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Post # 1
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Join Date: 20 Sep 2011
Location:  KuwaitPosts: 100 |
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how did the writing began? |
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People communicated through speaking long before they began writing. Historians think that writing, a visible record of language, began around 4500 b.c. in Mesopotamia, located in the area that is now Iraq. People there (probably Sumerians) used wedges to make marks on wet slabs of clay that were later dried or baked to hardness, making a permanent record. Their system of writing-which consisted of symbols that represented words or syllables of words-is called cuneiform.
At about the same time the ancient Egyptians began to use a similar writing system called hieroglyphics. Pictures and symbols represented ideas and words or parts of words. Egyptians also wrote on clay tablets or carved hieroglyphics on the stone walls of monuments and tombs. They also painted them on paperlike materials made from river grasses (papyrus) or other plants; few of these more delicate examples have survived. (The Rosetta Stone, found in Egypt in 1799 and carved in three languages-including hieroglyphics-gave scholars the key to understanding ancient Egypt's picture language.) Later, the Maya people of Central America invented their own hieroglyphic writing system. None of these written picture languages are true alphabets, the symbols of which represent all the sounds of a language. The ancient Greeks created the first true alphabet around 1000 b.c. (The word alphabet comes from the names of the first two Greek letters: "alpha" and "beta."  All complex civilizations have some form of writing. |
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