https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pyHZmjUTto1Ni3ZUTfQ0JH48cPKUeQqVoHRMIckatFk/edit?usp=sharing
Evolution of writing
by Richard CNMV
Writing is one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind, maybe the biggest one, as it made history possible. Even so, it is a skill that those who write think that it is self-understood. We are first learning to write at school, starting from the letters of the alphabet, or, if we live in China or Japan, from the Chinese characters. At a mature age, it is rare to think of the process of transforming thoughts in symbols on a piece of paper or on a monitor or in bits of information on a disc inside the computer. Few of us really remember how we learned to write.
A text written in a foreign language that we don’t understand remembers us the quality of this skill.A lost antique Egyptian writing amazes us like it is some kind of miracle. By what means these pioneers of writing learned how to write? How could their symbols replace thinking and talk? Are the present writing systems different to the ones from antiquity? Are the Chinese and Japanese letters similar to the ancient hieroglyphics? Are they better ? Anyways. what kind of people were scribes from the oldest times, and what kind of information, ideas and feelings they were leaving to the next generations?
The function of writing
Writing is generally seen as a good thing. It is easy to understand that someone who can read and write has more and bigger perspectives of fulfilment in life than someone who can’t. But writing can also be used to lie, to confuse and exploit, not only to educate and tell the truth, as history teaches us.
Socrate highlighted the ambivalent trait of the writing science when he said the story featuring the Egyptian god named „Thoth”, the inventor of writing, that went to the king to request a blessing for his shining invention. The king said „You, the father of the letters, you let yourself pushed by feelings and you gave them a power exactly the opposite of the one that they really have... You invented an elixir, not for memory and reminding, but for offering your disciples the appearance of wisdom, not the true wisdom, because they can read a lot without being guided, and they will think that they know a lot of things, when, in reality, they will be more ignorant”. In the XXIst century, filled with information and fast-evolving technology, these words from the antique world get an actual surprising echo.
Political leaders always used writing as a propaganda tool. Four thousand years and a writing system completely different separate the codes of Hammurabi from the posters in the 1990s Irak, but the messages are almost the same. Hammurabi is saying to himself: „the strong king, king of Babilon, king of Amurru, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four corners of the world” and he assures that, if his codes are followed, all of his subjects will have only to win.
As H.G. Wells affirms in „The short history of the world”: „Agreements, norms, laws were recorded using writing. That’s how some states got bigger than some city-states. The will of priests or kings and their seals could reach far further than their voices and sights, and they could survive after death.
Unfortunately, yes, the Babylonian cuneiforms, Egyptian hieroglyphs and mauve glyphs were used exactly the same as Stalin in the USSR did, to remind them who is the greatest, what big things he did, how divinity was linked with his authority. In Karnak, Egypt, on the exterior wall of a temple are carved representations of a peace treaty in which the Egyptians won, but, another version of this treaty, in the capital of their enemy, shows that they won.
The desire for immortality has proven important for scribes. For example, most of the fragments written by Etruscans are funeral inscriptions. We can understand the name, dates and the place of death because they are written in a language similar to the greek one but we can’t understand the rest of the language that is borrowed from the Greeks and passed to the Romans than to the rest of Europe.
Another use of writing was the prediction of the future. All of the antique societies were obsessed with their fate. Writing allowed them to hide their fears. Mayans used books with tabs made from barks, painted with complex drawings, in colours, and linked in jaguar leather. The predictions were made using a calendar system so complex that it went 5 billion years back before the Earth existed. In China, on the other hand, in the Shang dynasty, the questions about the future were written on tortoise shells and on bones. The bones were heated with a torch and the damage caused by it was interpreted as the future.
Writing was obviously used for worldly purposes, it could be used as an ID card or a property sign. Every object that belonged to Tutankhamon had his name on it. Anyone in the leadership had to have a seal to mark it on clay tablets. Same is for traders and influential persons. Today, in Japan, this seal is a handwritten signature used to legitimate documents. This technique is also seen in territories far away from each other like Mesopotamia, China and Central America. The stone seals found in the Indus valleys are interesting because the symbols on them were not decoded.
