Writing plays an extremely important role in human society, it is the engine of human culture. Thanks to writing, people can use the huge stock of knowledge accumulated by mankind in all spheres of activity, and further develop the process of cognition.
The history of writing begins from the moment when a person began to use graphic images to convey information. Although even before that people communicated in a variety of ways and means. For example, the "letter" of the Scythians to the Persians is known, consisting of a bird, a mouse, a frog and a bunch of arrows. The Persian sages deciphered his “ultimatum”: “If you, Persians, do not learn to fly like birds, jump through swamps like frogs, hide in a hole like mice, you will be showered with our arrows as soon as you set foot on our land.”
The next stage was the use of conditional signaling, in which the objects themselves do not express anything, but act as conventional signs. This implies a preliminary agreement between the communicants on what exactly this or that object should denote. Examples of conditional signaling are the letter of the Incas - "kipu", the Iroquois letter "wampum", notches on wooden boards - "tags".
"Kipu" is a system of cords made of wool of various colors with knots tied, each of which has a specific meaning.
"Wampum" - threads with circles of shells of different colors and sizes strung on them, sewn onto a belt. With its help, it was possible to convey a rather complex message. Using the wampum system, the American Indians made peace treaties and made alliances. They had entire archives of such documents.
Notched "tags" were used to count and secure various transactions. Sometimes the tags split into two halves. One of them remained with the debtor, the other with the creditor.
The letter itself is a system of graphic signs (pictures, letters, numbers) for fixing and transmitting a sound language. Historically, several types have changed in the development of descriptive writing. Each of them was determined by what elements of the sound language (whole messages, individual words, syllables or sounds) served as a unit of written designation.
The initial stage in the development of writing was a pictorial, or pictographic, letter (from lat. pictus"painted" and Greek. grapho- writing). It is an image on stone, wood, clay of objects, actions, events for the purpose of communication.
But this type of writing did not allow conveying information that was not amenable to graphic representation, as well as abstract concepts. Therefore, with the development of human society, on the basis of pictographic writing, a more perfect one arose - ideographic.
Its appearance is associated with the development of human thinking and, as a result, language. A person began to think more abstractly and learned to decompose speech into its constituent elements - words. The very term "ideography" (from the Greek. idea- concept and grapho- writing) indicates the ability of this type of writing to convey abstract concepts embodied in words.
Unlike pictography, ideographic writing captures the message verbatim and conveys, in addition to the verbal composition, also the word order. The signs here are not reinvented, but are taken from a ready-made set.
Hieroglyphic writing is the highest stage in the development of ideography. It originated in Egypt around the 4th millennium BC. e. and lasted until the second half of the III century. BC e.
Egyptian hieroglyphs were used for monumental inscriptions on the walls of temples, statues of gods, pyramids. They are also called monumental writing. Each sign was carved independently, without connection with other signs. The direction of the letter was not established either. As a rule, the Egyptians wrote in columns from top to bottom and from right to left. Sometimes there were inscriptions in columns from left to right and from right to left in a horizontal line. The directions of the line indicated the depicted figures. Their faces, arms and legs looked towards the beginning of the line.
The evolution of writing led to the fact that the language of the masses began to be transmitted exclusively in hieratic writing, from which a more fluent and concise form later emerged, called demotic writing.
Deciphering the inscriptions made in the ancient Egyptian language made it possible to establish that the Egyptian writing consisted of three types of signs - ideographic, denoting words, phonetic (sound) and determinatives, which were used as ideographic signs. So, for example, the drawing “beetle” meant a beetle, the action “go” was conveyed by the image of walking legs, the image of a man with a staff symbolized old age.
No less ancient than Egyptian hieroglyphs, a variety of ideographic writing is cuneiform. This writing system arose in the interfluve of the Tigris and Euphrates and later spread throughout Asia Minor. The material for it was wet clay tiles, on which the necessary graphic signs were squeezed out with the help of a cutter. The resulting recesses were thickened at the top, at the point of pressure, and thinned along the cutter. They resembled wedges, hence the name of this writing system - cuneiform.
The Sumerians were the first to use cuneiform.
Along with Egyptian and Sumerian, Chinese is considered one of the oldest writing systems. The oldest monuments of Chinese writing that have come down to us are inscriptions on tortoise shells, pottery and bronze vessels. They were discovered at the end of the 19th century in the Yellow River basin. In writing, each individual sign corresponds to a separate concept.
Chinese writing developed from picture writing.
Chinese characters were usually written in vertical columns from top to bottom and right to left, although horizontal writing is now used for convenience.
The disadvantage of the Chinese character system is that for its assimilation it is necessary to memorize a large number of characters. In addition, the outline of hieroglyphs is very difficult - the most common of them consist of an average of 11 strokes each.
The disadvantage of ideographic systems is their bulkiness and difficulty in conveying the grammatical form of a word. Therefore, with the further development of human society, the expansion of the scope of writing, there was a transition to syllabic and alpha-sound systems.
In syllabic, or syllabic (from the Greek. syllabe) in writing, each graphic sign denotes such a language unit as a syllable. The appearance of the first syllabic systems is attributed to the II-I millennia BC.
The formation of the syllabary went in different ways. Some syllabic systems arose on the basis of ideographic writing (Sumerian, Assyro-Babylonian, Cretan, Maya). But they are not purely syllabic.
Others, such as Ethiopian, Indian Kharoshta and Brahmi, developed from a sound script in which only consonant sounds were denoted by signs (the so-called consonant-sound script) by adding signs denoting vowel sounds.
The Indian Brahmi script consisted of 35 characters. It laid the foundation for many Indian scripts, as well as the syllabic systems of Burma, Thailand, Central Asia and the Pacific Islands (Philippines, Borneo, Sumatra, Java). Based on it in the XI-XIII centuries. n. e. the modern syllabary of India, Devanagari, arose. Initially, it was used to transmit Sanskrit, and then to transmit a number of modern Indian languages \u200b\u200b(Hindi, Marathi, Nepali). Devanagari is currently the national language of India. It has 33 syllables. Devanagari is written from left to right, covering letters and words with a horizontal line.
