The origin of writing: how it arose and what was its historical evolution

Right now, I'm typing in front of my computer. I follow, then, a writing process that, for us, is something everyday and has nothing exceptional or strange about it. Indeed; We are faced with this task daily, just as our ancestors have been doing for millennia.

But do we know what was the origin of this (exclusively) human manifestation? Where do we find the first writing testimonies? And, what motivated the human being to leave his ideas in writing? Join us on this fascinating journey to the origins of writing, in which we will try to answer all these questions.

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The origin of writing: Mesopotamia or Egypt?

There are still debates among experts about which is the cradle of writing. Specifically, the possibilities are limited to two places: Mesopotamia and Egypt.

"Mesopotamia" is the name given to the valley formed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and would more or less correspond to the current countries of Iran and Iraq. The Greek word to designate the region,

Mesopotamia, literally means "between rivers". Indeed, in the fertile valley that stretched between both river courses, important civilizations, which owed part of their extraordinary culture to the first stable settlements.

With the appearance of agriculture, human groups settle definitively in a territory. Mesopotamia, with its fertile lands, suitable for cultivation and cattle raising, stands as one of the best places for the emergence of the first populations.

One of these civilizations were the Sumerians that, from the IV millennium a. C., left written testimonies. These writings used the cuneiform alphabet and were made on wet clay tablets in which incisions were made with a sharp pen or awl. The clay dried up and, in this way, these written manifestations have survived to the present day.

This first cuneiform writing consisted of pictograms: that is, each graphism corresponded to a syllable. One of the oldest cuneiform manifestations is the Kish tablet, made around 3,500 BC. c. on limestone. It is, therefore, three centuries prior to what is known as the "Narmer palette", in which the first Egyptian hieroglyphs are found.

Thus, we would have the testimony that Mesopotamian writing is much older than Egyptian. However, in 1998 samples of proto-hieroglyphic writing were discovered in Abydos, which would indeed be contemporary with cuneiform, which only fuels the controversy.

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A purely administrative origin

The writing was born as a practical solution to the need to keep records of goods and commercial exchanges. The first Sumerian documents are inventories of products, essential in an eminently agricultural society. Later, writing was also applied to the codification of laws; a good example is the Code of Hammurabi, engraved in cuneiform on a black basalt stele that is preserved in the Louvre Museum. The stela collects the first legislative record, and deals with issues such as robbery, adultery or homicide.

We will have to wait until the III millennium BC. c. to find the first strictly literary expression: the one known as Gilgamesh poem, the Akkadian account of a Sumerian myth that is the first example of written literature in history.

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language and alphabet

It is necessary to make a point: alphabet is not the same as language. An alphabet is a system of symbols and spellings that serve to express a language in writing. Through an alphabet it is possible to transcribe an indefinable number of languages. A very clear example would be our western alphabet; With it we can write in Spanish, but also in English, German, Swedish, French, etc.

Therefore, if we go back to cuneiform writing, we have that, despite the fact that it was originally the exclusive system of the Sumerian language, it was later used in many cultures. In fact, cuneiform became the "official" writing of the Mesopotamian civilizations. Thus, the Akkadians (who spoke a Semitic language), the Hittites and the Persians used the cuneiform system to translate their languages ​​into writing. This, of course, entailed a series of problems: it was often necessary to alter the original characters to transcribe sounds that did not exist in Sumerian.

Cuneiform writing is one of the longest-lived in history. It was used without interruption since the dawn of the Sumerian civilization, in the 4th millennium BC. C., until the first century AD. c. Specifically, the last cuneiform writing of which there is evidence dates from the year 75 of our era. At that time, this writing system was already completely displaced by the Greek and Latin alphabet, which we will talk about later.

vestiges that speak

It is estimated that the genus Homo began to develop oral language about 100,000 years ago, perhaps based on gestural communication, which later ended up being consolidated in spoken language.