The writing used for keeping records was much more widespread than the one used for seals or inscriptions. The oldest records, written on clay tablets in Mesopotamia, were keeping track of raw materials, drinks, rice, workers and their jobs, agricultural parcels and their owners, etc. Records that looked similar were also found in Europe.
Origins of writing
Many scientists agree today that writing started with records of accounting things, even thought accountability wasn’t the main subject of the writings found in China, Egypt, and Central America. At the end of the 4th millennium, commercial and administrative reasons made writing more popular, especially in trading.
What is not known is how writing appeared, some think that it is an invention by some intelligent administrators and traders in the Uruk fortress, but some also think that it is just a discovery, not something invented, and there is a theory that writing is based on a numbering system using counters.
However, essential for writing development was the discovery of the principle behind the rebus. This lead to the revolutionary idea that a symbol can be understood as a sound, like a painting with an owl can be used to represent the sound that the owl makes.
The development of writing
Once invented, discovered, evolved or as everyone wants to believe, how could write spread from Mesopotamia to the entire world? As writing appeared in different centuries across the continents, we can say that writing spread from culture to culture. Because there are not major proofs that writing spread from culture to culture, most scientists think that it was individually developed in the biggest civilisations of the antique world.
Writing was also copied from one nation to another: Romans slightly changed Etruscan's writing, the Japanese adopted Chinese characters, and the Turks ceded the Arabic writing for the latin one. When a language is borrowed from another nation, it needs to be modified because the new language has sounds that the old one didn’t (For example, u with umlaut from Ataturk). This process can be easily understood if the two languages are the same, but if they are different the sounds are difficult to apply (Chinese and Japanese). To compensate, the Japanese language is using two writing systems, one consisting of Chinese characters and the other one consisting of Japanese symbols.
Writing, talking and language
Europeans and Americans are expected to know around 52 symbols alphabetical signs and a lot of symbols, while the Japanese, are expected to know at least 2000 symbols, and if they possess a superior knowledge, they can recognize at least 5000 symbols.
„Any complete writing system can be used to transmit everything that someone thinks.” (John DeFrancis- an American expert in the Chinese language). Both alphabets and the Chinese and Japanese languages have symbols that represent sounds: these are the phonetic symbols and every writing system uses a mix of phonetic and semantic symbols. The difference is the radio of them two, the higher the ratio, the easier is to guess the pronunciation. The finnish grammar is much more efficient than the Chinese one.
Undoubtedly, the Chinese and Japanese languages are hard to learn. In Japan, in mid 50’s, there has been a wave of suicide because of the spread of mass education. A Chinese or Japanese needs more years than a European or American to read fluently.
On the other hand, it’s true that millions of Europeans and Americans didn’t learn to write and read. In Japan, the level of book science is far higher than in the Occident. The fact that the hard language didn’t stop Japan to became an economic power, hasn’t also lead to the disbandment of the use of Chinese characters.
The chronicle of the evolution of writing
Ice Age- a protoscript is used, a protographic communication.
3300 BC- clay tables used in Mesopotamia
3100 BC- the first cuneiform inscriptions
3100-3000 BC- the first hieroglyphic inscriptions
2500 BC – first writings on the Indus valleys
The 18th century BC- first linearly A inscriptions in Crete
1792-1750 BC- the reign of Hammurabi, his law codes were applied on small tables
17th,16th centuries BC- the first known alphabet, used in Palestine.
1450 BC- first linearly B inscriptions in Crete
15th century BC- alphabetical cuneiform inscriptions from Ugarit
1361-1352 BC- the reign of Tutankhamon in Egypt
~1285 BC- the battle of Kades between the Egyptians led by Ramses the second and the hitics. Both celebrate it as a victory.