The third group consists of syllabic systems that originally arose as an addition to ideographic ones to denote grammatical affixes. They arose at the end of the 1st - beginning of the 2nd millennium AD. These include the Japanese syllabary kana.
The Japanese kana was formed in the 8th century AD. e. based on Chinese ideographic writing.
Phoenician is the basis of most modern alphabetic-sound alphabets. It consisted of 22 characters arranged in strict sequence.
The next step in the development of alphabetic-sound writing was taken by the Greeks. Based on the Phoenician, they created an alphabet by adding signs for vowel sounds, as well as signs for some consonants that were absent in the Phoenician alphabet. Even the names of the Greek letters came from Phoenician: alpha from aleph, beta from bet. In Greek writing, the direction of the line changed several times. Initially, they wrote from right to left, then the “boustrophedon” method became widespread, in which, having finished writing a line, they began to write the next one in the opposite direction. Later, the modern direction was adopted - from right to left.
The most common Latin alphabet in the modern world goes back to the alphabet of the Etruscans - the people who lived in Italy before the arrival of the Romans. That, in turn, arose on the basis of Western Greek writing, the writing of the Greek colonists. Initially, the Latin alphabet consisted of 21 letters. As the Roman state expanded, it adapted to the peculiarities of oral Latin speech and consisted of 23 letters. The remaining three were added in the Middle Ages. Despite the use of the Latin script in most European countries, it is poorly adapted to convey the sound composition of their languages in writing. Therefore, each language has signs to designate specific sounds that are absent in the Latin alphabet, in particular hissing.
Lecture No. 1. The history of the emergence of writing
Writing, like sound speech, is a means of communication between people, and serves to transmit thoughts at a distance and fix it in time. Writing is part of the general culture of a given people, and therefore part of world culture. The history of world writing knows the following main types of writing:
pictographic,
ideographic,
syllabic,
letter-sound.
pictographic(picture) - the most ancient writing in the form of cave paintings of primitive people;
Ideographic (hieroglyphic) - a letter from the era of early statehood and the emergence of trade (Egypt, China). IN IV-III millennia BC. e. in Ancient Sumer (Anterior Asia), in Ancient Egypt, and then, in II, and in Ancient China a different way of writing arose: each word was conveyed by a drawing, sometimes specific, sometimes conditional. For example, when it was about the hand, they drew the hand, and the water was depicted with a wavy line. A house, a city, a boat were also designated by a certain symbol ... The Greeks called such Egyptian drawings hieroglyphs: "hiero" - "sacred", "glyphs" - "carved in stone". The text, composed in hieroglyphs, looks like a series of drawings. This letter can be called: "I am writing a concept" or "I am writing an idea" (hence the scientific name of such a letter - "ideographic").
The extraordinary achievement of human civilization was the so-called syllabary, the invention of which took place during III-II millennium BC. e. Each stage in the formation of writing recorded a certain result in the advancement of mankind along the path of logical abstract thinking. First, this is the division of the phrase into words, then the free use of drawings-words, the next step is the division of the word into syllables. We speak in syllables, and children are taught to read in syllables. To arrange the record in syllables, it would seem that it could be more natural! Yes, and there are many fewer syllables than words composed with their help. But it took many centuries to come to such a decision. Syllabic writing was already used in III-II millennia BC. e. in the Eastern Mediterranean. For example, the predominantly syllabary is the famous cuneiform.(They still write in a syllabic way in India, in Ethiopia.)
alpha-sound(phonemic) writing expressing the phonemic composition of a language. Phonemes denote individual speech sounds and may vary depending on the pronunciation. Our writing cannot convey all the sound nuances of the language and is intended only to differentiate (distinguish) words.
Russian alphabet has 33 characters, while the phonemic structure of the language consists of 39 phonemes.
Alphabetic writing system- the basis of the writing of many peoples of the world, the linguistic specificity of which is also reflected in the phonographic composition of their alphabets. So in the Latin alphabet - 23 characters, in Italian - 21 , Czech - 38, Armenian - 39 .etc.
The characters of the alphabet are graphically different from each other and in their simplest form represent graphemes(the invariable form of the letters included in the alphabet, without taking into account style, typeface and other shaping).
The graphematic composition of the alphabet has evolved over many centuries based on the requirements of a particular language, the requirements for ease of writing and reading.
First letter alphabet appeared about 16 in. BC. It is known that the Semitic tribes that lived on Sinai Peninsula, adopted a number of signs-ideograms from Egyptian writing, denoting the first sounds of the names of certain objects with them. This is how the original letter was born.
Phoenicians, having adopted and improved it, in turn served as intermediaries in the movement of alphabetic-sound writing from the South-Eastern Mediterranean to the Greeks.
The oldest Greek letters appeared in 8th c. BC, but only to 4th c. to our era have gained relative completeness, graphic simplicity and clarity.
IN 3 in. BC exists and Latin alphabet. The Latins (the inhabitants of Rome and its environs, hence the name - Latin) borrowed the Etruscan alphabet, which developed on the basis of the Greek. At the turn of the new era, the letter was located between two rulers, it was continuous, there were no intervals between words, the geometric shapes of the letters made it difficult to write.
The creation of the alphabet of the Slavic-Russian writing system - "Cyrillic" refers to by the end of the 9th beginning of the 10th. The creators of the Slavic alphabet based on the Byzantine script were brothers Kirill(Konstantin the Philosopher, he took the name Cyril not long before his death) and Methodius, natives of Thessalonica (Thessaloniki) in Macedonia. The Slavic language was their native language, and they received Greek upbringing and education.
