The history of writing traces the development of writing systems[1] and how their use transformed and was transformed by different societies. The use of writing prefigures various social and psychological consequences associated with literacy and literary culture.
Each historical invention of writing emerged from systems of proto-writing that used ideographic and mnemonic symbols but were not capable of fully recording spoken language. True writing, where the content of linguistic utterances can be accurately reconstructed by later readers, is a later development. As proto-writing is not capable of fully reflecting the grammar and lexicon used in languages, it is often difficult or impossible to deduce what the author intended to communicate.
The earliest uses of writing were to document agricultural transactions and contracts in ancient Sumer, but it was soon used in the areas of finance, religion, government, and law. Writing allowed the spread of these social modalities and their associated knowledge, and ultimately the further centralization of political power.[2]
Writing systems typically satisfy three criteria. Firstly, the writing must have some purpose or meaning to it, and a point must be communicated by the text. Secondly, writing systems make use of specific symbols which may be recorded on some writing medium. Thirdly, the symbols used in writing generally correspond to elements of spoken language.[3] In general, systems of symbolic communication like signage, painting, maps, and mathematics are distinguished from writing systems, which require knowledge of an associated spoken language to read a text.
The norms of writing generally evolve more slowly than those of speech; as a result, linguistic features are frequently preserved in the written form of a language after they cease to appear in the corresponding spoken language.[4]
The Kish tablet, bearing what is possibly the earliest known writing–Sumer (c.3500BCE), from the Ashmolean Museum
Before the 20th century, most scholarly theories of the origins of writing involved some form of monogenesis,[5] the assumption that writing had been invented only once as cuneiform in ancient Sumer, and spread across the world from there via cultural diffusion.[6] According to these theories, writing was such a particular technology that exposure through activities like trade was a much more likely means of acquisition than independent reinvention. Specifically, many theories were dependent on a literal account of the Book of Genesis, including the emphases it placed on Mesopotamia.[7] Over time, greater awareness of the systems of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica conclusively established that writing had been independently invented multiple times. Four independent inventions of writing are most commonly recognized[8]—in Mesopotamia (c.3400–3100BCE), Egypt (c.3250BCE),[9][10][6] China (before c.1250BCE),[11] and Mesoamerica (before c.1CE).[12]
Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs are considered the earliest true writing systems, both having gradually evolved from proto-writing between 3400 and 3100BCE. The Proto-Elamite script is also believed to have been in use during this period.[13] Regarding Egyptian hieroglyphs,[9][14][15] scholars point to very early differences with Sumerian cuneiform "in structure and style" as to why the two systems "(must) have developed independently," and if any "stimulus diffusion" of writing did occur, it only served to transmit the bare idea of writing between cultures.[9][16] Due to the lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing, "no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt."[17]
During the 1990s, symbols originally inscribed between 3400 and 3200BCE were discovered at Abydos, which shed some doubt on the previous notion that the Mesopotamian sign system predated the Egyptian one.[18] However, scholars have noted that the attestation at Abydos is singular and sudden, while the gradual evolution of the Mesopotamian system is lengthy and well-documented, with its predecessor token system used in agriculture and accounting attested as early as 8000BCE.[19]
As there is no evidence of contact between the Chinese Shang dynasty (c.1600– c.1050BCE) and the literate civilizations of the Near East,[20] and the methods of logographic and phonetic representation in Chinese characters are distinct from those used in cuneiform and hieroglyphs, written Chinese is considered to be an independent development.[8]
Pre-cuneiform tags depicting a goat or sheep alongside a numeral, likely "10"–Al-Hasakah (3300–3100BCE)[21][22]
Turtle plastron inscribed with an eye-like symbol–Jiahu, China (c.6000BCE)
During the Early Bronze Age (3300–2100BCE), the first writing systems evolved from systems of proto-writing, which used ideographic and mnemonic symbols to communicate information, but did not record human language directly. Proto-writing is attested as early as the 7th millenniumBCE, with well-known examples including:
The Jiahu symbols carved into tortoise shells, found in 24 Neolithic graves excavated at Jiahu in northern China and dated to the 7th millenniumBCE.[23][bettersourceneeded] The majority of the signs uncovered were inscribed individually or in small groups on different shells.[24][25] Most archaeologists consider the Jiahu symbols as not directly linked to the emergence of true writing.[26]
The Vinča symbols found on artifacts of the Vinča culture of central and southeastern Europe, dating to the 6th–5th millenniaBCE.[27]
The Indus script attested in short inscriptions between 2600 and 2000BCE.[28]
Other examples of proto-writing include quipu, a system of knotted cords used as mnemonic devices within the Inca Empire (15th centuryCE).[29]
The origins of writing are more generally attributed to the start of the pottery-phase of the Neolithic, when clay tokens were used to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities. These tokens were initially impressed on the surface of round clay envelopes and then stored in them. The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with a stylus. Actual writing is first recorded in Uruk (modern Iraq), at the end of the 4th millenniumBCE, and soon after in various parts of the Near East.[30]
An ancient Sumerian poem gives the first known story of the invention of writing:
Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat (the message), the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay.
