World History and Cultures - Essay Example

The Development of Writing By understanding the mechanics that went into the development of a particular invention we can gain a better understanding of the instrument and begin to develop ways of making it better, more efficient or more environmentally friendly. The words of Socrates have worked to shape the educations of generations of students. However, there is a key ingredient necessary in all inventions, past deeds and the thoughts of men who lived centuries ago. That key ingredient is the use of writing in developing their ideas and transferring them to successive generations.

Writing is one of the most important inventions mankind has devised throughout history as without it, history isn’t possible. Oral traditions have long been lauded as having certain significance in carrying forward the ideologies of a given group of people, but, as can be simply proven among even small groups, oral history is not intended to be nor can it be entirely accurate. The story changes with the teller and the facts become blurred with myth. In addition, it can only be preserved for as long as there are people around interested in learning the stories and lore enough to be able to pass it down to the next generation, and a next generation interested in sitting around to hear it.

The concept of the written word offers a similar mixture of truth and lies, but offers a means of preserving the history and traditions of a people.The earliest writing, the Sumarian cuneiform, is believed to have developed as a necessary means of keeping business accounts. “Some time in the late fourth millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in the early cities of Mesopotamia reached a point at which it outstripped the power of memory of the governing elite. To record transactions in a dependable, permanent form became essential” (Robinson, 1995, p. 11). However, many scholars do not consider these early forms of pictographs true writing.

“Writing only started when an organized system of signs or symbols was created that could be used to clearly record and fix all that the writer was thinking, feeling, and capable of expressing” (Ouaknin,1999, p. 18). This definition seems too broad, though, as many poets and writers will attest that there simply aren’t available words to express all that they are ‘thinking, feeling and capable of expressing’. This form of pictorial record-keeping did seem to have a relatively standard format among merchants and was capable of conveying at least some of the ideas of the writers.

It can also be argued that it led to the development of the earliest form of Egyptian writing, known as hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics began as a word script where each sign represented a word and dates back to the start of the third millennium (the First Dynasty) (Ouaknin, 1999, p. 26). The earliest Egyptian writing dates from approximately 3100 BC. With the realization of the rebus principle, Egyptian hieroglyphs began to take the shape of a phonetic system. Under this system, the picture of an owl can represent the consonantal sound we in America associate with the letter m (because it is based on their language, not English).

To translate to American, Robinson (1995) suggests a picture of a bee and a leaf could be interpreted as the word belief in much the same way. With the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, that combined ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics with a more modern form of hieroglyphs and a recognizable form of ancient Greek, the realization that the ancient Egyptian writing system was a complex mixture of semantic symbols, or logograms (symbols that stand for words and ideas), and phonetic signs that represented one or more sounds was made.

This also led to the understanding that these symbols could have different meanings depending upon their context and finally allowed the breakthrough that enabled the modern world to read like the Egyptians.Works CitedOuaknin, Marc-Alain. Mysteries of the Alphabet. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1999.Robinson, Andrew. The Story of Writing. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.