Along with the Cyrillic alphabet, there was another alphabet - Glagolitic.
In Rus', the Glagolitic alphabet did not last long and was completely replaced by the Cyrillic script. From the history of the Old Russian font, the main calligraphic variants of the Cyrillic alphabet stand out:
from the 11th century - a charter letter(according to the oldest Russian manuscripts that have come down to us);
from the 14th century – semi-status, which served as a model for the typeface in the middle 16th century;
at first 15th century various types of cursive.
Charter- an early calligraphic form of the Cyrillic alphabet. The letters of the charter had almost square proportions and were distinguished by straightness and angularity of forms. They were placed freely in the line, there were no gaps between words.
An example of a classic charter letter is "Ostromir Gospel", written in 1056-1057 deacon Grigory by order of the Novgorod posadnik Ostromir. A letter of incorporation is quite laborious to write. The inscription of the letters of the charter required frequent changes in the position of the instrument of writing. The letters were more drawn with a pen than written.
Semi-charter- a kind of calligraphic version of Cyrillic writing. The semi-stated text has a brighter overall picture. The letters are rounder and smaller, the words and sentences are separated by clear gaps, the style is simpler, more flexible and faster than in the statutory letter. Stroke contrast is less; pen sharpens sharper. There are many abbreviations under the titles, as well as many different superscripts, stresses (forces) and a whole system of punctuation marks. The letter takes on a noticeable slope. The semi-ustav lasted as long as the handwritten book lived. It also served as the basis for the fonts of early printed books. The first printed book in Rus', The Apostle, was made by the book printer Ivan Fedorov in 1564.
Russian ligature- a special decorative letter used with 15th century mainly for highlighting titles. There are two types of ties: round and angular(stamped). One of the main methods of tying is the mast ligature, in which two adjacent strokes (boles) of two letters turned into one. The voids formed at the same time were filled with reduced oval or almond-shaped letters, as well as half-masts (half-bolts) of neighboring letters. The inscriptions made in gold or cinnabar carried a special artistic and decorative load in various written monuments.
Almost simultaneously with the formation of a semi-charter, a business letter develops cursive, which quickly seeps into books. Cursive 14th century very close to halfway point.
In the 15th century it becomes freer, gains considerable distribution; She wrote various letters, acts, books. It turned out to be one of the most mobile types of Cyrillic writing.
In the 17th century cursive, distinguished by its special calligraphy and elegance, has become an independent type of writing.
In the 17th century semi-ustav, moving from church books to office work, is transformed into civil letter. At this time, books of writing samples appeared - “The Alphabet of the Slavic Language ...” (1653), primers of Karion Istomin (1694-1696) with magnificent examples of letters of various styles: from luxurious initials to simple cursive letters.
The reform of the alphabet and type carried out Peter I at the beginning of the 18th century. contributed to the spread of literacy and education. In form, proportions and style, the civil font was close to the old antiqua. The new font began to print all secular literature, scientific and government publications. The first books of the new type were published in Moscow in 1708.
The signs of the times herald the departure of the alphabet, and the letters seem to be losing their meaning. The thought of losing written communication is really frightening, because writing is the only way to preserve human myths, traditions and knowledge for many centuries. Artifacts may serve as reminders of ancient civilizations, but without writing, the thoughts of humanity will be lost. Scholars rightly call the creation of writing the dawn of history. It's like everything that happened before didn't happen.
The Sumerians only practiced writing on palm-sized tablets. After use, the boards were simply thrown away - so many of them were found.
The boards had inscriptions on both sides. On the one hand, the teacher wrote out a new lesson, which the students had to rewrite from the back of the board.
But cuneiform, Sumerian writing, was not a spontaneous invention. Over the centuries, it has evolved from pictograms and drawings. Each drawing was a simple representation of the world or some object. But this system not only limited the possibilities of expression, but was also incredibly complex.
As soon as signs began to mean sounds, and not objects, the same sign could be used for several phonetically similar concepts.
The use of more abstract symbols was an important development that marked the transition from a one-character-one-word writing system to a "one character - one syllable". This process has evolved over the centuries, and this has led to decrease in signs, used by the Sumerians, from 2 thousand to 500. At the same time, the signs went through a process of simplification and stylization, to the point that the symbols had practically nothing to do with the original picture.
The Sumerians lived in well-organized city-states. Monumental temples were the intellectual, spiritual and commercial centers of cities. For example, the ziggurat of the city-state of Ur is older than the Egyptian pyramids; it served as a prototype for the legendary Tower of Babel. This temple was the most powerful symbol of this urban civilization - the civilization in which the concept of writing was born.
Early written documents were used for bookkeeping. But since many different Sumerian documents have been found, it can be assumed that written documentation was not just an economic necessity.
The Euphrates River has long since changed course, and the desert swallowed up the temples. Today, only a few guards watch over the remnants of the civilization that invented and developed writing.
But not only temples and tablets remember the birth of writing. The profession of scribe still exists in modern Iraq, where clients are served outside of offices and government offices.
The Greeks contributed to Phoenician writing vowel sounds. They used Phoenician characters to represent vowels, which have no phonetic equivalent in Greek.
Writing in Ancient Rome
Etruscan art in modern Tuscany testifies to the strong influence of ancient Greece. This is not just a stylistic imitation. As the Greeks established colonies throughout the Italian peninsula, the Etruscans adopted the Greek alphabet. And although the Etruscan civilization remains a mystery, it is precisely established that it was the Etruscan city-states that transferred their writing to Ancient Rome. But its development, in turn, is final put an end to Etruscan culture.
August 24, 79 AD happened historical disaster, which, ironically, has proven to be extremely useful to modern archaeologists.
The stylo was made of wood, metal, or even ivory. The writing was easy to remove by simply smoothing the wax with the blunt end of the stylus. To make the process of writing on wax faster and more efficient, cursive was used.