The emergence of writing in a given area is usually followed by several centuries of fragmentary inscriptions. Historians mark the "historicity" of a culture by the presence of coherent texts written by the culture.[33] Scholars have disagreed concerning when prehistory becomes history and when proto-writing became true writing.[34]
Tablet with proto-cuneiform pictographs–Uruk III (late 4th millenniumBCE)
Sumerian writing evolved from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millenniumBCE, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, which recorded numbers using a round stylus pressed into the clay at different angles. This system was gradually augmented with pictographic marks indicating what was being counted, which were made using a sharp stylus. By the 29th centuryBCE, writing used a wedge-shaped stylus and included phonetic elements representing syllables of the Sumerian language, and gradually replaced round-stylus and sharp-stylus markings during the 27th and 26th centuriesBCE.[35] Finally, cuneiform became a general-purpose writing system with logograms, syllables, and numerals. From the 26th centuryBCE, the system was adapted to write the Akkadian language, and from there to others, such as Hurrian and Hittite. Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for Ugaritic and Old Persian.
Designs on tokens bearing similarities to contemporary clay tags from Uruk–Abydos, Egypt (3400–3200BCE)
Geoffrey Sampson states that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script, and, probably [were], invented under the influence of the latter",[38] and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia".[39][40][17] However, more recent scholars have held that the evidence for direct influence is sparse. During the 1990s, the discovery of glyphs at Abydos dated between 3400 and 3200BCE has challenged the hypothesis that writing diffused from Mesopotamia to Egypt, pointing instead to the independent development of writing within Egypt. The Abydos glyphs, found in tomb U-J, are written on ivory and are likely labels for other goods found in the grave.[41] While sign usage in Mesopotamian tokens is attested c.8000BCE, Egyptian writing appears suddenly in the late 4th millenniumBCE.[18][32][42]
Frank J. Yurco states that depictions of pharaonic iconography such as the royal crowns, Horus falcons and victory scenes were concentrated in the Upper EgyptianNaqada and A-Group cultures. He further elaborates that "Egyptian writing arose in Naqadan Upper Egypt and A-Group Nubia, and not in the Delta cultures, where the direct Western Asian contact was made, [which] further vitiates the Mesopotamian-influence argument".[43]
Egyptian scholar Gamal Mokhtar argues that the inventory of hieroglyphic symbols derived from "fauna and flora used in the signs [which] are essentially African" and in "regards to writing, we have seen that a purely Nilotic, hence African origin not only is not excluded, but probably reflects the reality", although he acknowledges the geographical location of Egypt made it a receptacle for many influences.[44]
Writing was of political importance to the Egyptian empire, and literacy was concentrated among an educated elite of scribes.[45] Only people from certain backgrounds were allowed to train as scribes, in the service of temple, royal, and military authorities.
Most alphabetic writing systems presently in use either descended from Proto-Sinaitic—usually via the Phoenician alphabet—or were directly inspired by its descendants. In Italy, about 500 years separated the early Old Italic scripts from Plautus (c.750–250BCE), and in the case of the Germanic peoples, the corresponding time span is again similar, from the first Elder Futhark inscriptions to early texts like the Abrogans (c.200–750CE). These early abjads remained of marginal importance for several centuries, and it is only towards the end of the Bronze Age that forms of Proto-Sinaitic script split into the Proto-Canaanite alphabet (c.1400BCE), the undeciphered Byblos syllabary, and the South Arabian alphabet (c.1200 BCE). Proto-Canaanite, which was probably influenced by the Byblos syllabary, in turn inspired the Ugaritic alphabet (c.1300BCE).
