Writing is an integral part of human culture and the form of existence of a language. The emergence of writing is the most important milestone in the history of mankind, on which the formation of modern culture and language directly depended.
Instruction manual
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In the primitive era, mankind did not know the written language, and all cultural material was transmitted orally. The rudiments of writing arose for the first time in developed ancient civilizations: the cuneiform writing of the Sumer-Akkadian civilization, which appeared in Mesopotamia at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, is considered the most ancient example of writing. Using cuneiform writing, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia depicted pictographs endowed with a certain meaning on clay tablets. This type of writing was widely used in several languages - Hittite, Akkadian, Sumerian, Persian. The ancient Persian cuneiform script was first deciphered by German scientists at the beginning of the 19th century, taking as a basis the inscriptions of the ruling Achaemenid dynasty.
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The earliest cuneiform tablets were compiled by priests of Mesopotamian temples. With the help of pictograms, the priests kept records of the harvest and used cuneiform writing for household purposes. Gradually, the number of pictograms increased, the meaningfulness of cuneiform writing expanded, the writing technique became more complicated. If at first the pictograms depicted specific objects or phenomena, then later the letter in Mesopotamia became verbal-syllable. Pictograms depicted syllables, and the meaning of the written phrase changed due to their different combinations.
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Another cradle of writing in world culture is Ancient Egypt. Egyptian hieroglyphs were first deciphered at the beginning of the 19th century by Jean Francois Champollion, who studied the Rosetta stone found in Egypt with inscriptions carved in it in three languages. The scientist correlated the ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian text, which allowed for the first time in the history of mankind to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Egyptologists say that Egyptian writing is the same age as the Mesopotamian cuneiform writing. Both types of ancient writing arose almost simultaneously at the turn of the 4th-3rd millennium BC.
Useful advice
As for the first full-fledged alphabet in the history of mankind, it appeared much later. The very first alphabet was compiled about 1500 BC in the Mediterranean, and it was based on the Mesopotamian cuneiform. Also during this period the Phoenician alphabet was created, which subsequently laid the foundation for the formation of Greek, Roman and modern writing.