Tablets were easy to use and inexpensive to make, so for the first time in human history, reading and writing were not restricted to the elite. The Roman Empire was the first civilization in which the education system was accessible to the general population. This Roman democratization made greatest contribution to the history of writing. Political slogans on the buildings of Pompeii testify to high level of literacy of the population.
During the volcanic eruption, the election campaign for the election of the mayor was just going on. Slogans are written in uncial script - the second Roman form of writing. Like all Roman scripts, it consisted only of capital letters. The rounded uncial script, in which all the letters were in capitals, was third type of roman script. It was mainly used for inscriptions on stones. They still confirm the greatness of the empire on the ruins of monumental Roman buildings.
Writing in ancient Rome was a tool of power. mastery of this art was indispensable for the management of a vast empire. Written messages and orders were sent to the most remote corners of the empire. Writing allowed complex legislation to be enacted.
From an aesthetic point of view, Roman letters were well defined and remained unchanged for many centuries. The persistence of this classical beauty contrasted strongly with the chaos and disorder of the early Middle Ages.
Although there are those who are quite critical of current events. We may find ourselves in a situation where people will be forced to completely a new mechanism for communicating with each other. The principle behind this new mechanism is to digitize all human knowledge in binary codes using only the numbers 0 and 1.
The digital revolution in some way is about understanding difference between bits and atoms. Even if you don't know physics, always remember about atoms, because we are made of atoms, we carry atoms, we eat atoms, we live in atoms. They have their whole, size, color, weight. But bits, these ones and zeros that make up the DNA of information, have neither weight nor size, they move at the speed of light, this is a completely different phenomenon. As soon as we begin to distinguish the world of bits from the world of atoms, the world will change.
In a popular American newspaper, the following example was given: tons of paper are produced every day and thousands of spins are bent to get the newspaper on the table to the reader. The company maintains more than 100 machines, each of which travels thousands of kilometers a year, to distribute newspapers to all points of sale. The same newspaper can be read by millions of people via the Internet. One click of the mouse, and information will appear on the screen, carried over thousands of kilometers by weightless and incorporeal bits.
Internet is universal cornucopia of knowledge, examples of which have not yet been in the history of mankind. The World Wide Web provides access not only to current information, such as newspaper articles, but also to ancient documents and even entire libraries.
It remains to be seen whether the new technologies will live up to our optimistic expectations. Some people hope for the advent of a new era in which peace and freedom will reign. Some believe that we will live better, because it will be possible not to go to work, but to earn money without leaving home. While others worry about the potential loss of communication, isolation in the cold world of conformists.
Oddly enough, new technologies do not bring us closer, but rather create a new kind of loneliness leading to cultural collapse. Because of new technologies, we are forgetting about physical contact, replacing it with electronic, so in many ways we have become more fragmented than ever.
We used to have enough pen and pencil, but our requirements have become more complex. There is a fear that people who are not computer savvy will be excluded from the new digital world. There is a main lack of digital revolution A: A lot of people don't have access to computers. Now people are divided not so much into poor or rich, but into generations, young people understand this, but people of the older generation do not. Kids today use computers much more naturally than their parents used phones when they were younger.
But new media don't just convey a familiar meaning in a new way, they change the content. New vibrant media connect words, writing, pictures and sounds in ways never before seen, and these new advances will undoubtedly influence traditional teaching methods.
The invention of the alphabet led to the creation of a civilization of people who think in words. The consequences of electronic technologies are completely different: they stimulate another area of the brain responsible for imagination. We as a culture are losing the ability to communicate through words. Literacy is not a prerequisite for electronic media; one does not need to be able to read and write to make a phone call or turn on a radio or TV.
With the development of new media, traditional ways of conveying words, such as books, may simply fall into disuse. However, not everyone agrees with this statement, believing that in the electronic world no room for long books, long paragraphs, long sentences and long discussions.
Perhaps in the future, cheap computer monitors will serve as the pages of the book. In fact, the computer will be a book. Some may not like that he only has one book, but that book is subject to change at any time.
The position of the book is now stronger than ever. The number of works printed all over the world is increasing every year, and libraries are bursting at the seams. The book survived the advent of radio, film, and television. Therefore, it can be assumed that even the digital age will not win the love of a person for the printed word.
The enormous impact of the new media is undeniable. This leads some people to look for connections with civilizations that have traditionally enjoyed the benefits of the right hemisphere. Perhaps the alphabet will become obsolete and out of use, like a vinyl record in its time.
Whether we share this view or not, writing is undoubtedly undergoing a lot of changes. But even in the digital age, writing will the main way to solve complex problems and transforming them into a simpler and more organized form. It will remain the single most important means of organizing human ideas and emotions. But besides the world of writing, there will be other worlds that it is even difficult for us to imagine today.
No matter where humanity comes in the future, language will always be the spokesman for our thoughts, and writing will remain a tool with which we will document our ideas, preventing them from sinking into oblivion.
Ministry of General and Professional
Education Russian Federation
RGRTA
Department of "History"
Discipline "Culturology"
Abstract on the topic:
"The history of the development of writing"
Fulfilled :
Art. gr. 070
Ruchkin G.V.
Checked:
Kupreev A.I.
Ryazan 2001
Introduction 3
1. Nodular writing 3
2.Pictogram 4
3. Hieroglyph 6
4.Alphabet 7
Conclusion 9
References 10
WRITING
Introduction
Writing appeared around 3300 BC. in Sumer, by 3000 B.C. in Egypt, by 2000 B.C. in China. In all regions, this process followed the same pattern: a drawing - a pictogram - a hieroglyph - an alphabet (the latter appeared among the Phoenicians in 1,000 BC). Hieroglyphic writing determined the peculiarities of the thinking of the peoples of the East, the ability to think in symbols. A hieroglyph does not convey the sound of a word, but conditionally depicts an object or is an abstract sign - a symbol of a concept. A complex character consists of simpler elements endowed with their own meaning. Moreover, these values can be several.