Anatolian hieroglyphs are an indigenous script native to western Anatolia, used to record the Hieroglyphic Luwian language. It first appeared on Luwian royal seals from the 13th centuryBCE.[47]
The earliest attested Chinese writing comprise the body of inscriptions on oracle bones and bronze vessels dating to the Late Shang period (c.1200– c.1050BCE), with the earliest of these dated c.1250BCE.[48][49]
Cretan hieroglyphs are found on artifacts of Crete (2nd millenniumBCE, MM I to MM III, overlapping with Linear A from MM IIA at the earliest). Linear B, the writing system of the Mycenaean Greeks, has been deciphered while Linear A has yet to be deciphered. The sequence and the geographical spread of the three overlapping, but distinct, writing systems can be summarized as follows:[50]
Of several symbol systems used in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, the Maya script appears to be the best developed, and has been fully deciphered. The earliest inscriptions identifiable as Maya date to the 3rd centuryBCE, and writing was in continuous use from the 1st centuryCE until shortly after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century. Maya writing used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs.[51]
The sculpture depicts a scene where three soothsayers are interpreting to King Suddhodana the dream of Queen Maya, mother of Gautama Buddha. Below them is seated a scribe recording the interpretation–from Nagarjunakonda, 2nd centuryCE
The Phoenician alphabet is the continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet into the Iron Age; it in turn gave rise to the Aramaic and Greek alphabets. To date, most of the writing systems used throughout Afro-Eurasia descend from either Aramaic or Greek. The Greek alphabet was the first to introduce letters representing vowel sounds.[52] It and its descendant in the Latin alphabet gave rise to several European scripts in the first several centuriesCE, including the runic, Gothic, and Cyrillic alphabets. The Aramaic alphabet evolved into the Brahmic scripts of India, as well as the Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac abjads—with descendants spread as far as the Mongolian script. The South Arabian alphabet gave rise to the Ge'ez abugida.[53]
The history of the Greek alphabet began as early as the 8th centuryBCE, when the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet for their own use.[54] The letters of the Greek alphabet generally visually correspond to those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both came to be arranged using the same alphabetical order.[54] Those adapting the Phoenician system added three letters to the end of the series, called the "supplementals". Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as the Cumae alphabet, was used west of Athens and in southern Italy. The other variation, known as Eastern Greek, was used in present-day Turkey and by the Athenians, and eventually the rest of the world that spoke Greek adopted this variation. After first writing right to left, like the Phoenicians, the Greeks eventually chose to write from left to right. Occasionally however, the writer would start the next line where the previous line finished, so that the lines would read alternately left to right, then right to left, and so on. This is known as boustrophedon writing, which imitated the path of an ox-drawn plough, and was used until the 6th century.[55]
Greek is in turn the source for all the modern scripts of Europe. The most widespread descendant of Greek is the Latin script, named for the Latins, a central Italian people who came to dominate Europe with the rise of Rome. Around the 5th centuryBCE, the Romans adopted writing from the Etruscan civilization, who wrote in a number of Italic scripts derived from the western Greeks. Due to the cultural dominance of the Roman state, the other Old Italic scripts have not survived in any great quantity, and the Etruscan language is mostly lost.
Medieval era and modernity
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, the production and transmission of literature that had previously been widespread across the Roman world became largely confined to the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, where the primary literary languages were Greek and Persian respectively—though other languages such as Syriac and Coptic were also important.[56]
The spread of Islam in the 7th century brought about the rapid establishment of Arabic as a major literary language in much of the Mediterranean and Central Asia. Arabic and Persian quickly began to overshadow Greek's role as a language of scholarship. Arabic script was adopted as the primary script of the Persian language and the Old Turkic language. This script also heavily influenced the development of the cursive scripts of Greek, the Slavic languages, Latin, and other languages.[citation needed] The Arabic language also served to spread the Hindu–Arabic numeral system throughout Europe.[citation needed] By the 11th century, the city of Córdoba, Andalusia in what is now southern Spain had become one of the world's foremost intellectual centers, and was the site of the largest library in Europe.[57]
By the 14th century, the Renaissance in Europe led to a temporary revival of the importance of Greek, and a slow revival of Latin as a significant literary language[clarification needed][citation needed]. A similar though smaller emergence occurred in Eastern Europe, especially in Russia. At the same time Arabic and Persian began a slow decline in importance as the Islamic Golden Age ended. The revival of literacy development in Western Europe led to many innovations in the Latin alphabet and the diversification of the alphabet to codify the phonologies of the various languages.
The nature of writing has been constantly evolving, particularly due to the development of new technologies over the centuries. The pen, printing press, computer, and mobile phone are all technological developments which have altered what is written, and the medium through which the written word is produced.
The mediums, materials, and technologies used by literate societies for writing help determine how writing systems work, what writing is used for, and what social impact it has.[58] For example, the physical durability of the materials used directly determines what historical examples of writing have survived for later analysis: while bodies of inscriptions in stone, bone, or metal are attested from each ancient literate society, much manuscript culture is attested only indirectly.[59][60]
The common manuscript materials in Mesopotamia world were the tablet and the roll, the former probably having a Chaldean origin, the latter an Egyptian. The tablets of the Chaldeans are small pieces of clay, somewhat crudely shaped into a form resembling a pillow, and thickly inscribed with cuneiform characters. Similar use has been seen in hollow cylinders, or prisms of six or eight sides, formed of fine terracotta, sometimes glazed, on which the characters were traced with a small stylus, in some specimens so minutely as to require the aid of a magnifying glass.[61]
In Egypt the principal writing material was of quite a different sort. Wooden tablets are found pictured on the monuments, while papyrus was also used as early as the 4th millenniumBCE.[62] The papyrus reed grew chiefly in Lower Egypt and had various economic means for writing. The pith was taken out and divided by a pointed instrument into the thin pieces of which it is composed; it was then flattened by pressure, and the strips glued together, other strips being placed at right angles to them, so that a roll of any length might be manufactured. Writing seems to have become more widespread with the invention of papyrus in Egypt. That this material was in use in Egypt from a very early period is evidenced by still existing papyrus of the earliest Theban dynasties.[63]
As the papyrus, being in great demand, and exported to all parts of the world, became very costly, other materials were often used instead of it, among which is mentioned leather, a few leather mills of an early period having been found in the tombs.[61]Parchment, using sheepskins left after the wool was removed for cloth, was sometimes cheaper than papyrus, which had to be imported outside Egypt. With the invention of wood-pulp paper, the cost of writing material began a steady decline. Wood-pulp paper is still used today, and in recent times efforts have been made to improve bond strength of fibers. Two main areas of examination in this regard have been "dry strength of paper" and "wet web strength".[64] The former involves examination of the physical properties of the paper itself, while the latter involves using additives to improve strength.
