History of Writing

History of writing: Part 1

In prehistoric times, in order to communicate or leave a trace of memory, humanoids used to engrave or paint on cave walls, or craft on pottery. However when Homo sapiens started to become more civilized they started using symbols, anagrams, in order to have communication or to keep records.Earliest studies shows that writing started in Mesopotamian.

The earliest written records are these tablets:

This is an early Sumerian pictograph tablet, as one can see the tablet is constructed by grid work, and symbols of seeds, plants, tools and other information. The writing style evolved over centuries. They later developed a sense of writing the pictographs left to right, and from top to bottom, this had made it easier to follow, this was in 2800bce. Three hundred years later, by replacing the current stylus into a sharp-pointed triangle-tipped one, had made it easier to write. This tool pushed into the clay instead of being dragged through its surface.

Cuneiform became rebus writing, which is pictures or pictographs that represent words and syllables, with very similar or the same sound as the object presented. Early Sumerian artists had mixed writing and images together. The “Blau” monument could be the eldest extant artifact that combines both words and pictures on the same surface. Mesopotamians had libraries which had contained thousands of tablets on religion, history, law, mathematics, medicine and astronomy. There was also the beginning of literature as poetry, epics, myths and legends on the clay tablets.  After the fall of Mesopotamia the gift of writing that they provided us went to the Egyptians and Phoenicians. The Egyptians had evolved a complex writing based on pictographs (hieroglyphs), whilst the Phoenicians replaced the complexity of the cuneiform with simple phonetic signs.

The Blau

Reference to information and images:

Philip B.Meggs, Alston W.Purvis Meggs’ History of graphic design 5^th Edition, New Jersey.

Personal comment:I found the way Mesopotamian civilization communicated with each other very interesting, and also very well crafted, especially at those times to engrave meaning on tablet, a very impressive start in ways to communicate. It was a start, they even depicted law, religion, mathematics plenty other things on these clay pieces without this method of “writing” the Egyptians and Phoenicians would have never evolved their own ways of writing (or would have developed it much later,which possibly means we would not have any way to communicate verbally).