Inscriptions are found on the walls of the tombs, on potsherds, clay tablets, and parchments. Egyptian papyri sometimes reach 30 - 40 m in length. Entire libraries are found in the ruins of ancient palaces. During the excavations of Nineveh, 25,000 cuneiform tablets were found belonging to the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. These are collections of laws, reports of spies, decisions on judicial issues, medical prescriptions.
Consider each step in the development of writing separately.
1. Nodular pimennost
One of its first types was nodular writing. A certain number of knots tied on a rope conveyed a particular message. Simultaneously with knot writing, picture writing arose, in which notes were made using drawings.
Gradually writing improved. Each - sign drawing acquired new meanings, the number of signs increased, their styles changed, less and less remembering the images of objects.
2. ICON
Pictogram - one of the types of writing, which is a pictorial letter, or painting - an image of objects, events and actions using conventional signs. For example, a sign depicting a leg can mean "walk", "stand", "bring". Pictographic writing with elements of hieroglyphics used by the Aztecs has been known since the 14th century. There was no definite system for the arrangement of pictograms: they could follow both horizontally and vertically, and using the boustrophedon method (opposite direction of adjacent "lines", i.e. series of pictograms). The main systems of Aztec writing: signs to convey the phonetic appearance of the word, for which the so-called rebus method was used (for example, to write the name Itzcoatl, an arrow itz-tli was depicted above the snake coatl); hieroglyphic signs that convey certain concepts; proper phonetic signs, especially to convey the sound of affixes. By the time of the Spanish conquest, which interrupted the development of Aztec writing, all these systems existed in parallel, their use was not streamlined. The material for writing was leather or paper strips, folded in the form of a screen.
Instead of an image, arbitrary graphic symbols were also used. This script was used in household records, where the number of concepts is limited by the content of the letter itself, and in ritual records as an aid. The earliest records date back to 3000 BC. In ancient Egypt, there were verbal-syllabic pictograms that denoted not only concepts, but also purely sound elements of a word or its part. Some types of cuneiform developed from Sumerian writing - small cuneiform signs. Each icon of such a letter consists of wedges in various combinations and denotes a sound, syllable, or word and was written from left to right on clay tablets. The cuneiform script of Mesopotamia has been studied and deciphered the most.
The Sumerian and Babylonian-Assyrian cultures differed in many ways from the ancient Egyptians. It is enough to look at Egyptian hieroglyphic or hieratic texts and compare them with any cuneiform system to feel the depth of the difference between the two cultural worlds.
Writing in the Greek culture of the XXII-XII centuries. played a limited role. Like many peoples of the world, the inhabitants of Hellas first of all began to make pictorial notes, known already in the second half of the 3rd millennium. Each sign of this pictographic letter denoted a whole concept. The Cretans created some signs, though not many, under the influence of Egyptian hierographic writing, which arose as early as the 4th millennium. Gradually, the forms of signs were simplified, and some began to designate only syllables. Such a syllabic (linear) letter, which had already developed by 1700, is called letter A, which still remains unsolved.
After 1500, a more convenient form of writing was developed in Hellas - the syllabic letter B. It included about half of the signs of the syllabic letter A, several dozen new signs, as well as some signs of the oldest picture writing. The counting system, as before, was based on decimal notation. Syllabary records were still made from left to right, however, the writing rules became more strict: words separated by a special sign or space were written along horizontal lines, separate texts were provided with headings and subheadings. Texts were drawn on clay tablets, scratched on stone, written with a brush or paint or ink on vessels.
Achaean writing was accessible only to educated specialists. He was known by ministers in the royal palaces and some layer of wealthy citizens. Sumerian pictograms also gave rise to hieroglyphs.
3. HIEROGLYPHS
The basis of ancient Egyptian writing was hieroglyphs (from the Greek "hieros" - "sacred" and "glyph" - "carved") - figured signs denoting whole concepts or individual syllables and sounds of speech, the name "hieroglyph" originally meant "sacred, vychyachennye on letters". The main writing material was made from papyrus, a tropical reed-like aquatic plant. From the cut stems of papyrus, the core was isolated, dissected into thin long strips, laid out in two layers - along and across, moistened with Nile water, leveled, compacted with blows of a wooden hammer and polished with an ivory tool. The resulting sheet did not wrinkle when folded and when unfolded, it became smooth again. The sheets were connected into scrolls up to 40 meters long. However, hieroglyphic inscriptions were included in paintings and reliefs. They were written from right to left with a thin reed stick. A new paragraph began with red paint (hence the expression “ Red line”), and the rest of the text was black. The ancient Egyptians considered the god Thoth to be the creator of writing. As the god of the moon, Thoth is the viceroy of Ra; as time - he divided time into days and months, led the chronology and wrote chronicles; as the god of wisdom, he created writing and counting, which he taught people. He is the author of sacred books, the patron of scientists, scribes, archives, libraries. Thoth was usually depicted as a man with the head of an ibis.
During the New Kingdom era, colored drawings appeared on the scrolls, as, for example, in the Book of the Dead.
Initially, the Chinese made their notes on the shells of turtles, animal bones; later on bamboo boards and silk. The bound tablets were the first books.
Hieroglyphic writing has serious drawbacks: the large number of characters in the system (from several hundred to many thousands) and the difficulty in mastering reading. According to Chinese scientists, only in the oldest inscriptions of the 14th - 11th centuries BC. there are about 2000 different hieroglyphs. It was an already developed system of writing.
4. ALPHABET
All the types of writing described above could not stand the competition alphabet.
The Phoenicians, who kept constant trade records, need a different, simple and convenient letter. They came up with an alphabet in which each sign - a letter - means only one specific sound of speech. They are derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The Phoenician alphabet consists of 22 simple letters. All of them are consonants, because consonants played the main role in the Phoenician language. To read a word, it was enough for a Phoenician to see its backbone, which consisted of consonants.
