Writing

I. II. III. Origin Types of Writings Materials Writing vs Language 25,000-30,000 years BP, humans were painting pictures on cave walls. Whether these pictures were telling a "story" or represented some type of "spirit house" or ritual exercise is not known. 9,000 years ago with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to more permanent agrarian encampments count ones property We see the first evidence for this with incised "counting tokens" the crystallization of the Sumerian culture the tokens began to be symbols that could be impressed or inscribed in clay to represent a record of land, grain or cattle written language was beginning to develop. the tokens began to be symbols that could be impressed or inscribed in clay to represent a record of land, grain or cattle written language was beginning to develop. of Uruk in Mesopotamia Akkadian Mesopotamia and Akkadian became the first Semitic language and would be used by the Babylonians and Assyrians. The Akkadian characters continued to represent syllables with defined vowels 4th millennium BC- Egypt next step toward the development of an alphabet, One of the earliest examples is the name of NAR-MER, either the first or second Pharoah of an united Egypt in 3100 BCE. Egyptian vs Akkadian no definitive vowels. Some hieroglyphs were biliteral, some triliteral. Syllabic system Acrophones influenced Proto-Canaanite/Proto-Sinaiti
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 a pictograph to stand for the first sound in the word it stood for is called acrophony and was the first step in the development of an ALPHABET or the "One Sign-One sound" system of writing Phoenician Alphabet was adopted by the early Greeks Phoenician the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek scripts

Aramaic led to Arabic the scripts in India. Origin of Writing mythological/ way to differentiate people Darwins theory of evolution/ Europe as the pinnacle of civilization, relegated the rest of the world as primitive Todays theory writing appeared in different places independently Darwins opinion separate writing systems into functional types, which is still valid and scientific. However, they assigned "evolved-ness" to each group, with alphabet being the most evolved, and inherently the best system. Logographic systems like Chinese are considered primitive, archaic, and much inferior, and syllabic systems fall somewhere in between. It broke down thanks to Chinese writing Todays theory writing was invented independently in at least three places, Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica. Recent discoveries might also provide evidence that writing was invented in Egypt and Indus independently of Mesopotamia. Mythological In ancient Egypt to the god Thoth (Dhwty in Egyptian), who was not only the scribe and historian of the gods but also kept the calendar and invented art and science. In some Egyptian myths, Thoth is also portrayed as the creator of speech and possessing the power to transform speech into material objects. This ties in closely with the Egyptian belief that in order for a person to achieve immortality his or her name must be spoken or inscribed somewhere forever. In Mesopotamia among the Sumerians the god Enlil was the creator of writing. Later during Assyrian, and Babylonian periods, the god Nabu was credited as the inventor of writing and scribe of the gods. And similar to Thoth, Mesopotamian scribal gods also exhibit the power of creation via divine speech. In ancient Egypt to the god Thoth (Dhwty in Egyptian), who was not only the scribe and historian of the gods but also kept the calendar and invented art and science. In some Egyptian myths,
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Thoth is also portrayed as the creator of speech and possessing the power to transform speech into material objects. This ties in closely with the Egyptian belief that in order for a person to achieve immortality his or her name must be spoken or inscribed somewhere forever. In Mesopotamia among the Sumerians the god Enlil was the creator of writing. Later during Assyrian, and Babylonian periods, the god Nabu was credited as the inventor of writing and scribe of the gods. And similar to Thoth, Mesopotamian scribal gods also exhibit the power of creation via divine speech In China the invention of writing was not attributed to a deity but instead to a ancient sage named Ts'ang Chieh, who was a minister in the court of the legendary Huang Ti (Yellow Emperor). While not divine, this invention occurred in mythological times, and served as a communication tool between heaven TYPES OF SYSTEMS Logographic A system of this kind uses a tremendous number of signs, each to represent a morpheme. a logogram, a sign in a logographic system, may represent a word, or part of a word (like a suffix to denote a plural noun Logophonetic there are two major types of signs, ones denoting morphemes and ones denoting Consonantal Consonantal alphabets are also known as abjads, and are all descendents of the ProtoSinaitic script. In a "pure" consonantal alphabet, vowels are not written Syllabic In a syllabic writing system, the overwhelming number of signs are used in pairs forming syllables