Uses and implications
Trade and commerce
According to Denise Schmandt-Besserat, writing had its origins in the counting and cataloguing of agricultural produce, and then economic transactions involving the produce.[65] Government tax rolls followed thereafter. Written documents became essential for the accumulation and accounting of wealth by individuals, the state, and religious organizations as well as the transactions of trade, loans, inheritance, and documentation of ownership.[66] With such documentation and accounting larger accumulations of wealth became more possible, along with the power that accompanied wealth, most prominently to the benefit of royalty, the state, and religions. Contracts and loans supported the growth of long-distance international trade with accompanying networks for import and export, supporting the rise of capitalism.[67]Paper money (initially appearing in China in the 11th century)[68] and other financial instruments relied on writing, initially in the form of letters and then evolving into specialized genres, to explain the transactions and guarantees (from individuals, banks, or governments) of value inhering in the documents.[69] With the growth of economic activity in late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, sophisticated methods of accounting and calculating value emerged, with such calculations both carried out in writing and explained in manuals.[70] The creation of corporations then proliferated documents surrounding organization, management, the distribution of shares, and records management.[71]
Economic theory itself only began to be developed in the latter eighteenth century through the writings of such theorists as François Quesnay and Adam Smith. Even the concepts of an economy and a national economy were established through their texts and the texts of their colleagues.[72] Since then economics has developed as a field with many authors contributing texts to the professional literature, and governments collecting data, instituting policies and creating institutions to manage and advance their economies. Deirdre McCloskey has examined the rhetorical strategies and discursive construction of modern economic theory.[73][74][75] Graham Smart has examined in depth how the Bank of Canada uses writing to cooperatively produce policies based on economic data and then to communicate strategically with relevant publics.[76]
Law, governance, and journalism
Private legal documents for the sale of land appeared in Mesopotamia in the early 3rd millenniumBCE, not long after the initial appearance of cuneiform writing.[77] The first written legal codes followed shortly thereafter c.2100BCE with the most well known being the Code of Hammurabi, inscribed on stone stelae throughout Babylon.c.1750BCE.[78] While ancient Egypt did not have codified laws, legal decrees and private contracts did appear in the Old Kingdom c.2150BCE. The Torah—comprising the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—codified the laws of Ancient Israel. Many other codes were to follow in Greece and Rome, with Roman law to serve as a model for church canon law and secular law throughout much of Europe during later periods.[79][80]
In China, the earliest indications of written codifications of law or books of punishments are inscriptions on bronze vessels in 536BCE.[81] The earliest extant full set of laws dates back to the Qin and Han dynasties, which set out a full system of social control and governance, with criminal procedures and accountability for both government officials and citizens. These laws required complex reporting and documenting procedures to facilitate hierarchical supervision from the village up to the imperial center.[82]
While common law developed in a mostly oral environment in England after the Roman period, with the return of the church and the Norman conquest, customary law began to be inscribed as were precedents of the courts; however, many elements remained oral, with documents only memorializing public oaths, wills, land transfers, court judgments, and ceremonies. During the late medieval period, however, documents gained authority for agreements, transactions, and laws.[83]
Writing has been central to expanding many of the core functions of governance through law, regulation, taxation, and documentary surveillance of citizens; all dependent on growth of bureaucracy which elaborates and administers rules and policies and maintains records. These developments which rely on writing increase the power and extent of states.[2] At the same time writing has increased the ability of citizens to become informed about the operations of the state, to become more organized in expressing needs and concerns, to identify with regions and states, and to form constituencies with particular views and interests; the history of journalism is closely linked to citizen information, regional and national identity, and expression of interests. These changes have greatly influenced the nature of states, increasing the visibility of people and their views no matter what the form of governance is.
