The prehistory of writing goes back to the primitive communal system. It was then that people began to develop the skills to convey a variety of messages using drawings. A little later, a person came to the convenience of depicting concepts in writing in the form of combinations of sounds, which, in turn, denoted letters. This is how the ancient alphabets appeared. Where and how was the first word recorded? What is the disadvantage of the ancient alphabet and how did you manage to overcome it? Let's try to figure it out…
Sumerian cuneiform
The first system of written characters, according to historians, arose about five and a half thousand years ago in the agricultural settlements of the Sumerians, a people who lived between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The writing method, called "cuneiform", consisted of squeezing characters on a rectangularwet clay tile with a sharpened stick held at a slight angle. Next, the tiles were dried in the sun or fired in a kiln.
Using cuneiform signs, the Sumerians conveyed the meaning of concepts in a stylized form. In addition, they also had designations for some abstract quantities ("light", "time"). In total, there were more than two thousand signs of picture writing. However, there were not enough of them to display the meaning of complex concepts, so the Sumerians introduced the phonetic principle. A sign that was associated with a certain sound could be used to denote another object by means of that sound. This principle formed the basis of the writing of our days.
Hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt
Writing in Egypt originated in the fourth millennium BC. Initially, the records were made using conditional images - the ancient alphabets appeared in the next stage.
Ancient Egyptian writing united several varieties:
- hieroglyphic - the earliest form of writing of the Egyptians. It was based on the use of pictures, or pictograms; predominantly religious texts were compiled in this way;
- hieratic - a simplified form of hieroglyphic writing. It was a kind of "cursive script", convenient for maintaining legal and business documents;
- demotic - a much later and more convenient type of business cursive, the icons of which bear little resemblance to the formerhieroglyphs.
However, in all cases of Egyptian writing, there was a common feature in which one single sign could mean both a whole concept, a syllable, and a separate sound. In addition, there were also special icons - determinatives, which served for additional explanations of the meanings of a particular image.
With the help of hieroglyphs, as a rule, monumental inscriptions were carved on stones. Hieratic and demotic were written on reed papyrus with ink.
Phoenicia or Seir: who first invented the alphabet
The greatest achievement in the development of writing was the invention of the first alphabet. According to the prevailing theory, its creators were the Phoenicians. For the convenience of trading with peoples who spoke different languages, for the first time in the 11th-10th centuries BC, they implemented an alpha-sound system for recording concepts.
However, there is a second version of the origin of the first alphabet. His invention is attributed to the inhabitants of Seir, a desert area located south of the Dead Sea. It is known that the Seirs spoke their own language. Back in the 19th century BC, the Egyptians, who equipped expeditions to the Sinai Peninsula, hired them to increase the number of their troops. It is believed that the records made by the Seir overseers and foremen and received by the Egyptians in the form of reports eventually led to the emergence of the alphabet. Proponents of this theory claim that the earliest records using the characters of the alphabet were made by the inhabitants of Seir.
Phoenician letters. What is the disadvantage of the ancient alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet includes twenty-two letters. Some signs were borrowed from already existing writing systems: Egyptian, Cretan, Babylonian. All letters of the ancient alphabet were depicted as a conditional diagram of an object, the name of which began with the sound corresponding to the given letter. There was a principle of matching the style of each letter, its pronunciation and name. It is known that the Phoenicians wrote from right to left.
What is the disadvantage of the ancient alphabet? First of all, in the fact that he depicted only consonants and semivowels. Vowels were simply omitted when writing.
Subsequently, the ancient Phoenician alphabet became the basis on which all other alphabetic-sound systems arose, including those in European countries.
Greek is one of the oldest living written languages
The starting point for the development of all Western alphabets was the writing of the ancient Greeks. By 403 BC, they invented a writing system called "Ionic writing". The Greek alphabet originally had twenty-four letters. The first inscriptions in this language discovered by archaeologists were carved on stone or painted on ceramic objects.
What is the disadvantage of the ancient Greek alphabet? The very first inscriptions that have come down to us were characterized by letters that have strict geometric shapes and the same exact distance.between strings and individual characters.
Later texts, already handwritten, are characterized by more rounded letters, as well as continuous spelling of words. Over time, two types of lettering developed in the Greek letter - uppercase and lowercase.
Later the Greek alphabet was borrowed by the Romans. They left many of his letters unchanged and added a number of their own to them. Today, the Roman (Latin) alphabet is widely used, during this time it has changed very little.