The letters in the Phoenician alphabet were arranged in a certain order. This order was also borrowed by the Greeks, but in the Greek language, unlike the Phoenician, vowels played an important role.
Greek writing was the starting point for the development of all Western alphabets, the first of which was Latin.
For a long time there was an opinion that the letter came to Russia along with Christianity, with church books and prayers. A talented linguist, Cyril, creating a Slavic letter, took the Greek alphabet, consisting of 24 letters, as a basis, supplemented it with hissing sounds characteristic of Slavic languages (zh, u , w, h) and several other letters. Some of them are preserved in the modern alphabet - b, b, b, s, others have long gone out of use - yat, yus, izhitsa, fita. So the Slavic alphabet originally consisted of 43 letters, similar in spelling to Greek. Each of them had its own name: A - "az", B - "beeches" (their combination formed the word "alphabet"), C - "lead", G - "verb", D - "good" and so on. The letters on the letter denoted not only sounds, but also numbers. "A" - the number 1, "B" - 2, "P" - 100. In Rus', only in the 18th century. Arabic numerals have supplanted "alphabetic" numerals.
As is known, the Church Slavonic language was the first to receive literary use among the Slavic languages. For some time, along with the Cyrillic alphabet, another Slavic alphabet, the Glagolitic alphabet, was also in use. She had the same composition of letters, but with a more complex, ornate spelling. Apparently, this feature predetermined the further fate of the Glagolitic alphabet: by the 13th century. she has almost completely disappeared. This is not the place to expand on which Slavic tribe this language belonged to, the Bulgarians or the Pannoians.
The graphics of the Cyrillic alphabet underwent changes as a result of which letters were excluded that were unnecessary for transmitting the sounds of modern Russian speech. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters.
In the middle of the first millennium of our era, the Turkic-speaking peoples already used their own writing system, called runic writing. The first information about runic inscriptions appears in Russia at the end of the 18th century. Russian and foreign scientists copied and published some samples of ancient Turkic runic inscriptions. According to recent studies, runic writing originated before our era, possibly in the Saka time. In the 3rd-5th centuries, AD, there were two versions of the runic script - Hunnic and Eastern, which existed on the territory of Zhetysu and Mongolia. In the VI-VII centuries. on the basis of the latter, the ancient Turkic writing, called Orkhon-Yenisei, develops. The Hunnic runic writing served as the basis for the development of the Bulgar and Khazar writing, as well as the writing of the Kangars and Kypchaks. The main material for writing among the Turkic-speaking peoples were wooden boards. This is what the Kypchak proverbs say "I wrote, I wrote, I painted five trees", "I wrote a big inscription on the top of a tall tree". These sayings also testify to the widespread use of writing among the Kypchaks and other Turkic-speaking peoples. For example, the riddle "Looking up, I read endlessly", meaning the sky and stars, could come up with a people for whom reading was a normal phenomenon. This riddle was widespread among the Kypchaks. Along with the use of the Sogdian language, the Turks used the Sogdian alphabet to convey their own speech. Later, this alphabet, after some modifications, was called "Uyghur", since the ancient Uyghurs used it especially widely in the 9th-15th centuries.
Conclusion
The basis of any ancient culture is writing. The birthplace of writing is rightfully the Ancient East. Its emergence was associated with the accumulation of knowledge that was no longer possible to keep in memory, the growth of cultural ties between people, and then the needs of states. The invention of writing ensured the accumulation of knowledge and its reliable transmission to descendants. Various peoples of the Ancient East developed and improved writing in different ways, finally creating the first types of alphabetic writing. The alphabetic Phoenician letter, later revised by the Greeks, formed the basis of our modern alphabet.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Cultural studies. uch. allowance. Under the editorship of Yuzhakova L.V. Ryazan 1999;
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3. Zvegentsev V.A. History of linguistics 19 - 20 centuries., M., 1965;
4. Reformatsky A.A. Introduction to linguistics. M., 1967;
5. B.S.E. volume 19, pp. 571 - 576;
6. History of Russia from ancient times to the end of the XVII century / Ed. A.N. Sakharov, A.P. Novoseltseva. - M., 1996;
7. Latin America: encyclopedic reference book, vol. I - M., Soviet Encyclopedia, 1979;
The Black Book of Prayers of Maria Sforza. 1466-1476 Miniaturist Philipde Macerolles. The book was created in Bruges for the Duke of Burgundy Charles the Bald. Black paper, gold, silver
Writing, as already mentioned, is one of the main signs of the emergence of civilization, demonstrating the general level of cultural development. Writing can only arise in a society that has “grown up” to the awareness of the need to store information in a form that is not subject to distortion - in contrast to oral speech. The first written monuments are the inscriptions of the owners of objects on seals, dedications to the gods, financial reports of the first government officials. Later - chronicles and commemorative inscriptions of kings and noble people.
School notebook. Egypt. wood and paint
Writing is not only a sign of civilization in general. This is, first of all, an indicator of the level of independence of culture. Using a borrowed script, a people forms a single civilizational space with another people or peoples, and is subject to its cultural influence. If for some time its own writing system dominates, it means that civilization arose separately, albeit later, and was subjected to external influence. The unity of the writing system makes it possible to delineate the boundaries of civilization. Thus, the Western European civilization of the Middle Ages can be called Latin. All the peoples of Western Europe then used the Latin alphabet, which remains with them to this day. Moreover, in the Middle Ages, the spread of the alphabet was accompanied by the spread of the Latin language as the language of literature and official documents. In ancient times in the Near East, the Mesopotamian cuneiform script was such a common script for a long time, and then the Aramaic script born in Syria spread even more widely. Moreover, the latter also spread along with the language.