~1200 BC- first inscriptions with Chinese characters on bones
1000 BC- first inscriptions in the Fenician alphabet
730 BC- first inscriptions in the Greek alphabet
8th century BC- the appearance of the Etruscan alphabet in nowadays northern Italy
650 BC- the first inscriptions in demotic writing
600 BC- the first glific inscriptions in Africa
521-486 BC- the reign of the persan prince Darius, the inscription from Behinstun is made, the key to decoding the cuneiform writing
400 BC- the ionic alphabet becomes the standard Greek alphabet
~227-~232 BC- Asoka has written the edicts of stone in Brahmi and Karoshi languages
221 BC- during the Qin dynasty, a reform of writing with Chinese characters takes place
2nd century BC- in China, paper is invented
1st century AD- the Manuscripts from the Dead Sea, in an Hebraic writing
75 AD- the last inscription made using the cuneiform writing
2nd century AD- the first runic inscriptions in Europe
394 AD- the last writing made with Egyptian hieroglyphs
615-683 AD- the reign of king Pascal, from the classic Mayan age
712 AD- Kojiki, the oldest example of Japanese literature, written in Chinese characters
Before 800AD- the pattern is invented in China
9th century AD- the chiliric alphabet is invented in Russia
1418-1450 AD- the reign of King Sejong in Korea, the Hangul alphabet is invented
15th century AD- the pattern with mobile characters is invented in Europe
1560’s AD- Diego de Landa makes popular the Mayan alphabet from the Yucatan peninsula
1799 AD- the stone from Rosetta is discovered in Egypt
1821 AD- Sequoia invents an alphabet for the Indian Cherokee language in the united states
1823 AD- the Egyptian hieroglyphs are decoded by Champollion.
Starting in 1840’s AD- the Mesopotamian cuneiforms are decoded by Rawlinson, Hincks and others
1867 AD- the typewriter is invented
1899 AD- the inscriptions on bones are discovered in China
1900 AD- Evans identifies the linearly A and B writings
1905 AD- the pro-synonym inscriptions are discovered
1920’s AD- the civilisation on the Indus valleys is discovered
1940’s AD- the electronic calculators are invented
1948 AD- Hebrew becomes a national language in Israel
1952 AD- Ventris decodes the linearly B writing
Starting in the 1950’s AD- the Pijin writing is introduced in China
1980’s AD- text processors are invented, the writing becomes electronic
1990’s AD- the international network named World Wide Web (www) is introduced, which revolutionises the storing and transmission of information
The modern hieroglyphs
Are the claims about the efficiency of alphabets so exaggerated? Maybe writing and reading would function well if there are logograms which have the meaning of one full word, like in Chinese, Japanese and the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Why would it be necessary that writing has to represent sounds? After all, what makes the sound so important in the processes of writing and reading?
If we look around us, we’ll see that hieroglyphs are coming back, on the sides of a road, on the monitors, on all electronic products, the keyboard of a text processor and so on.
Hieroglyphs help us see where and how to drive, how to operate things, if we need to expect rain, etc.
Some people think that there can be used a global language, that everyone can speak, read and learn easily, this idea coming from the 17th century.It would not depend on any major language in the world and it would have essential notions regarding high-level communications in politics, philosophy and science. If maths and music accomplish the same thing, why can’t it be generalized?
The book above demonstrates that such a dream can’t be real. Writing and reading are linked intimate and inextricable with speaking. The Chinese characters aren’t directly linked to the mind without any sound intervention on the language, in spite of what Chinese people stated for centuries. Not even hieroglyphs work the same, even if we recognise them.
Aristotle said that the basic unit of language is „gramma” and meant the written and spoken the language.Ferdinand de Saussure said that a language can be compared with a piece of paper. We are at the beginning regarding the understanding of the mental processes that take place when we talk, read and write, but one thing is sure, writing can’t be separated from speaking; words and the writing systems that use words assume both sounds and signs.
Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/writing
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wrtg/hd_wrtg.htm
http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab33
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyjLt_RGEww
About writing, pictography and symbols
by Rivi CNMV
Writing is in principle the representation of language rather than a direct representation of thought and the fact that spoken language has a number of levels of structure, including sentences, words, syllables, and phonemes (the smallest units of speech used to distinguish one word or morpheme from another), any one of which a writing system can “map onto” or represent. Indeed, the history of writing is in part a matter of the discovery and representation of these structural levels of spoken language in the attempt to construct an efficient, general, and economical writing system capable of serving a range of socially valuable functions. The invention of the alphabet is a major achievement of Western culture. It is also unique; the alphabet was invented only once, though it has been borrowed by many cultures. It is a model of analytic thinking, breaking down perceptible qualities like syllables into more basic constituents. And because it is capable of conveying subtle differences in meaning, it has come to be used for the expression of a great many of the functions served by speech. The alphabet requires little of the reader beyond familiarity with its orthography. It allows the reader to decipher words newly encountered and permits the invention of spellings for new patterns of sound, including proper names (a problem that is formidable for nonalphabetic systems).
