Writing has allowed millions of people to be able to come into contact with each other indirectly, at a distance and obviously without the need to speak and it was therefore a huge revolution. The early complex forms of writing they date back to ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, periods from which the history of all humanity has been documented.
Writing not only for communication: a cultural progress
In fact, writing was not only used to make money administration and communication much simpler tasks, but it was a real progress on a cultural and intellectual level. The first complex forms of writing can be identified in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt and were very different from each other.
Mesopotamia it is that strip of land which, as you will surely remember from elementary school, is located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and it is precisely in that place that around 3400 BC it developed cuneiform writing thanks to the Sumerians. This type of writing takes its name from the wedge-shaped marks that were impressed on clay tablets with a stick made from cane.
At the beginning this system was defined as pictographic since concrete objects were each represented, but only over time did it become a much more complex logographic and syllabic system, in which they were represented sounds and words. Cuneiform writing was used, among other things, to record economic transactions, document historical achievements, codify laws, and transmit myths and literature.
Given the usefulness of this new system, it was also adopted by other Mesopotamian cultures, such as the Arcadians, the Babylonians and finally the Assyrians.
At the same time, in a different geographical area, namely Egypt, a hieroglyphic writing around 3200 BC It is a system that has been used for over 3000 years and is still studied with great fascination and interest today.
Hieroglyphic symbols they were pictographic and they represented sounds, ideas and objects and could be either logograms, i.e. representing words, or phonograms, i.e. representing sounds or determinants, which indicated the category of a word.
The ancient Egyptians they wrote on papyrus, on stone or on other materials and their geographic location were used particularly on monuments and in religious situations such as ceremonies, but they also had great use for administrative practices. They were also used to carve temples, tombs and monuments to tell divine stories and celebrate pharaohs.
Both of these writing systems were fundamental in being able to develop further ones and at the same time in giving us the possibility of receiving important information on the life and customs of those periods.
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