With the advent of writing, people of antiquity begin to "speak" with the researcher in living voices. Many elements of the bygone reality, which could only be guessed at, are now clearly and literally spelled out in the sources. History begins to be told, and the presentation created by contemporaries falls into the hands of a modern specialist without distortion. The importance of written monuments for the study of history is so great that the era preceding its occurrence is often called prehistory.
Cuneiform inscription from the palace of Darius I. Persepolis. 6th century BC e.
But the appearance of writing in no way detracts from the importance of material monuments and the work of an archaeologist. Yes, the interpretation of many archaeological finds is facilitated by the existence of written data. But after all, the most ancient written monuments themselves became known only thanks to archaeologists. The earliest manuscripts from European libraries and archives belong only to the 3rd-4th centuries, although they are often copies of older ones. A huge mass of ancient written monuments is delivered by the so-called epigraphy - the science of inscriptions on stone and various objects, in other words, about inscriptions made by an unconventional tool on unconventional writing material. Many of them have survived to this day and did not need to be searched, but most were still discovered by archaeologists in different parts of the globe. As a result of archaeological excavations, clay tablets from Western Asia, as well as papyri from Egypt, manuscripts on ox skin (parchment) dating back to the turn of the new era, turned out to be in the hands of scientists.
Pictograms and symbols of the Apache Indians. 19th century
It was thanks to archaeological finds that the history of ancient civilizations was recreated.
The manuscripts found by archaeologists at the turn of the new era, among other things, proved the absolute authenticity of those monuments of ancient Greek and Roman literature that were preserved in copies of the Middle Ages. It has now been established as a reliable fact that in the most ancient centers of civilization the written tradition has not been interrupted since the end of the 4th millennium BC. e.
Man, of course, long before the advent of writing, felt the need to preserve information. Over the centuries, in one way or another, the tribe accumulated so much necessary information that the memory of oral storytellers no longer contained them. This was the reason for the emergence of pictography - "picture writing". Pictography is not yet proper writing. Pictographic chronicle, for example, is a chain of drawings, each of which depicts some significant event in the life of the tribe. Looking at such a canvas, the keeper of legends recalled the sequence of facts about which he must tell. Over time, the drawings become more and more simple and schematic, symbolic. So, in the "pictorial chronicle" of the North American Indians, the image of a swan with its head lowered into the water meant the year of the death of a leader named Swan. The so-called phraseography appears - with this system of “picture writing”, an entire text is already reflected, where each sentence corresponds to a special picture.
Papyrus. "Book of the Dead" with the image of the priest of the god Amon. Egypt
The most culturally developed peoples of the world at the end of the Neolithic move from pictography to ideography, or hieroglyphics. Ideography is already a writing system in the proper sense of the word. In it, the whole text is clearly and unambiguously transmitted through ideograms - fixed signs of one or another meaning. Unlike modern letters, ideograms, however, denoted not sounds, but whole words or word roots, as well as numbers. To record proper names, as a rule, combinations of ideograms suitable in sound or meaning were used. Another name for ideograms - "hieroglyphs" ("sacred carving") - goes back to the ancient Greeks. So they called the Egyptian script, mysterious to them, which in the last centuries BC was understandable only to local priests.
Almost every center of the independent formation of civilization had its own system of hieroglyphic writing. However, who owns the palm, scientists have not yet established. It is only clear that hieroglyphics originated in different, even neighboring areas, independently of each other.
Clay cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia
Many scientists consider the writing of the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, known from the second half of the 4th millennium BC, to be the oldest. e. But were the Sumerians its creators? Now there is more and more evidence that Mesopotamia is not the birthplace of "its" writing. Symbolic "pictorial" signs, similar in style to Sumerian hieroglyphs, are found on the vessels of the cultures of Asia Minor and the Balkans of the 7th-6th millennia BC. e.
In an ancient burial site of the end of the 6th-5th millennium BC. e. On the territory of Romania, in Terteria, clay tablets with hieroglyphs were found. The find is extremely mysterious. The writing of the tablets resembles the Sumerian (although not completely identical with it). The material - clay - and the shape of the tablets are also quite "Sumerian". But they are clearly not written in the Sumerian language and date back to a time much older than the most ancient monuments of Sumer. A lot of suggestions have been made about the mysterious tablets. Some scholars, for example, believe that the tablets are much younger than the burial. In any case, it is not yet clear how to interpret this finding. However, recent studies in Mesopotamia itself allow us to conclude that writing did not immediately become "Sumerian" and spread from the north. The Terterian tablets, if their date is correct, are the oldest written monument in the world.
As Mesopotamian writing developed, its signs, at first quite “pictorial”, became more and more simplified. This was facilitated by the fact that they from the III millennium BC. e. extruded on clay using a primitive wedge-shaped tool. Hence the name "cuneiform". The cuneiform image naturally departed from “pictorial” accuracy, not conveying the true appearance of the object behind the root of the word (say, the figure of a farmer or a human head). Simplified, the letter became available for the transmission of words and syllables of a foreign language. Cuneiform is borrowed by numerous peoples of the Middle East. At the same time, some of them had their own system of hieroglyphics before. The Elamites in the southwest of Iran, the Hattians in Asia Minor had their own hieroglyphs.
Egyptian funerary stele depicting sacrificial offerings to the god Osiris
In Egypt, hieroglyphic writing also arose in the 4th millennium BC. e. and lasted without much change until the beginning of a new era. Here the main materials for writing were stone and papyrus. Icons were cut or drawn while retaining their "pictorial" fidelity and complexity. That is why the Egyptian letter was not accepted by neighboring peoples, and then gradually forgotten in Egypt itself, becoming part of the "sacred" priestly knowledge.
Other centers of ancient civilizations also had their own systems of hieroglyphs. So it was in the millennium BC. e. in the Indus Valley (the so-called proto-Indian writing), and in the II-I millennium BC. e. in South Arabia.
