History of Writing

The History of Writing


It is just over 50,000 years since the human forms evolved on earth. But the 'writing' began only very late. The development of languages or understanding through certain communication methods - may be just sounds in different recognizable forms - began again after tens of thousands of years. History of writing begins only after that, may be about 25,000 years back. Some sort of scribblings must have been the first writing. Certain excavations have shown some crude pictures on walls of caves. These scribblings were made with the help of sharp tools, perhaps sharp edges of rock pieces or stones. These might be the first 'writings' used to covey messages.

Since everybody could not do these 'writing', certain special powers were attributed to those who could do this. In every place this was the approach. The writers were attributed with some powers and were considered as God given gift. In all cultures, the learned and wise wrote. In India writing was considered as a gift given by "Brahma", who is considered as the creator. Other cultures also attributed to the creators like Nebo for Sumerians, Thoth for Egyptians, Allah for Arabs, etc. Now we consider writing as something evolved by humans as and when they found it useful.

The above fact is clear from the different styles and fonts of writing. The Greeks wrote alternately from right to left and then left to right, where as the Chinese wrote from top to bottom and from right to left. Japanese also write from top to bottom, but from left to right. Mexicans have it from bottom to top. Arabic and Urdu are written from right to left.

The need for writing started with the accumulation of knowledge by the human race. These knowledges were to be preserved and conveyed to others, for which writing became essential. These happened after several centuries since man came on earth. As could be seen from excavations lots of pictures were used for this purpose in the beginning. But later it became difficult because lot of pictures had to be grouped together to do this. Also these pictures could not convey the messages as expected. This difficulty, after many centuries led to the unification of spoken language and written symbols. Actually it was from here the art of writing started growing. Writing became more exact and easy to learn again after a few centuries. This led the emergence of many artistic forms of writing with punctuations, paragraphs and spaces. This slowly led to the art of 'calligraphy'.

As per the available records, the Egyptians are considered to be the first people to think of a way to say what they had in their mind. We know that the Egyptian civilization is one of the earliest and richest. This is indicated by the reminiscences such as pyramids and Sphinx. Their history of writing start with hieroglyphics – ideograms and then alphabetic writing.

Earlier to 4000 BC the Mesopotamian civilization existed. This is the land of the Bible. This part of the earth contained lots of clay than stones. So the people here made tablets of clay for writing. They used a pen called 'stylus', and their writings referred to as 'Cuneiform'. A collection of these tablets together is considered as the first book. The great epic 'Gilgamesh' by Hammurabi belonged to this period.

Tadmus was the person who 'invented' Greek alphabets, according to the Greeks,. The Greek alphabets has about 24 letters and the earlier ones were carved on stones or painted on pottery. 'Papyrus' was developed and used as a better writing material. Each developed language started to lend words to developing languages. For example the Greek language has donated many words to other languages , mainly to English. Greeks were very good at mathematics and astronomy.

The Roman script developed around 200 B.C. Latin, a very old and respected language, was being used by them. Symbols were used to represent letters and they wrote on stones. Their letters are the most widely used. There were famous writers and this helped them in excelling in different fields.

Another different script is Chinese which is nearly 5000 years old. The Chinese and Japanese people still use pictures to represent information. In the beginning the Chinese wrote on different available materials, like bones, shells, wood and bamboo. They later made paper in a crude form and were the first to use it for writing. This invention actually revolutionized the art of writing throughout the world.

Another civilization older than 4000 BC was the Indus civilization. The details about this civilization was discovered very late. People there wrote on soft stones and then baked it in furnace to preserve. They wrote on pottery, clay and copper tablets. Right to left was their way of writing, the language used by them is not yet known, as it died along with the civilization. It is gathered from excavations that by around 5000 B.C. India had more than 64 scripts.

The Aryans came from central Asia and spoke a language called Sanskrit. Sanskrit later served as the basic language and helped developing many other languages like Telugu, Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, etc. parallel to this in South India the Dravidian languages started developing. Tamil was the oldest among them.

Malayalam and others spoken languages developed later as regional and cultural differences existed within South India. More over the influence of Aryan culture also paved the way for the development of Malayalam language. It contains several Sanskrit and Tamil words. The grammar and other features are similar to the Sanskrit to a certain extent. Phonetic alphabets in Sanskrit developed around 7000 B.C. Oral imparting of knowledge was more prevalent in India and hence books came in at a very later stage.

All these indicate that the history of writing is incomplete, though from different parts of the world varying information provide certain pictures. What is available indicate that the history of writing is the history of human endeavor and discovery. Now writing has come a long way. It started as a means for communication and expression for man's ideas. Ideas cannot be retained for ever, it might disappear. But once it is put in black and white it stay forever-for the future generations. Writing started with cave scribblings, paintings, then came picture writing, alphabetic writing, printing, desktop publishing and now is used in computer communication. Future may bring in still new forms and ways of writing.