Nonetheless, all contemporary orthographies have a history of development, and there are many common features in these histories. It is unlikely that writing was invented only once and then borrowed by different cultural groups. While all Western writing systems may be traced back to the beginnings of symbol making in Sumer, there is no reason to believe that Asian writing systems were borrowed from the Sumerian form. Consequently, there are two quite separate histories of writing, that of the writing system developed by the Sumerians and that of the one developed by the Chinese.
Pictography
It is a logic case that lots of this symbols were born from pictures – at least this is what savants think from this point of view. What can be easier than reading a symbol representing a human, a cow, a snake or a tree?! In reality, pictograms are not as simple as we can imagine. Here are 12 pictograms Chinese from 1200-1245 B.C. and another series of 18 Sumerians symbols from year 3000 B.C. Let’s try to guess their meaning before reading the explication from the bottom of the page.
Pictography presents two major difficulties of practical order. First one: at what level – on a value scale – a symbol becomes a pictogram? And vice-versa: how abstract can a pictogram become in order to stop being this thing (a pictogram)? The artist M.C. Escher transformed this tricky spelling in a series of fascinating art work, which one of them is mentioned above. Black forms from the center are triangles and ones from the right side are pictograms representing birds. But how about the form between them?
On the other hand: at what level – on a scale of generalizing and associating ideas – are pictograms understood? As an example: a standing man can mean anything but in can be interpreted as “standing up”, “waiting”, “alone”, even the closet sign for male sex.; or just as a man or representing all men. Even like this, Sumerian symbol can mean “barley” or refer to any other cereal or maybe plant. This situation is similar to toddlers that are learning to speak. If kids hear the discussion about the family dog, they usually refer to their house pet as any other animal but not a dog (like cats or fish, or etc.).
Culture signs
Pictograms usually conquer cultural difficulties. There are many types of chairs, like tall bar chairs or regular chairs but none of them will ever be associated with a traditional ancient African chair. The cow is associated in occidental countries with milk and beef but in India the cow has humps and they are blessed and they can’t be killed in the abattoir. So, the chairs and the cows are represented differently because they come from different cultures.
Pictograms from the new technological domain are simple. They are not difficult to understand as long as you know the basics of natation in this system. Those diagrams of circuits are an example in pictographic communication. Let’s imagine that this information needs to be converted in words. All thought, those diagrams can’t be translated without a very precise category.
Symbols dated from Ice Age
The signs on the wall presented in this picture probably have a 20.000 years story and they origin from a cave located in Pech Merle, Lot, France. What does lines colored in lively shades mean? Nobody knows. There are many examples of form of art dated from this century. In the south of France, Lorthet, there is a picture with a deer and two rhombus. And at Marsoulas the bison which has a few signs.
Aren’t they just writings?! If the question refers to “systems of graphic symbols which can be used for transmitting any type of information based on type of mind”, then the answer is no. That will mean pushing the simplicity to far if we would think that humans of Ice Age could invent a regular system of writing or an alphabet (that would get lost eventually). And on regular basis we can’t be sure if those artists that colored the caves could talk (but in that age it is believed that they could). And it is much more frustrating that those artist didn’t develop a limited form of written communication. This is why we call those pictures “proto-writing”. This is one a form of proto-writing. We have a form too nowadays and it is represented by the diagrams of circuits. The first form of written communication was found in Sumer around 3.300 B.C. This forms of proto-writing will exist forever just like writing exist now.
Vertices
As the story says, the king Darius left a group of Greek people to watch a bridge. He gave them a piece of paper with 60 nodes on it and then he asked them to untie one nod per day. If he wouldn’t get until all the nodes where untied the Greeks could go home.