The oldest written language in Europe (except for the mysterious tablets from Tarteria) was the so-called Minoan hieroglyphic script (see the article "Bull and Lion: Cretan-Mycenaean Civilization"). His few monuments are scattered across the islands of the Aegean, Crete and Cyprus. The most famous, with which, in fact, the discovery of the letter is connected, is a disk with a circular inscription from the Cretan Phaistos. This writing system was replaced by the "linear writing" of the ancient Greek civilizations. It no longer used ideograms, but geometric conventional icons denoting syllables. A similar transitional syllabary to the alphabet is also known to some other peoples of the Mediterranean.
The most common and surviving system of hieroglyphic writing is Chinese. It originated in the I millennium BC. e. and has come a long way historical development. Chinese characters from the very beginning were characterized by simplicity and schematic outlines and were quickly adapted to convey syllables. In addition, due to the isolation and originality of Chinese culture, local hieroglyphs did not have to compete with alphabets. The Chinese ideography was not only preserved, but was adopted in the Middle Ages by neighboring peoples: Vietnamese, Koreans, Japanese. In Japan, one of the varieties of Chinese writing is still used. However, Chinese ideographic writing was not the only one in the Far East. In the 70s. 20th century monuments of an independent hieroglyphic system II - I millennium BC. e. discovered by Chinese archaeologists south of the Yangtze River, where the ancestors of Thai and Vietnamese tribes lived in ancient times.
Utagama Kunisada. A festival of painting and calligraphy at the Manpashiro Tea House. 1827
The Indian civilizations of Ancient America also had their own hieroglyphic writing. The oldest - Olmec appeared in Mexico in the II - beginning of the I millennium BC. e. The hieroglyphs of other Indian peoples of Central America go back to Olmec writing: Maya, Mixtec, Zapotec. In South America at the beginning of the II millennium BC. e. Aymara Indians created their own hieroglyphics (kelka). But in the 15th century, when the Aymara state was conquered by the Incas, all written monuments that testified to the greatness of the former culture were destroyed by the conquerors. Only three small inscriptions of the kelk have come down to us, dating back to the time before the 16th century.
The lands along the eastern and northeastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea became the center for the further development of writing from ideography to the alphabet. It was here that linear and syllabic writing systems arose, already much simpler than cumbersome, from many thousands of characters, hieroglyphic writing. The most developed of the "marine" peoples of the Middle East - the Phoenicians (lived in Lebanon) at the end of the II millennium BC. e. created the first alphabetic letter. In it, each sign corresponded to a certain sound. The alphabetic text is much longer than the hieroglyphic, but there are hundreds of times fewer characters in it, so it is much easier to memorize them.
All the numerous systems of alphabetic writing today, including ancient Greek, go back to the Phoenician alphabet. The word “alphabet” itself appeared in Greece - it comes from the names of the first letters “alpha” and “beta” (in the Middle Ages “vita”). The most common writing systems in medieval Europe originated from the Greek alphabet - the Latin alphabet and the Slavic Cyrillic alphabet, which is also used in Russia.
The Borja Code. Library of the Vatican. 13th century
The presence of written monuments clarifies a lot for the historian in the past. But they also raise some difficult questions. Many ancient monuments are written not just in "dead", but in languages completely unknown in the modern world. Others (say, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic monuments) are written in a language that is generally understandable. But the system of writing itself died long ago, and this “accessibility” still had to be established. So, after the discovery of a monument of an ancient letter by an archaeologist, it is the turn of its “reader”-decoder. Deciphering unknown writing systems has long been an important area in linguistics.
The main help for the decoder is the so-called bilinguals - monuments in which the same text is given in two languages or two writing systems. Bilinguals were quite common in the Middle East, where different writing systems existed in parallel. The role of a bilingual can also be played by dictionaries, which were actively created in the ancient Middle Eastern states for the same reasons. A true success for a historian is the discovery of a trilingual, that is, a matching text in three different written versions.
With trilingua, the decoding of ancient Egyptian writing once began. French explorer Jean Francois Champollion (1790 - 1832) came across an inscription on the so-called Rosetta stone. On this basalt slab, the same inscription was repeated in Greek and ancient Egyptian. At the same time, one version of the Egyptian text was made in the well-known local alphabetic script, and the other in hieroglyphs, mysterious for the science of that time. The reading of the Rosetta inscription made it possible to determine the main features of hieroglyphic writing and decipher it.
Greek letter. Stone. Louvre. Paris. 475 BC e.
A large number of dictionaries, bilinguals and trilinguals went to archaeologists who excavated in Mesopotamia and other areas of Western Asia. Among them, a special place is occupied by the trilingual Behistun inscription, carved on a high rock Behistun near the city of Hamadan in Iran. This commemorative inscription about the victories of the Persian king at the end of the 6th century. BC e. Darius I was read by the English scholar Henry Creswick Rawlinson (1810 - 1895). She gave the key to deciphering the cuneiform writing of the ancient civilizations of the Near East. The logical result of this many years of work, climbing the chain of bilinguals and dictionaries, was the discovery of a previously unknown and unrelated known language - Sumerian.
In the case when scientists do not have a bilingual at their disposal, they have to decipher the letters based on the texts themselves. Then the nature of writing, the composition of texts, information about the culture that gave rise to them are subjected to the most careful study. If it is possible to determine the intended meaning of at least one text (for example, the frequently repeated enumeration of twelve or thirteen words can be the designation of months), the so-called artificial bilingualism falls into the hands of scientists. If, with its help, the texts begin to be read, and not only by the discoverer himself, then the right path has been chosen. The honor of developing this method belongs to the Russian scientist Yuri Knorozov (1922-1999), who studied the civilizations of Central America. The technique developed by him is successfully used by his students and followers in the study of Proto-Indian, Minoan and Rapanui writing.