Extensive bureaucracies arose in the ancient Near East[84] and China[85][86] which relied on a literate class of scribes and bureaucrats. In the Ancient Near East this was carried out through the formation of scribal schools,[87] while in China this led to a series of written imperial examinations based on classic texts which in effect regulated education over millennia.[88] Literacy remained associated with rise in the government bureaucracy, and printing as it emerged was tightly controlled by the government, with vernacular texts only emerging later and then being limited in their range up through the early twentieth century and the fall of the Ching dynasty.[89] In ancient Greece and Rome, class distinctions of citizen and slave, wealthy and poor limited education and participation. In Medieval and early modern Europe church dominance of education, both before and for a time after the reformation, expressed the importance of religion in the control of the state and state bureaucracies.[90]
In Europe and its colonies in the Americas, the introduction of the printing press and decreasing cost of paper and printing allowed for greater access of ordinary citizens to gain information about the government and conditions in other regions within the jurisdictions.[91] The Reformation with an emphasis on individual reading of sacred texts, eventually increased the spread of literacy beyond the governing classes and opened the door to wider knowledge and criticism of government actions. Divisions in English society during the 16th century, the English Civil War of the 17th century, and the increased role of parliament that followed, along with the splitting of political religious control[92] were accompanied by pamphlet wars.
Newspaper publishing and journalism, having origins in commercial information, soon was to offer political information and was instrumental to the formation of a public sphere.[93][94] Newspapers were instrumental in the sharing of information, fostering discussion, and forming political identities in the American Revolution, and then the new nation. The circulation of newspapers also created urban, regional, and state identification in the latter nineteenth century and after. A focus on national news that followed telegraphy and the emergence of newspapers with national circulation along with scripted national radio and television news broadcasts also created horizons of attention through the 20th century, with both benefits and costs.[95]
Literary culture
Much of what is considered knowledge is inscribed in written text and is the result of communal processes of production, sharing, and evaluation among social groups and institutions bound together with the aim of producing and disseminating knowledge-bearing texts; the contemporary world identifies such social groups as disciplines and their products as disciplinary literatures. The invention of writing facilitated the sharing, comparing, criticizing, and evaluating of texts, resulting in knowledge becoming a more communal property across wider geographic and temporal domains. Religious texts formed the common knowledge of scriptural religions, and knowledge of those sacred scriptures became the focus of institutions of religious belief, interpretation, and schooling.[96]
Scholars have disagreed concerning when written record-keeping became more like literature, but the oldest surviving literary texts date from a full millennium after the invention of writing. The earliest literary author known by name is Enheduanna, who is credited as the author of a number of works of Sumerian literature, including Exaltation of Inanna, in the Sumerian language during the 24th centuryBCE.[97][98] The next earliest named author is Ptahhotep, who is credited with authoring The Maxims of Ptahhotep, an instructional book for young men in Egyptian composed in the 23rd centuryBCE.[99] The Epic of Gilgamesh is a notable early poem, but it can also be seen as a political glorification of the historical King Gilgamesh of Sumer whose natural and supernatural accomplishments are recounted.
The identification of sacred religious texts codified distinct belief systems, and became the basis of the modern concept of religion.[2] The reproduction and spread of these texts became associated with these scriptural religions and their spread, and thus were central to proselytizing.[2] These sacred books created obligations of believers to read, or to follow the teachings of priests charged with the reading, interpretation and application of these texts. Well-known examples of such scriptures are the Torah, the Bible, Quran, Vedas, Bhagavad Gita, and Sutras, but there are far more religious texts through the histories of different religions with many still in current use. These texts, because of their spread, tended to foster generalized guides for moral and ethical behavior, at least for all members of the religious community, but often these guidelines were considered applicable to all humans, as in the Ten Commandments.
Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and Mesoamerica
In Mesopotamia and Egypt, scribes became important for roles beyond the initiating roles in the economy, governance and law. They became the producers and stewards of astronomy and calendars, divination, and literary culture. Schools developed in tablet houses, which also archived repositories of knowledge.[100] In ancient India, the Brahman caste became stewards of texts that aggregated and codified oral knowledge.[101] Those texts then became the authoritative basis for a continuing tradition of oral education. A case in point is the work of Pāṇini the linguist, who analyzed and codified knowledge of Sanskrit syntax, prosody, and grammar. Mathematics, astronomy, and medicine were also subjects of classic Indian learning and were codified in classic texts.[102] Less is known about Mayan, Aztec, and other Mesoamerican learning because of the destruction of texts by the conquistadors, but it is known that scribes were revered, elite children attended schools, and the study of astronomy, map making, historical chronicles, and genealogy flourished.[103][104]
China
In China, after the Qin dynasty attempted to remove all traces of the competing Confucian tradition, the Han dynasty made philological knowledge the qualification for the government bureaucracy, so as to restore knowledge that was in danger of vanishing. The imperial examination system for the civil service functioned for two millennia, and consisted of a written exam based on knowledge of classical texts. To support students obtaining government positions through the written examination, schools focused on those same texts and the associated philological knowledge.[88] These texts covered philosophical, religious, legal, astronomical, hydrological, mathematical, military, and medical knowledge.[105]Printing as it emerged largely served the knowledge needs of the bureaucracy and the monastery, with substantial vernacular printing only emerging around the 15th century.[89]
Ancient Greece and Rome
While Socrates thought writing an inferior means of transmission of learning (recounted in the Phaedrus), we know of his works through Plato's written accounts of his dialogues. Havelock also connects the philosophical work of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle with literacy, as it enabled the development of critical thinking via the analysis of permanent texts written both by the author and their peers.[106][107][108]Aristotle wrote treatises and lectures which were the core of education at the Lyceum, along with the may volumes collected in the Lyceum's library. The Stoics and Epicureans also wrote and taught during the same period in Athens, although we now have only fragments of their works.
