Writing is an integral part of human culture and a form of language existence. The emergence of writing is the most important milestone in the history of mankind, on which the formation of modern culture and language directly depended.
Instructions
Step 1
In the primitive era, mankind did not know writing, and all cultural material was transmitted orally. For the first time, the rudiments of writing arose in advanced ancient civilizations: the most ancient example of writing is considered to be the cuneiform script of the Sumerian-Akkadian civilization, which appeared in Mesopotamia at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. With the help of cuneiform writing, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia depicted pictograms on clay tablets, endowed with a certain meaning. This type of writing was widely used in several languages - Hittite, Akkadian, Sumerian, Persian. Ancient Persian cuneiform was first deciphered by German scientists at the beginning of the 19th century, based on the inscriptions of the ruling Achaemenid dynasty.
Step 2
The earliest cuneiform tablets were compiled by the priests of Mesopotamian temples. With the help of pictograms, the priests kept records of the harvested harvest and used cuneiform for economic purposes. Gradually, the number of pictograms increased, the semantic content of cuneiform expanded, and the writing technique became more complicated. If at first the pictograms depicted specific objects or phenomena, then later the letter in Mesopotamia became verbal and syllabic. The pictograms depicted syllables, and the meaning of the written phrase changed from their different combinations.
Step 3
Another cradle of writing in world culture is Ancient Egypt. Egyptian hieroglyphs were first deciphered at the beginning of the 19th century by Jean François Champollion, who studied the Rosetta stone found in Egypt with inscriptions in three languages carved on it. The scientist correlated the ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian texts, which made it possible for the first time in the history of mankind to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Egyptologists claim that Egyptian writing is the same age as Mesopotamian cuneiform. Both types of ancient writing emerged almost simultaneously at the turn of the IV-III millennium BC.