Just like vertices, those pieces of paper with dots on them where a old dated proto-writing as well. They were discovered bones from the Ice Age too. Those little dots were made with unique tools from time to time in a time interval. A good and rational explication is that the bones were chopped monthly by the movements of the Moon. People from Ice Age created some very useful calendars.
It is easy to say to assume that after science spread the use of vertices was useless. But the truth is that the mark left behind in order to help you remind something was very useful for regular people and for scientist too.
Incas Quipus
The Incas civilization is a well remarked exception in writing. They didn’t have an alphabet like Aztec and Maya people did. They had an arrangement of ropes and nodes named “quipu” that helped them register the stuff they imported and exported. This was the only one form of official register of Incas people. The “quipucamayoci” were the people charged for representing and tying the ropes. This system was used until Spanish Conquistadors came there in 16th century.
Amerindians pictograms
The most recognized form of proto-writing is the one created by North-American Indians (Hindu). The majority of those writings are some notations and pictures. Unfortunately there are some pictograms difficult to guess.
The pictograms from above were written by a leader of Indians Sioux Oglala in year 1883 in USA, Dakota. They represent a list of fighters (the red lines on their faces represent that they fight) and their names are written above their heads. Example: The Steel Eagle ( blue represents steel ), The Attacking Eagle, etc.
There are some examples of pictographic “letters” send by Indians to Americans. There aren’t usual letters, in fact they are some encrypted messages that can be understood only by science people.
Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/writing#ref513124
How does writing works
by Stefan CNMV
How does writing work
200 years ago, nobody knew how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs. The scientists didn’t even know that the writings could be read in the same way that you can read the writing based on the alphabet. They believed that those exotic symbols were representing ideas and thoughts, not the sound of a living old language.
The classic image of Egypt
The stone from Rosetta is, probably, the most famous inscription in the world. Her discovery in Egypt, in 1799, allowed the reading of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The hieroglyphs wisdom
The classic studies refresh did attract a comeback of Greeks and Romans to Egyptian hieroglyphs faith.
The first hieroglyphiers
The most famous was the priest Anthanasius Kircher. In the middle of 17th century he was the known authority in terms of ancient Egypt. William Warburton was the first that advanced with the idea that all the writing system, including hieroglyphs, could evolve starting from images. Abatele Barthélemy, a follower and admirer of Warburton, was the first that guessed that in the interior of cartridges you could find names of kings or gods.
A Danish scientist named Zoëga wrote, a little bit before 1800, that some hieroglyphs could represent, somehow, “phonetic signs”.
Champollion breaks the Egyptian code
The complete deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, announced in 1823, was the success of Jean-François Champollion. Born in 1790, in the time of the French Revolution, he couldn’t do primary school. Instead, he had private Greek and Latin teachers. After he moved to Grenoble to do the high school there, he met the mathematician and physicist Fourier. Fourier initiated the young Champollion in Egyptology. At 20 years old, after he studied in Paris Oriental languages and Coptic language, Champollion returned to Grenoble and started studying thorough the Pharaonic Egypt.
In 1819, Thomas Young has published his thoughts about the Egyptian system of writing. Champollion was in rivalry with him, because he was convinced that hieroglyphs were fully non-phonetic.
The obelisk of Philae
The key of further evolution of the deciphering process was built by the copy of the bilingual inscription from an obelisk, delivered to Paris by William Bankes probably in January 1822. The text came from The Great Britain, where the obelisk was sent after it was unearthed from Philae.
The inscription from the base plate was in Greek, and the one on the column was in hieroglyphic writing. In Greek were mentioned the names of Ptolemeu and Cleopatra, and in hieroglyphic writing appeared just two cartridges
The name of Ramses The Great
Champollion changed his mind about hieroglyphs when he started to receive, in September 1822, copies of different bas-reliefs and inscriptions from ancient Egypt temples. One of them, from the Abu Simbel temple, from Nubia, had some strange cartridges. After all the appearances, they were containing the same name wrote in a multitude of types. The name was Ramses, a king from 19th dynasty, mentioned in a well-known history of Egypt written by Manetho.
