It has never been possible to write on clay before.Įnmerkar and the King of Aratta, a Sumerian epic written around 1800 BCEĪlthough there is agreement among scholars as to the difference between prehistory and the history of early writing, there is disagreement as to when proto-writing became "real writing." The criteria are somewhat arbitrary. The Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and wrote on it like a tablet because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat the message. The earliest recorded account of the development of writing is found in a poem from ancient Mesopotamia: Other areas of the Near East quickly followed. Towards the end of the fourth millennium BCE, Uruk was where actual writing was first discovered. Afterwards, flat tablets were gradually introduced in place of the tokens, and signs were recorded using a stylus. These tokens were initially imprinted on the exterior of spherical clay envelopes, which were later used to keep them. Writing enables communities to communicate knowledge, transmit information, and stages of developmentīeginning with the Neolithic pottery phase, when clay tokens were used to keep track of particular quantities of animals or other goods, writing first appeared. The greatest advantage of writing is that it gives society a way to regularly and thoroughly preserve information-something that the spoken word could not previously do as successfully. In order to facilitate communication, the writing system's symbols must resemble spoken words or speech. Second, whether they are physical or digital, all writing systems must include some kind of symbol that can be created on a surface. First, writing must be comprehensive it must have a meaning or purpose, and it must make a point or be able to convey that message. Three writing standards are thought to apply to all writing systems. Writing systems generally develop more slowly after they are formed than their spoken counterparts and frequently preserve traits and idioms that have been lost to the spoken language. Writing system development has been intermittent, uneven, and delayed, and old oral communication systems have only been partially replaced. Every human group has its own language, which is thought by many to be a natural and essential aspect of mankind. In contrast, it's not always necessary to have a prior understanding of a spoken language to use symbolic systems like information signs, paintings, maps, and mathematics. For most writing systems, reading a text requires some knowledge of the spoken language that goes along with it. Writing systems are distinct from symbolic communication systems. Although there is still a chance that Mesopotamian "stimulus dispersion" occurred, the influence could not have extended beyond the dissemination of an idea."īecause there is no evidence of communication between ancient China and the Near Eastern literate civilizations, as well as because Mesopotamian and Chinese approaches to phonetic representation differ, it is thought that ancient Chinese characters are independent creations. Some academics have suggested that ancient Egypt "The earliest authentic examples of Egyptian writing differ from Mesopotamian writing in both structure and style, indicating that they must have emerged independently. In at least four ancient civilizations, including Mesopotamia (between 34 BCE), Egypt (about 3250 BCE), China (1200 BCE), and lowland portions of southern Mexico and Guatemala, writing may have independently originated (by 500 BCE). The finding of ancient Mesoamerican scripts, far from Middle Eastern sources, demonstrated, however, that writing had been created more than once. This argument holds that traders or merchants traveling between geographical locations passed on the idea of representing language by written signs, though perhaps not necessarily the specifics of how such a system operated. According to academics, all writing originated in Mesopotamia's ancient Sumer and spread around the world as a result of cultural diffusion. The idea that writing originated in a single civilization and was called "monogenesis" persisted for a long time. It differs from proto-writing, which frequently forgoes recording grammatical words and affixes, making it harder or even impossible to reassemble the precise meaning intended by the writer unless a substantial amount of context is already known in advance. Protowriting, ideographic systems, or early mnemonic symbols came before more advanced writing systems in the evolution of writing in human societies (symbols or letters that make remembering them easier).Ī subsequent development is true writing, in which the content of a spoken language is encoded so that another reader may reasonably reconstruct the identical utterance written down.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |