Writing: one of the most important inventions

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

When a person already knows how to speak, he is faced with the need to share with others what he knows, or some plans and fantasies. But this was not always possible to do with the help of oral speech: what to do when you want to leave a message to the next generation? Or their contemporaries, congeners? And then the man found a way out: writing appeared.

What came first? Most likely cave paintings. It was they who carried the scenes of primitive battles and hunting, preserving information important for the artist. But this, so to speak, is a chronicle of events - but how can one “write a letter” to a fellow tribesman? The solution to the problem was the so-called subject writing. A good example is the notches in the trees to indicate the direction of travel, or the bunches of arrows to symbolize the declaration of war. In a word, it was any object, or a set of objects that carry a certain meaning. It would seem that over time, this type of communication should have improved and become easier, but something went wrong: the messages often lost their true meaning, since the addressee incorrectly deciphered them. It happened with King Darius: the Scythians sent him a bird, a mouse, a frog and a bundle of arrows. Unfortunately, the king misinterpreted the meaning of this message. He considered that the Scythians decided to surrender: they say, a mouse means earth, a bird means air, a frog means water, and arrows mean refusal of further resistance. In fact (and this is exactly what one of the wise men who surrounded Darius said) this "letter" had a diametrically opposite meaning: the Scythians warned their opponents, the Persians, that if they did not fly away into the sky like birds. either they do not gallop into the swamp like frogs, or they do not bury themselves in the ground like mice, then they cannot return home - they will be struck by the arrows of fearless nomads. In the end, it happened.

Gradually, pictography comes to replace subject writing. Now there was no need to send the object to the addressee - the image of it was enough. Of course, similar drawings have been used before, but not in the form of pictograms. Naturally, for the correct interpretation, it was necessary to somehow systematize the icons, which the tribes did: a certain uniformity appeared in the drawings, each of which had a certain meaning. But such a letter could not satisfy all the needs of a person, so ideography comes into play. This concept characterizes such things that cannot be indicated by a pictogram with a single meaning. For example, the image of the eye can be interpreted both as a reference to an organ and as “vigilance”. The pictogram now has both direct and figurative meaning. One of the examples can be considered the Sumerian writing: even before cuneiform, the Sumerians used precisely pictographic images, which are well preserved on clay tablets. It was they who made it possible to obtain information about the ancient civilization.

Many people still use ancient writing, and they themselves do not even know about it. Remember - have you ever tied a knot "for memory"? But these are the echoes of that very ancient letter - nodular! It existed among many peoples. Even before our era, the Chinese used complex, but incredibly beautiful patterns with which they conveyed their messages.

Archaeologists were surprised when they did not find pictographic messages on the territory of modern Peru. The Inca civilization seemed to have silently sunk into oblivion, although, logically, such a large state must have a way by which they conducted trade and entered into various kinds of agreements. As a result, it turned out that the Incas used nodular writing for these purposes. The Indians in North America, in particular the Iroquois, used wampumas to convey important messages - a kind of belt with cylindrical shell beads strung on them. Through them, agreements were concluded between the Indians and the "pale-faced", important events from the life of the tribes were recorded, and the old people, possessing the knowledge necessary to read the wampums, introduced them to the younger generation. The importance of this knowledge is conveyed by the fact that the name of Hiawatha, the creator of the Iroquois League - the most significant among the unions of the North American Indians - literally means "He who composes the Wampums." Shells became a thing of the past only when white traders began to bring in glass beads - it was from them that wampums began to be made. The inhabitants of Colombia and the Amazon “wrote letters” by means of ribbons, which were tied in a certain way on a long rope. The Japanese, too, did not disdain this method, and encrypted their "notes" by combining small items and knots on necklaces.

Do you remember how Ivan Tsarevich walked through the mountains, through the forests, and a guiding ball showed him the way? One of the Slavic Magi's methods of storing information was reflected in folk tales: knots were tied on a string, and it was wound into a ball, which was carefully kept for the time being.

Over time, the pictograms were simplified, turning into hieroglyphs, very vaguely reminiscent of the original drawing. Mesopotamia and Egypt quickly adjusted them for themselves - cuneiform appeared, and with it a separate class, scribes. Cuneiform writing was a very complex type, including several hundred (or even thousands) symbols, which were applied to soft clay with a wooden pointed stick - a very inconvenient method. Therefore, the preparation of scribes took a long time, and the profession itself required certain skills.

As for the actual hieroglyphs, the researchers did not come to a consensus regarding the area in which they appeared. There is a hypothesis that this type of writing originated at about the same time, but in different areas. Until our time, Chinese hieroglyphs, which are considered the most ancient, have been preserved almost unchanged. Already from the Celestial Empire, this writing spread to neighboring countries, and for a long time was the only way of writing in Japan, Vietnam and other areas of the ancient East.

It's funny, but the most familiar form of writing for us, when a separate letter corresponds to each sound, turned out to be the most difficult for mankind. When people realized that you can simply divide speech into sounds, it took only a few dozen characters to write them down. This is how the alphabet appeared. The largest is considered to be Khmer, in which there are 72 letters, the smallest is the Rotokas alphabet, in which there are only 12 characters (a, e, g, i, k, o, p, r, s, t, u, v) …

In the Phoenician alphabet, which is given the title of "father" of all the others, there were 22 syllable symbols. His main problem was that there were practically no letters to denote vowel sounds. Each of the syllables had a specific name, and later this letter formed the basis of ancient Greek and Arabic. It is noteworthy that at first the lines of the Greek scribes went from right to left, and, reaching the edge of the sheet, returned in the opposite direction. Only later was the left-to-right writing style adopted, which is now common in most countries.

After Christianization, the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabet appeared in Russia, significantly corrected during the time of Peter I and in 1918: as a result, the alphabet lost a large number of “unnecessary” letters, including “yat”, “fitu”, and a solid sign at the end of words.

And yet, despite many changes and a long evolution, the letter remains a letter. One of the most important, most significant discoveries of mankind, which in some ways can be compared with the subjugation of fire, is the invention of writing.