By its very oral nature, it is much more difficult to date the origin of speech than of writing. However, much progress has been made in this field; through fossil remains of human skulls, paleoneurology can study the most developed brain areas and measure, in this way, the linguistic capacity of the individual. The written remains, for their part, are much more precise since, through the archaeological context and Using techniques such as carbon-14 dating, boundaries can be more accurately established. chronological.

Rawlinson, the cliff and the cuneiform characters

The first findings of cuneiform writing occurred in the 17th century, when Pietro della Valle discovered in 1621 some tablets in the remains of the city of Persepolis. Later, in 1700, Thomas Hyde, from the University of Oxford, coined the term "cuneiform" to refer to this writing system, referring to the wedge shape that the characters presented. But it would be necessary to wait until the 19th century (specifically, 1802), for the first interpretations of this writing to be made. That year, Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1775-1853) presented a first study to the Royal Society of Göttingen, which was later completed by authors such as Emile Burnouf.

More famous was the case of Henry Rawlinson, a British army officer who, in 1835, dared to access the cliff of the Zagros Mountains (Iran) where an enormous relief of King Darius I was carved into the rock, surrounded by writing cuneiform. The colossal dimensions of the work (15 meters high and 25 meters long) and its difficult location meant that no one dared to examine it. Rawlinson plucked up his courage and managed to climb down the cliff and extract a copy of the characters. The text was written in three languages: Elemite, Babylonian, and Old Persian, which made it easy to translate, since the latter it was an alphabetic language and therefore much easier to interpret (the other two had syllabic structure). That is why these reliefs are known as "the Persian Rosetta stone".

The “original” Rosetta stone

Why are the reliefs of the Zagros Mountains known as the "Persian Rosetta Stone"? Because, a decade before Rawlinson, in 1822, Jean-François Champollion, a young French historian, had found the key to decipher the enigmatic Egyptian hieroglyphics. This key was a basalt stela, found in 1799 near Rosetta during the campaign of Napoleon in Egypt, which contained a text written in hieroglyphic characters, demotic and Greek ancient. From the latter, Champollion was able to decipher the other two. Previously, the Rosetta stone had already aroused enormous interest in European scholarly circles; Thomas Young published some of his conclusions in 1818, four years before Champollion's complete translation.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are a unique and highly complex writing system, as they consists of both ideograms and phonograms. The former function as literal transcriptions of an object, but they can also serve as determiners; that is, they determine to which class a word belongs. On the other hand, phonograms collect sounds, which can be uniliteral or alphabetic (one sound per sign) or biliteral (two sounds). To further complicate matters, the ancient Egyptian language did not include vowels in its writing, which is common in archaic languages. For this reason, and to be able to pronounce the words, the Egyptologists agreed that they would be read with the letter "e". Now you understand the reason why there are so many words in ancient Egypt that contain this vowel: nefer (beauty, beautiful) or but (home).

The ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were basically found in temples and tombs; that is, in sacred locations. In fact, the word "hieroglyphic" is composed of the Greek words wounds (sacred) and glyphein (engrave, chisel). From this sacred script he went to hieratic, which adapted the hieroglyphs and simplified them for use in daily activities such as state bureaucracy or accounts. Finally, the last manifestation of ancient Egyptian writing is found in the demotic, which corresponds to the late period and has a clear Greek influence.

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The Phoenician alphabet and the end of archaic writing

The exclusively phonetic and uniliteral alphabet (which we still use) it appeared in Chaldea around the year 1,500 a. c. It was the Phoenicians (who were located in present-day Lebanon) who exported this type of alphabet to the rest of Europe, through their trade routes. The Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet and introduced new spellings to transcribe sounds that did not exist. Thus, around the year 800 a. c. the Greek alphabet is born, from which both the Latin and the Cyrillic descend. The first is the one still in use in our Western civilization, while the second is still used in countries like Russia and Bulgaria.