The essence of Egyptian hieroglyphs
The main features of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, discovered for the first time by Champollion, can be summarized. The writing system is a combination of semantic symbols named logograms ( which represents words and ideas) and phonetic signs, named phonograms ( which shows one or more sounds) .Some hieroglyphs are recognizable images of objects or beings such as a bird or a snake, which means that are icons, but the image doesn’t give the sign, obligatory, a specific sense. For example, the sign hand from Cleopatra’s cartridge has nothing to do with the meaning of “hand” – it’s just a phonogram. So, an icon can work like a phonogram, and like a logogram, depending of the context in which appears. With other words, in the Egyptian hieroglyphs system, one sign can have more functions.
Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/writing
Cuneiform Art
by Iulian CNMV
The cuneiform inscriptions were stamped in clay, carved in stone and engraved on metal, ivory, glass and wax. For all we know today, this type of writing was done very rarely with ink, as opposed to Egyptian hieroglyphics, which could be written with ink on sheets of papyrus. Although, the cuneiform symbols do not have the same magical and mysterious nature as hieroglyphics, when the writing is made masterfully, they are converted into thrilling works of art.
The craft of cuneiforms
In their overwhelming majority, the cuneiform inscriptions are made in clay. Manufacturing a good tablet of clay was, probably, one of the first duties of an apprentice-scribe. The biggest tablets had eleven columns and these could reach the size of a square of 30 cm. One of the sides was, in general, flat, and the other was convex. The scribe first carved the plane side, then, when it filled up, he turned the tablet on the other side and he continued writing on the curved side; the first lines of sings, being made on a plane surface, were not affected by pressure.
When the inscription of a tablet was done, usually it was left to dry; the tablets of this kind could be modified by moistening the clay. Instead, if the engraving was meant to be permanent, the tablet was burned off in the oven. If the burning was accidental, for example when a library was destroyed, the fire made it possible for the tablets to be preserved forever.
Writing Methods
The scribe started the engraving of a tablet from the left-top corner and worked from the top towards the inferior edge; he came back to the top of the next column and repeated the process, advancing toward the right side of the tablet column by column. When he got to the right-bottom corner, he turned the tablet on the other side bottom-down and started to write from the right top corner and advanced, column by column, towards left. In that manner, the clay tablets were written and read just like a modern newspaper, apart from the fact that the ancient scribes "turned the page" after the bottom corner, not after one of the sides.
The pen was made-up, usually, of cane, but, in some cases of metal or bone.
Scribes Training
The scribes were trained in special schools. Boys (and few girls) were made exercise, by copying a few lines of cuneiform writing engraved by the teachers: names of deities, a list of technical terms, and a short literary fragment or a proverb. These school tablets have been preserved,having a teacher version on one side and worked version with less skil.The scribes fulfilled many roles of which: private secretaries,affiliated of temples, farmers etc.
SOURCE: Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/writing
Petrache Poenaru by Miruna CNMV
Petrache Poenaru patented the fountain pen on May 25th, 1827, he invented the fountain pen while he was in school in Paris and wanted a way to continue note taking without stopping to dip for ink.
Second only to Gutenberg’s invention of mechanical movable type that started the printing revolution, the invention of the fountain pens allowed writers to write without dipping a quill in ink every few letters.
It’s amazing when you think about it. Before the fountain pen was mass produced, you had to be able to afford to write. Why? Well you had to be able to afford to pay a quill cutter to cut your quill with a razor at the proper angle and sharpen it after a few pages of writing.
I thought about this the other day when I noticed a pen discarded on the street, today people toss them out or drop them and don’t even bother picking them up.
There was a struggle to invent a fountain pen that wasn’t ink-starved and wouldn’t blob ink all over your paperwork. With the advent of a tube feeder or bladder to hold the ink, people didn’t yet understand how to regulate the ink supply.
Fountain pens have a beautiful history and brought writing to the masses. Petrache Poenaru, who invented the fountain pen, was just the beginning of the evolution of fine writing instruments
Source: http://www.poenari.ro/