История письменности

The Story of the Coming of Writing

Olga kamarzaeva

Grade 9

Pictographs circa 15,000 B.C .

People had lived on Earth for about 4 million years. They had leatned to control fire, make complex tools, and survive variable weather. Humans wanted to share what they had seen so they drew on the walls of caves. We can learn much about the animals that were important to these humans by studying these pictures. Maybe someday you will travel and visit some of these caves.

Ideograms circa 7,500 B.C.

Humans later used a combination of pictures to tell a story. They used pictures as symbols - pictures that represented a word. A picture of a mouth and a bowl meant eating. They used natural materials for 'paint' - like dried blood, berries, charcoal or rocks.

Sumar circa 3500 B.C .

The people of Sumer had a great civilization. They did not have many trees in Sumer so they learned how to use clay as a tablet. They baked the tablet in the sun to dry. They used a wedge shaped tool called a stylus. We call their wedge shaped writing cuneiform. Cuneiform means wedge shaped.

Egypt circa 3200 B.C.

The Egyptians developed a style of writing called hieroglyphics, or writing of the gods. They carved their symbols into rock. It was very difficult to learn as it had so many symbols so they had scribes who went to school to learn how to write. Only boys were allowed to go to scribe school. The Egyptians developed a type of paper from a plant called papyrus. They used a reed sharpened into a point to write on their paper. They then rolled the paper into scrolls. These were their books. Sometimes the Egyptians wrote symbols that stood for concepts and sometimes they mixed in symbols that stood for sounds. We use symbols for sounds today. They wrote left to right, right to left and up and down.

3,500 B.C. Indus River

There was another great civilization on the Indus River near the Arabian Sea. They developed a system of writing with around 250 symbols. They carved their writings on soft soapstone. No one has yet deciphered their language. This civilization died out, whereas the other two continued to grow. Maybe somebody will decode the symbols of the Indus. Recently there was another civilization discovered in Asia that also had writing. Watch for current articles so you can share them with your students to let them know this research is living and ongoing.

2,000 B.C. Shang Dynasty

The Shang on the Yellow River is the earliest known civilization that used Chinese writing. They used about 3,000 symbols for words and actions. The Chinese language of today differs very little from this early writing. This is because the Chinese civilization was siolated from the rest of the world for many years.

Phoenicians 1,600 B.C.

The Phoenicians lived on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. They were merchants who sailed around the Mediterranean Sea selling ivory, spices, incense, ornaments, glass. Their name comes from a purple dye they used to make clothes. It came from shellfish called the Murex Snail. They were famous for their purple dye. They needed an easy system of writing to keep track of all the goods they traded. They saw the Egyptian and Sumerian alphabets and borrowed their ideas. Their first alphabet had 80 symbols, but eventually they simplified it to only 22 letters with sounds. The Phoenicians did not have any vowels.

The Greeks 800 B. C

The Greeks learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians. They did not speak the same language as the Phoenicians so they had to add some new letter s . They changed to an alpha bet with 24 letters. The Greeks used vowels, left spaces between words, used some punctuation and were the first to only write left to right.

Romans 100 B. C.

The Romans were a great civilization. They conquered a lot of the world. They simplified the Greek alphabet by changing the shape of many of their letters. They named their language Latin. The shape of our letters today is a lot like the Roman letters of 2, 000 years ago. The Romans kept their writing in books, instead of on scrolls. Monks copied the books by hand using beautiful script and pictures called illumination. They wrote wih quill pens on paper made from animal skins called parchment. They wrote beside open windows using the sun for light.

The Chinese 900 B.C .

The Chinese invented many things before the Europeans. The Europeans did not know as the two cultures rarely mixed with each other. The Chinese invented the first printing press. They first had individual letters carved in wood. Pages were written by puuting individual letters togeher. Later they carved a whole page of words onto a wooden block.

Many pages could then be printed, but the wood wore down rapidly and had to be replaced. The Chinese also invented true paper from wood pulp around 105 A.D.

Alcuin 780 A.D.

Charlemagne was a king of another great civilization that conquered much of the world. He had a library full of all the books written at that time in the great city of A lexandria. Unfortunaltely most of the books were lost in a great fire. A monk named Alcuin developed many of the rules we use today for capital letters and punctuation.

Printing Press, Eur ope 1400 A.D.

Johann Gutenburg, a German, is thought to have invented the first paper in Europe. The Chin ese had devel oped a process to make pa per long age, but refused to share their secrets. Gutenbu rg also invented a fas ter printing press. Mor e books could now be made in a day than a monk could produce in several months. The Koreans were the first to use a type set made out of bronze. It lasted much longer than wood.

Rosetta S tone 1799 A.D.

The Rosetta Stone is discovered by some of Napoleon's soldiers while they were fighting in Egypt. Napoleon was a famous French General. The Rosetta Stone had a passage written in two languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics and Greek. As many educated people could read the early Greek, they slowly figured out the meaning of the hieroglyphics. It took forty years, but the secrets of the ancient language were finally unlocked. Reading a civilizations writing lets us know a lot about how they lived and what they thought.

Computers 1900's

Today the written word can travel from one part of the world to another in seconds. Computers and satellites have made it possible to exchange news as it happens. Languages are translated from one to another by machines. Great quantities of information can be held by one magnetic disk. Whole encyclopedias are stored in about a six inch space. Someday communication with paper may be looked upon as we now look upon cave drawings.