Greek writers were the founding writers of many other fields of knowledge. Herodotus and Thucydides writing during the 5th centuryBCE in Athens are considered the founders of history, transforming genealogy and mythic accounts into systematic investigations of events. Thucydides developed a more critical, neutral history through the examination of documents, transcription of speeches, and interviews. Hippocrates during the same period authored several major works of medicine codifying and advancing the knowledge of this field. In the 2nd centuryCE, the Greek physician Galen went to Rome where he wrote numerous works that dominated European medicine through the Renaissance. Hellenized writers in Egypt also produced compendia of knowledge using the resources of the great library at Alexandria, such as Euclid's Elements, which remains a standard reference work in geometry. Ptolemy's Almagest, an astronomy treatise, was used throughout the Middle Ages.
Roman scholars continued the practice of writing compendia of knowledge, including Varro, Pliny the Elder, and Strabo. While much of Roman accomplishment was in material culture of construction, Vitruvius documented much of the contemporary practice to influence design until today. Agriculture also became an important area for manuals, such as Palladius' compendium. Numerous manuals of rhetoric and rhetorical education that were to influence future generations also appeared, such as the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero's De Oratore and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria.
Islamic world
With the fall of Rome, the Middle East became the crossroads for learning, with knowledge bearing texts from the West and East meeting in Constantinople, Damascus, and then Baghdad. The House of Wisdom) with a large library was founded, where Greek works of medicine, philosophy, mathematics and astronomy were translated into Arabic, along with Indian works on mathematics and therapeutics.[109] To these texts, philosophers such as Al-Kindi and Avicenna and astronomers such as Al-Farghani made new contributions. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi authored the first work on algebra, drawing on both Greek and Indian resources. The centrality of the Quran in Islam also led to growth of Arabic linguistics.[110] From Baghdad, knowledge and texts were to flow back to South Asia and down through Africa, with a large collection of books and an educational center around the Sankhore Mosque in Timbuktu, the seat of the Songhai Empire. During this period the deposed Abbasid Caliphate moved its seat of power and learning to Córdoba, now in Spain, where they founded a major library which reintroduced many of the classic texts back into Europe along with texts of Arab learning.
Early universities in Europe
The reintroduction of classical texts into Europe through the library and intercultural intellectual culture in Córdoba, including works of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, along with Arabic texts such as by Avicenna and Al-Kharazami created a need for interpretation, lectures, and scholarship to make those works more accessible to scholars in monasteries and urban centers. During the twelfth century universities emerged from these clusters of scholars in Italy at Bologna; in Spain at Salamanca, in France at Paris and in England at Oxford.[111] By 1500, there were at least sixty universities throughout Europe[112] enrolling at least 750,000 students.[113] Each of the four faculties—liberal arts, theology, law, and medicine—was oriented around the transmission of classical texts, rather than the production of fresh knowledge beyond lectures and commentaries. This form of scholastic education continued well into the 17th century in some locations and disciplines.[112][114][115][116][117]
Printing in Europe
Johannes Gutenberg's European introduction of the moveable type printing pressc.1450 created new opportunities for the production and widespread distribution of books, fostering much new writing, with particular consequences for the development of knowledge, as documented by Elizabeth Eisenstein.[118] The production and distribution of knowledge was no longer tied to monasteries or universities with their libraries and collections of scribal copies. In the ensuing centuries a politically and increasingly religiously divided Europe, no single authority was able to censor or control the production of books. While universities remained attached to disseminating traditional texts, publishing houses became the new centers of knowledge production, and publishing houses in different jurisdictions led to a diversity of ideas becoming available as books moved across borders and scholars came to see themselves as citizens of the Republic of Letters.[119]
The comparison of multiple editions of traditional texts led to improved textual scholarship.[120] The ability to share and compare results from many regions and enlist more people into the production of science soon led to the development of early modern science.[118] Books of medicine began to incorporate observations from contemporary surgery and dissections, including printed plates providing graphic displays, to improve knowledge of anatomy.[121] With many copies of traditional books and new books appearing, debates arose over the value of each in what became known as the "battle of the books".[122] Maps and discoveries of exploration and colonization also were recorded in books and governmental records,[123] often with the purpose of economic exploitation as in the General Archive of the Indies in Seville but also to satisfy curiosity about the world.[124]
Printing also made possible the invention and development of scientific journals, with the Journal des sçavans appearing in France and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in England, both in 1665.[125] Over the years, these journals proliferated and became the basis of disciplines and disciplinary literature.[126] Genres reporting experiments and other scientific observations and theories developed over the ensuing centuries to produce modern practices of disciplinary publication with the extensive intertexts which represent the collective pursuits of disciplinary knowledge. The availability of scientific and disciplinary books and journals also facilitated the development of modern practices of scientific reference and citation. These developments from the impact of printing on the growth of knowledge contributed to the Scientific Revolution, science in the Renaissance and during the Enlightenment.
