Writing is the visual counterpart of speech. While speech can be forgotten and hard to keep track of, writing is the opposite. Once written it remains despite memory or passage of time. Writing may have come to be because priests and clergy in ancient Mesopotamia needed ways to record and keep track of things. They used pictographic drawings on tablets along with very simple tallies in the form of the ten fingers of the human hand. The questions Mesopotamians needed answers to are listed in the book as: “who delivered their taxes in the form of crops? How much food was stored, and was it adequate to meet community needs before the next harvest?” These questions weren’t just pertinent to Mesopotamia, they also applied to other early civilizations
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It consisted of pictograms that showed objects and creatures. Two parts brought the language together, phonograms denoting sounds, and determinatives to identify categories, both of which when combined designated actual ideas. Moving away from pictographs that represented their literal depiction, Sui generis was a writing script developed in Byblos that used pictographs that didn’t have any pictorial meaning whatsoever. Written in 2000 BCE this script has over a hundred characters and is one of the first languages that approached the idea of an alphabet. In 1500 BCE Semitic workers in turquoise mines created their own version of hieroglyphics called Sinaitic script. Their glyphs used hieroglyphs as symbols to depict sounds instead of just literally describing something by picture. Around the same time the language evolved again from the Semitic alphabet called Ras Shamra. It had only a fraction of the characters, 30 wedge shaped marks, which represented sounds. Also around 1500 BCE Phoenician writing was used and exported which used 22 abstract characters for their alphabet. The book credits the North Semitic writing with the beginnings of the alphabet but also claims it may have descended from an earlier lost prototype of some
It consisted of pictograms that showed objects and creatures. Two parts brought the language together, phonograms denoting sounds, and determinatives to identify categories, both of which when combined designated actual ideas. Moving away from pictographs that represented their literal depiction, Sui generis was a writing script developed in Byblos that used pictographs that didn’t have any pictorial meaning whatsoever. Written in 2000 BCE this script has over a hundred characters and is one of the first languages that approached the idea of an alphabet. In 1500 BCE Semitic workers in turquoise mines created their own version of hieroglyphics called Sinaitic script. Their glyphs used hieroglyphs as symbols to depict sounds instead of just literally describing something by picture. Around the same time the language evolved again from the Semitic alphabet called Ras Shamra. It had only a fraction of the characters, 30 wedge shaped marks, which represented sounds. Also around 1500 BCE Phoenician writing was used and exported which used 22 abstract characters for their alphabet. The book credits the North Semitic writing with the beginnings of the alphabet but also claims it may have descended from an earlier lost prototype of some