the importance of writing, part one

History and RulesPart One

A Brief History of WritingTrue writing has been around since circa 3,500 BCE, but

before there was writing, there was prewriting.Most prewriting took the form of pictographs or

petroglyphs. Pictographs and petroglyphs are pictorial symbols; an image corresponds to a specific material object—a word or a idea.

For example, a picture of the sun represented the sun (duh).

Pictographs are painted images

Fremont Culture, Utah (n.d.)

Petroglyphs are pictographs cut into stone.Navaho petroglyphs of the Yei, holy spirits holding pine boughs.

Pictographs evolved into more sophisticated pictorial symbols. The image for “sun” would be representative of not only the sun disk, but for light in general or even enlightenment.

Lately, some pictographs found in China point to an earlier system of writing there than was previously thought.

Early WritingThe first systems of writing of which we are aware are

Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform, and hieroglyphs from the Harappa civilization in the Indus Valley.

Scholars have gone back and forth on who developed the first form of writing—Egypt or Sumeria. At the present, Egypt is ahead.

Keep in mind, these early forms are not alphabets , though some symbols do represent a sound.

The earliest Egyptian writing was pictorial. These are from the realm of the Scorpion King, circa 3400 and 3200 BCE.

Later hieroglyphic forms.

SumerianSumerian writing is much different from Egyptian writing.

The oldest piece of literature in the world is The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in Sumerian and Babylonian cuneiform.

Harappa, Indus ValleyThis type of writing has not been translated.

Early writing was not to record literature but served utilitarian purposes such as recording taxes, etc.

Literature was not recorded until much later in the history of writing.

Rosetta StoneWe had no idea how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, found in the nineteenth century. The stone has the same inscription written in hieroglyphs, Coptic Egyptian, and Greek (we knew the last two).

CopticLater Egyptian writing.

GreekThe Greek invented the first alphabet—our alphabet is based on the Greek.

RunesRunes are a type of alphabet. The Norse used runes

—Anglo-Saxons were originally a Teutonic tribe.Futhark--Norse

Anglo-SaxonThe Anglo-Saxons wrote and spoke Old English—which is based on Old Norse—and which is a foreign language to modern speakers of English.

Middle EnglishThe language of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

Modern EnglishModern English is divided into several sections. One is Early Modern English, the language of the King James Version of the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays.

Those who do not remember history . . .Why is it important to know the history of writing?It gives us a sense of continuity in that we can see how

our present writing evolved.The rules of modern grammar, syntax, spelling, etc., have

their roots in the past—in order to understand the rules, it is good to know from where they came.