History of writing: its development in Antiquity

Writing is both a practice and a system. It is about the graphic representation of ideas, concepts and objects by means of signs that we call letters. The latter may have different characteristics depending on the specific society that uses them, which also generates different writing systems. One of them is, for example, the alphabet, and its history is very extensive, dating back more or less four centuries BC.

In this article we will a brief review of the history of writing, addressing the trajectory that has followed from classical Mesopotamia to current Western societies.

• Related article: "The 5 ages of History (and their characteristics)"

History of writing in Antiquity

Mesopotamia, the ancient region of the Middle East, is recognized as the place where the beginnings of writing took place, which later gave rise to our current alphabetic system.

This process could be carried out due to the multilingual and multicultural context that was characteristic of the area around the 4th millennium B.C. This is because that historical moment allowed the convergence of different ethnicities. For the history of writing it was especially important

the combination of Semitic languages ​​with the language of the Sumerians, that was transmitted by means of pictograms that represented the objects.

• You may be interested: "The 6 stages of Prehistory"

Cuneiform writing

The latter, the Sumerians, are credited with creating cuneiform writing. And this is so because his pictograms were not simple graphic representations but they transmitted messages in a systematic way with linguistic value.

In addition, it is called “cuneiform writing” since, initially, the pictograms were made on clay tablets and by using wedges (pieces of wood or metal with a point and an edge that are used to break or make incisions). In fact, the word "wedge" comes from the Latin cuneus, and that is where the term "cuneiform" has been derived.

Although the Sumerian language did not survive, cuneiform writing was a technique adopted by different Indo-European and non-Indo-European groups. For example, it was recovered by the Babylonians, but it also served to write languages ​​such as Akkadian and Elamite. It was used by the Persians (people of Indo-European origin originally settled in Iran), Hurrians (Mitanni people of Northern Mesopotamia), Hittites (people of the Anatolian peninsula, one of the Middle East).

Thus, writing as a technique, and clay tablets together with wedges, as the main tools, spread throughout Asia Minor, Syria and surrounding areas. It is estimated that cuneiform writing was used for three and a half millennia and the last record of a cuneiform tablet is from 75 AD (Ferreiro, 1994).

Later and through different historical events related to the way in which human settlements have been generated; cultural diversity and linguistic mixing made it possible for the writing system initiated by the Sumerians came into the hands of the Hellenic peoples.

• Related article: "The development of literacy: theories and intervention"

Origins of the alphabet

The Greeks inherited from the Phoenicians and / or the Canaanites an ordered set of signs and symbols also associated with a name and a sound (known as the "acrophony principle").

This ordered set of signs and symbols was assimilated and adapted by the Greeks for their own purposes. Specifically, it is the writing system called “protocananeo” (from the Bronze Age), which has been recognized as the paradigm from which the Phoenician alphabet was developed, which in turn laid the foundations for the development of the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets, among others.

Writing, reading and literacy

The writing system that we know as the alphabet is then the result of a multi-literacy of the peoples conquered by the inhabitants of Ancient Greece, and arises as a result of the rich cultural exchange and linguistic.

This means that the scribes of the time had strongly mixed alphabets, they worked, used and mastered more than one language. Another consequence was that these alphabets were administered and distributed according to social systems, which is visible, for example, in the process of secularization of writing (when it stopped being a practice reserved for religious cults).

That is why inevitably, the history of writing systems is linked to the history of literacy, inasmuch as the latter is the process by which the speeches that must be written are controlled, used and distributed (Ferreiro, 1994). Furthermore, insofar as writing and texts do not exist without material support, the history of writing is also the history of reading, a question that has recently been addressed by different linguists and historians.

Literacy followed a process of systematization and expansion that had different characteristics in the following historical moments of Western civilization, in a close relationship with print culture, the transmission of knowledge and education as fundamental practices and values ​​for development.

Bibliographic references:

• Ferreiro, E. (1994). Diversity and the literacy process: from celebration to awareness. Latin American Reading Magazine. 15(3): 2-11.
• Laporte, J.P. (2012). Review of "History of reading and writing in the Western world" by Martins Lyons. Information, culture and society magazine. 27: 123-135.