India and Pakistan
In the Indian subcontinent, the Brahmi script emerged around the 3rd century BC. It served as the basis for many South and Southeast Asian scripts, including Devanagari (used for Hindi and Nepali), Tamil, and Thai.
The Indus River Valley Culture was a Bronze Age civilization in the northwestern regions of South Asia, which existed between 3,300 BC and 1,300 BC and reached its peak between 2,600 and 1,900 BC.
Its complex of urban centers covers an area stretching from northeastern Afghanistan, through much of Pakistan and western and northwestern India. It flourished in the basins of the Indus River, which flows through Pakistan and along a system of perennial rivers that once flowed in the vicinity of the seasonal Gagar River in northwestern India and eastern Pakistan.
The society that used these symbols was from a historic settlement in the Indus region dating back to at least 7,000 BC. A high urban culture flourished for 700 years, between 2,600 and 1,900 BC. They had already developed their own system of protowriting and, later, the Aramaic. Symbols were found there on objects that could be written documents.
Although there are about 5,000 known inscribed artifacts and the longest inscription consists of 26 symbols, most have only three or four signs. The 400 unique symbols that have been identified are too low in number for a viable word-based logographic writing system.
Symbols found on stone seals from the Indus Valley in Pakistan and northern India
Number similar to that found in predynastic Egyptian hieroglyphics and ancient Sumerian writing. Scholars have therefore suggested that, like these two systems, the Indus River Valley script may contain a mixture of logographic and syllabic components.
This type of writing gave rise to the Brahmin or Indian families, mothers of the current languages of Southeast Asia and South Asia, as well as parts of Central Asia: the Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Mongolian, Dravidian, Tai and, probably Korean.
In Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a region of the American continent that includes approximately southern Mexico, the territories of Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize and the western portions of Nicaragua, Honduras and Costa Rica. Sometime between 900 and 600 BC, evidence of writing appeared in this region. The discoveries also expanded the range of cultures and languages that used the writing of the Mayans, Mixtecs, and Aztecs to include the early Olmecs and Zapotecs. There were two types of writing systems in pre-colonial Mesoamerica. Are they:
Open systems – recording texts that were not linked to the grammatical and sound structures of specific languages. They functioned as mnemonic devices, guiding readers through the narratives of the texts without depending on the linguistic background of the target audience. They were common among the Aztecs and other Mexican communities in central Mexico.
Closed systems – linked to the sound and grammatical structures of specific languages. They were aimed at specific linguistic communities and functioned in a similar way to the writing we know today. Examples of these systems can be found among the Mayans.
Stone stele erected in Belize showing the Mayan writing system.
In the 1st century BC, the Maya developed a complex writing system made up of logograms (symbols that represent words or phrases) and phonetic symbols.
In Central America, writing records left by this civilization were found. These writings referred especially to records of historical data, such as wars and marriages.
Guardians of the Sacred Books
The position of scribe was one of high status. Mayan artists were often the youngest children of the royal family. The Guardians of the Sacred Books, the highest scribe position, served as librarians, historians, genealogists, tribute recorders, marriage arrangers, masters of ceremonies, and astronomers.
Only four Mayan books survive from the pre-colonial period and fewer than 20 throughout the region. These codices are painted on deerskin and tree bark, with the writing surface coated with polished lime paste or plaster. Codex is a writing vehicle composed of folded sheets sewn together along one edge. Originating in the 1st century, it is considered the precursor of the book.
Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Polynesia)
About two dozen wooden tablets inscribed with glyphs were discovered on Rapa Nui in the 19th century. Rongorongo, a term that the Rapa Nui themselves applied to these objects, was interpreted by missionaries at the time as meaning “incised lines to be sung”. But by that time, the knowledge of how to use the boards had been lost. They reflect human, animal and plant motifs.
Wooden tablet collected on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), with glyph inscriptions.
There are 120 elementary (not united) glyphs, which have been used to write texts of up to 2,320 characters. An open question is whether rongorongo is purely a mnemonic device or a system of logographic and syllabic symbols as a unique sixth point of origin for a writing system.
Change and stability
Truly little about the origins of writing is defined and, for this reason, it remains an interesting area of study. Archaeological discoveries could easily change origin dates in Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica. However, new decipherments, such as those we wait for the writings of the Indus River Valley or the tablets of Rapa Nui, could link cultures that are now separate.
The legacy of writing
In addition to allowing a record of production and commerce to be kept, writing was fundamental to the development of literature, philosophy, and science. Thanks to writing, ideas and knowledge could be transmitted from one generation to another, allowing humanity to advance.
Writing continues to be a fundamental tool for communicating and exchanging ideas. Although it has evolved a lot since its origins, its original purpose remains the same: to allow people to communicate and transmit information in an efficient and lasting way.
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