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Script Writing Herodotus Egyptian Hieroglyphs Hieroglyph Greek

Cuneiform was the first system of writing developed by the ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE. It used wedge-shaped impressions pressed into clay to represent words and phonetic sounds and was adopted by subsequent Mesopotamian civilizations. The name "cuneiform" comes from the Latin word for wedge. It remained in use until being replaced by alphabetic scripts after 100 BCE.

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Script Writing Herodotus Egyptian Hieroglyphs Hieroglyph Greek

Cuneiform was the first system of writing developed by the ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE. It used wedge-shaped impressions pressed into clay to represent words and phonetic sounds and was adopted by subsequent Mesopotamian civilizations. The name "cuneiform" comes from the Latin word for wedge. It remained in use until being replaced by alphabetic scripts after 100 BCE.

Uploaded by

Ayver Guimai
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Cuneiform is a system of writing first developed by the ancient Sumerians of

Mesopotamia c. 3500-3000 BCE. It is considered the most significant among the


many cultural contributions of the Sumerians and the greatest among those of the
Sumerian city of Uruk which advanced the writing of cuneiform c. 3200 BCE. The
name comes from the Latin word cuneus for 'wedge' owing to the wedge-shaped
style of writing. In cuneiform, a carefully cut writing implement known as a stylus is
pressed into soft clay to produce wedge-like impressions that represent word-signs
(pictographs) and, later, phonograms or `word-concepts' (closer to a modern day
understanding of a `word'). All of the great Mesopotamian civilizations used
cuneiform (the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Elamites, Hatti, Hittites,
Assyrians, Hurrians and others) until it was abandoned in favour of the alphabetic
script at some point after 100 BCE.

The Egyptian hieroglyphic script was one of the writing systems used by ancient Egyptians to
represent their language. Because of their pictorial elegance, Herodotus and other important
Greeks believed that Egyptian hieroglyphs were something sacred, so they referred to them as
holy writing. Thus, the word hieroglyph comes from the Greek hiero holy and glypho
writing. In the ancient Egyptian language, hieroglyphs were called medu netjer, the gods
words as it was believed that writing was an invention of the gods.
The script was composed of three basic types of signs: logograms, representing words;
phonograms, representing sounds; and determinatives, placed at the end of the word to help
clarify its meaning. As a result, the number of signs used by the Egyptians was much higher
compared to alphabetical systems, with over a thousand different hieroglyphs in use initially and
later reduced to about 750 during the Middle Kingdom (2055-1650 BCE).

Old Stone Age Rock Painting. 3. The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period
during which stone was widely used to make implements with a sharp edge, a
point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted roughly 3.4 million years, and
ended between 6000 BCE and 2000 BCE with the advent of metalworking.

The Greek alphabet is the writing system developed in Greece which first appears in the
archaeological record during the 8th century BCE. This was not the first writing system that was
used to write Greek: several centuries before the Greek alphabet was invented, the Linear B
script was the writing system used to write Greek during Mycenaean times. The Linear B script
was lost around c.1100 BCE and with it, all knowledge of writing vanished from Greece until the
time when the Greek alphabet was developed.
The Greek alphabet was born when the Greeks adapted the Phoenician writing system to
represent their own language by developing a fully phonetic writing system composed of

individual signs arranged in a linear fashion that could represent both consonants and
vowels. The earliest Greek alphabet inscriptions are graffiti incised on pots and potsherds. The
graffiti found in Lefkandi and Eretria, the Dipylon oinochoe found in Athens, and the
inscriptions in the Nestors cup form Pithekoussai are all dated to the second half of the 8th
century BCE, and they are the oldest known Greek alphabetic inscriptions ever recorded.

The Roman alphabet is the product of a long series of simplifications


and refinements. Like other forms of writing, its most distant
ancestors were tallies and pictograms. These evolved into
ideograms which, in turn, resolved themselves into phonetic
symbols first symbols representing syllables, then signs indicating
consonants, and finally letters standing for both vowel and
consonant phonemes. The Greek alphabet achieved this final step.
Simplification of signs involved ease in writing and reading as well
as emphasis on smaller units of sound

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