The Development Of Ancient Systems Of Writing In Iraq And Egypt :: essays research papers

The Development of Ancient Systems of Writing in Iraq and EgyptAncient systems of committal to writing in the Middle East arose when people needed amethod for remembering important information. In both Ancient Iraq and AncientEgypt each of the stages of writing, from pictograms to ideograms tophonetograms, evolved as a response to the need to express more complex ideas.Satisfaction of this need gave us the two most famous forms of antique writing,cuneiform from ancient Iraq, and hieroglyphics from ancient Egypt. Both of theseforms of writing evolved and their use spread to other peoples even after theoriginators of the scripts had passed on.Some of the oldest writing found in the Middle East dates from 8000 to 3000B.C. This corresponds to the gravelly time period that the people of theregion went from living a nomadic life to settlement in villages and tradingamong themselves. When trading large or varying types of commodities you need amethod for recording. To meet this need dev eloped a token system for therecording of financial data. These tokens were of varying shapes for variousthings, two to triad centimetres in size, and used for enumeration and keepingtrack of goods and labour.These tokens eventually had to be stored so they wouldnt be misplaced orlost. To secure them, they were placed in dusky clay envelopes. To indicatewhat was inside the envelope markings were made on it, eventually manyonerealized that all you had to do was mark on the clay what was in the envelopeand you discard the tokens altogether. With this major development we get the number 1 writing on clay tablets.In Ancient Mesopotamia the most readily available corporal for writing onwas clay. When writing on clay first arose, the scribe would try to make anartistic representation of what he was referring to. This is a logical firststep in writing as if you wanted to record that you had three sheep, you woulddraw a picture of a sheep and then add to the picture some marking to indi catethat you had three of them. Thus the earliest stage in writing arose, pictograms.Pictograms, although not really writing in the modern sense of the term, dorepresent a method of communicating an event or message. They also "led to truewriting through a process of selection and organization." As people wanted towrite more down and in a faster method, the pictograms lost their artistic lookand took on a more " stylize representation of an object by making a few marksin the clay . . . ." The writing was eventually written in "horizontal lines