The Origin and
Development of Writing
The first
indisputable examples of writing appear on clay tablets and were found at the
site of Uruk in lower Mesopotamia. These
mark the transition from “prehistoric” to “historic” civilization and are
roughly contemporaneous with the onset of the Early Bronze Age (i.e. 3200 BC). The content of these early texts has proved
for the most part to be undecipherable.
However, scholars are generally agreed that the Uruk texts constitute an
early written form of the Sumerian language.
Shortly after the appearance of this cuneiform
(i.e. “wedge-shaped”) writing in Mesopotamia, writing also appeared in Egypt in
the form of hieroglyphics (i.e.
“sacred-carvings”)1. Mesopotamia and Egypt, therefore, are our
earliest sources for the study of the written history of humankind.
From
this point of origin, writing went through several stages of historic
development in the ancient Near East2. This development is important to bear in mind
since it is easy to fall into the misconception that ancient languages were
written with letters, as in our
western alphabet. Sumerian and Egyptian,
however, were not written with letters and did not have an alphabet. In an alphabet, letters consist of symbols written
to represent simple sounds, such as, the letters “a” or “b”. In Sumerian and Egyptian, words were written
with symbols representing either whole words, which are called logograms, or whole syllables, which are
called syllabograms. Thus, for example, a single symbol stands for
the Sumerian word “dinger” (god), while another symbol stands for the syllable
“nig” (which could be used to form any number of words). This manner of writing is referred to as logo-syllabic writing and is the earliest system known to have been used in the
world. Of the two forms of
logo-syllabary just mentioned, cuneiform became the dominant one used
throughout the ancient Near East, while the use of hieroglyphics remained
almost exclusively within the province of Egypt.
From
this brief introduction, it is easy to see how cumbersome such a system of
writing could become. While modern
English writers are able to represent every word in their vocabulary with a 26
letter alphabet, the earliest logo-syllabaries of the Sumerians could contain
up to 2000 different symbols, all with different meanings. To complicate
matters more, the meanings of most of the symbols varied across time and space
so that, eventually, signs could acquire up to five or six possible meanings
all of which would have to be determined by the context of their usage. Hence, literacy in the ancient world was a
rare privilege enjoyed only by professional scribes and the elite,
well-educated few. After the conquest of
the Sumerians by the Akkadians, logograms began to gradually disappear from
regular usage except in a few idiomatic expressions, while written language
came to be represented almost entirely in syllabograms. This manner of writing
is referred to as syllabic writing
and persisted throughout the latter part of the Early Bronze Age and all of the
Middle Bronze Age (i.e. 2000-1550 BC).
The
earliest examples of consonantal writing
begin to appear in Palestine sometime around the beginning of the Late Bronze
Age (i.e. 1550 B.C.)3. Next to
the invention of writing itself, this is easily the most significant historic
development in the history of writing.
The transition to consonantal writing began with the insight that
syllables (such as, for example, “nig”) could be broken down into a relatively
small group of sounds called consonants (e.g., “n” and “g”) which could be
rearranged in various ways to formulate words.
Thus, the Palestinian consonantary, as it is called, could now represent
the full range of human language with only 22 symbols, each representing a
consonant—an unimaginably efficient system of writing when compared to the 2000
symbols used in the logo-syllabary of the Sumerians! Archaeologists have
uncovered numerous attempts at developing this consonantary in Palestine and
Sinai in the Late Bronze Age, but the one that eventually caught on and was
disseminated to the rest of the Mediterranean world was that of the coastal
Phoenicians. From this point on,
literacy and writing grew in proportion to the facility with which it could be
carried out.
The
last and most familiar development in ancient Near Eastern writing is the
advent of the alphabet, which
appeared sometime around 800 BC in Greece.
The Greek alphabet, named after its first two letters “alpha” and
“beta”, incorporated all the advantages of the Palestinian consonantary, but it
also included within its scope the representation of vowels. This innovation
required that a few additional letters be used in the formulation of words, but
also overcame a certain amount of ambiguity inherent in the consonantal system
due to the absence of vowels. (For example, in a consonantal system of writing,
the symbol “blck” could be interpreted as either “black” or “block”.) The Greek
system was passed on to the Romans and preserved in Latin, which is the basis
of modern western language.
1 The
long-standing debate about whether writing first developed in Mesopotamia or
Egypt seems, at present, to be resolved in favor of the former on the basis of
the clay tablets discovered at Uruk.
Fresh evidence, however, could easily open this debate again.
2 Traditionally, archaeologists and linguists
only recognized three basic systems of writing.
The most recent analyses, however, suggest six systems, four of which
are treated here (i.e. logo-syllabic, syllabic, consonantal, and alphabetic). For a fuller treatment of these four systems
as well as abugida and hangul, cf. Peter T. Daniels, “Writing
and Writing Systems” Oxford Encyclopedia
of Archaeology in the Neat East, ed. E. Meyers (New York: Oxford
University, 1997) 5.352-358.
3 Possibly
the earliest example of consonantal writing in ancient Palestine is a
fragmentary potsherd from Gezer dated to approximately 1650 BC. The potsherd is inscribed with only three
symbols, the interpretation of which is a matter of debate.
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