Modern academia
In the 18th century, dissident Scottish and English dissident universities began offering practical instruction in rhetoric and writing to enable non-elite students to influence contemporary events. Only in the 19th century did the universities in some countries begin making place for the writing of new knowledge, turning them in the ensuing years from primarily disseminating knowledge through the reading of classical texts to becoming institutions devoted to both reading and writing. The creation of research seminars and the associated seminar papers in history and philology in German universities were a significant starting point for the reform of the university.[127] Professorships in philology, history, economy, theology, psychology, sociology, mathematics and the sciences were to emerge over the century, and the German model of disciplinary research university was to influence the organization of universities in England and the United States, with another model developing in France. Both emphasized production of new knowledge by faculty and acquisition thereof by students. In elite British universities, writing instruction was supported by the tutorial system with weekly writing by students for their tutors, while in the United States regular courses in writing were often required starting in the late 19th century, with writing across the curriculum becoming an increasing focus, particularly towards the end of the 20th century.
Psychological implications
Walter J. Ong, Jack Goody, and Eric A. Havelock were among the earliest to systematically argue for the psychological and intellectual consequences of literacy. Ong argued that the introduction of writing changed the form of human consciousness from sensing the immediacy of the spoken word to the critical distance and systematization of words, which could be graphically displayed and ordered,[128][129] such as in the works of Petrus Ramus.[130] Havelock attributed the emergence of Greek philosophic thought to the use of the written word which allowed the comparison of beliefs and belief systems and the critical examination of concepts.[131][132] Jack Goody argued that written language fostered such practices as categorization, making lists, following formulas, developing recipes and prescriptions, and ultimately making and recording experiments. These practices changed the intellectual and psychological orientation of those who engaged with them.[133][134]
While recognizing the possibilities of all these psychological and intellectual changes that accompanied these literate practices, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole argued that these changes did not come universally or automatically with literacy, but rather were dependent on the social uses made of literacy in their local contexts.[135] They carried out field observation and experiments among the Vai people of West Africa, for whom the psychological impacts of literacy vary due to the three different contexts in which locals learn to read and write the Vai language, English, and Arabic—practical skills, secular education, and religious education, respectively. European literacy was associated with European-style schooling, and fostered among other things syllogistic reasoning and logical problem solving. Arabic literacy was associated with the religious training of madrasas and fostered, among other things, heightened rote memory. Literacy in the written forms of Vai associated with daily practices of making requests and explaining tasks, increased anticipation of audience knowledge and needs along with rebus solving (as the written language used rebus-like icons).
An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographies assign symbols to words, morphemes, or other semantic units.
Greek is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy, southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, Caucasus, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.
Writing is the act of creating a persistent representation of human language. A writing system uses a set of symbols and rules to encode aspects of spoken language, such as its lexicon and syntax. However, written language may take on characteristics distinct from those of any spoken language.
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system. Moreover, owing in large part to the Greek and Aramaic scripts that descended from Phoenician, the majority of the world's living writing systems are descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs—most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts through Greek, and possibly the Arabic and Brahmic scripts through Aramaic.
Calligraphy is a visual art related to writing. It is the design and execution of lettering with a pen, ink brush, or other writing instrument. Contemporary calligraphic practice can be defined as "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious, and skillful manner".
A scribe is a person who serves as a professional copyist, especially one who made copies of manuscripts before the invention of automatic printing.
The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, and attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. In the history of writing systems, the Phoenician script also marked the first to have a fixed writing direction—while previous systems were multi-directional, Phoenician was written horizontally, from right to left. It developed directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during the Late Bronze Age, which was derived in turn from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention. Over time, the function, style, and means of writing characters have evolved greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the units of meaning in a language. Writing a language's entire vocabulary requires thousands of different characters. Characters are created according to several different principles, where aspects of both shape and pronunciation may be used to indicate the character's meaning.
