How did writing come about?


In the primitive era, mankind did not know writing, and all the cultural material was transmitted orally. For the first time the rudiments of writing arose in developed ancient civilizations: the earliest example of writing is the cuneiform of the Sumerian-Akkadian civilization that appeared in the Mesopotamus at the beginning of the III millennium BC. With the help of cuneiform, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia pictured on the clay tablets pictograms endowed with a certain meaning. This type of writing was widely used in several languages ​​- Hittite, Akkadian, Sumerian, Persian. Ancient Persian cuneiform was first deciphered by German scientists in the early 19th century, taking as a basis the inscriptions of the ruling Achaemenid dynasty.

The earliest cuneiform tablets were composed by the priests of the Mesopotamian temples. With the help of pictograms, the priests kept records of the harvested crop and used cuneiform writing for economic purposes. Gradually, the number

of pictograms increased, the semantic content of cuneiform writing expanded, and the technique of writing became more complicated. If at first pictograms depicted specific objects or phenomena, then in the future the letter in Mesopotamia became verbal and syllabic. Pictograms depicted syllables, and from a different combination of them, the meaning of the written phrase changed.

Another cradle of writing in world culture is Ancient Egypt. Egyptian hieroglyphs were first deciphered in the beginning of the XIX century by Jean Francois Champollion, who studied the Rosetta stone found in Egypt with carved inscriptions in three languages. The scientist correlated the ancient Greek and the ancient Egyptian text. which allowed for the first time in human history to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphic letter. Egyptologists argue that the Egyptian writing is the same age as the Mesopotamian cuneiform script. Both types of ancient writing arose almost simultaneously at the turn of the 4th-3rd millennium BC.


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How did writing come about?