Hieratic is the name given to a cursive writing system used for Ancient Egyptian and the principal script used to write that language from its development in the third millennium BCE until the rise of Demotic in the mid-first millennium BCE. It was primarily written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus.
The Ugaritic writing system is a cuneiform abjad with syllabic elements used from around either 1400 BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language. It was discovered in Ugarit, modern Ras Al Shamra, Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages, particularly Hurrian, were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, although not elsewhere.
A written language is the representation of a language by means of writing. This involves the use of visual symbols, known as graphemes, to represent linguistic units such as phonemes, syllables, morphemes, or words. However, written language is not merely spoken or signed language written down, though it can approximate that. Instead, it is a separate system with its own norms, structures, and stylistic conventions, and it often evolves differently than its corresponding spoken or signed language.
Brahmi is a writing system from ancient India that appeared as a fully developed script in the 3rd century BCE. Its descendants, the Brahmic scripts, continue to be used today across South and Southeastern Asia.
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to have developed distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Ionic-based Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard throughout the Greek-speaking world and is the version that is still used for Greek writing today.
The Proto-Sinaitic script is a Middle Bronze Age writing system known from a small corpus of about 30-40 inscriptions and fragments from Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as two inscriptions from Wadi el-Hol in Middle Egypt. Together with about 20 known Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, it is also known as Early Alphabetic, i.e. the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet, which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet. According to common theory, Canaanites or Hyksos who spoke a Canaanite language repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script.
The history of the alphabet goes back to the consonantal writing system used to write Semitic languages in the Levant during the 2nd millennium BCE. Nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic script. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and South Asia, mainly through Phoenician and the closely related Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, and later Aramaic and the Nabatean—derived from the Aramaic alphabet and developed into the Arabic alphabet—five closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE.
The history of communication technologies have evolved in tandem with shifts in political and economic systems, and by extension, systems of power. Communication can range from very subtle processes of exchange to full conversations and mass communication. The history of communication itself can be traced back since the origin of speech circa 100,000 BCE. The use of technology in communication may be considered since the first use of symbols about 30,000 years BCE. Among the symbols used, there are cave paintings, petroglyphs, pictograms and ideograms. Writing was a major innovation, as well as printing technology and, more recently, telecommunications and the Internet.
The writing systems used in ancient Egypt were deciphered in the early nineteenth century through the work of several European scholars, especially Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young. Ancient Egyptian forms of writing, which included the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, as the Coptic alphabet was increasingly used in their place. Later generations' knowledge of the older scripts was based on the work of Greek and Roman authors whose understanding was faulty. It was thus widely believed that Egyptian scripts were exclusively ideographic, representing ideas rather than sounds. Some attempts at decipherment by Islamic and European scholars in the Middle Ages and early modern times acknowledged the script might have a phonetic component, but perception of hieroglyphs as purely ideographic hampered efforts to understand them as late as the eighteenth century.
Imperial Aramaic is a linguistic term, coined by modern scholars in order to designate a specific historical variety of Aramaic language. The term is polysemic, with two distinctive meanings, wider (sociolinguistic) and narrower (dialectological). Since most surviving examples of the language have been found in Egypt, the language is also referred to as Egyptian Aramaic.
A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a script, as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing was invented during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each writing system invented without prior knowledge of writing gradually evolved from a system of proto-writing that included a small number of ideographs, which were not fully capable of encoding spoken language, and lacked the ability to express a broad range of ideas.
Lipi means 'writing, letters, alphabet', and contextually refers to scripts, the art or manner of writing, or in modified form such as lipī to painting, decorating or anointing a surface to express something.
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Further reading
Ferrara, Silvia (2022) [2019]. The Greatest invention: a history of the world in nine mysterious scripts. Translated by Portnowitz, Todd. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ISBN978-0-374-60162-1.
Lambert, J. L. F. (2014). Termcraft: The Emergence of Terminology Science from the Vin ANS and Sumerians to Aristotle. ISBN978-1-4602-1665-1.
Voogt, Alexander J. de; Quack, Joachim Friedrich, eds. (2012). The Idea of Writing: Writing Across Borders. Leiden: Brill. ISBN978-90-04-21545-0.
Powell, Barry B. (2009). Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN978-1-4051-6256-2.
Hoffman, Joel (2004). In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. New York University Press. ISBN978-0-8147-3654-8.
Glassner, Jean-Jacques (2003). The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer. Translated by Bahrani, Zainab; Van de Mieroop, Marc. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN978-0-8018-7389-8.
Robinson, Andrew (2000) [1995]. The Story of Writing. London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN978-0-500-28156-7.
Nissen, Hans Jörg; Damerow, Peter; Englund, Robert K. (1993). Archaic bookkeeping: early writing and techniques of economic administration in the ancient Near East. University of Chicago Press. ISBN978-0-226-58659-5.
Saggs, Henry W. F. (1989). Civilization before Greece and Rome. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN978-0-300-05031-8.
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