The Development Of Ancient Systems Of Writing In Iraq And Egypt

The Development of Ancient Systems of Writing in Iraq and Egypt

Ancient systems of writing in the Middle East arose when people needed a method for remembering important information. In both Ancient Iraq and Ancient

Egypt each of the stages of writing, from pictograms to ideograms to phonetograms, evolved as a response to the need to express more complex ideas.

Satisfaction of this need gave us the two most famous forms of ancient writing, cuneiform from ancient Iraq, and hieroglyphics from ancient Egypt. Both of these forms of writing evolved and their use spread to other peoples even after the originators of the scripts had passed on.

Some of the oldest writing found in the Middle East dates from 8000 to 3000

B.C. This corresponds to the approximate time period that the people of the region went from living a nomadic life to settlement in villages and trading among themselves. When trading large or varying types of commodities you need a method for recording. To meet this need developed a token system for the recording of financial data. These tokens were of varying shapes for various things, two to three centimetres in size, and used for enumeration and keeping track of goods and labour.

These tokens eventually had to be stored so they wouldn't be misplaced or lost. To secure them, they were placed in opaque clay envelopes. To indicate what was inside the envelope markings were made on it, eventually someone realized that all you had to do was mark on the clay what was in the envelope and you discard the tokens altogether. With this major development we get the first writing on clay tablets.

In Ancient Mesopotamia the most readily available material for writing on was clay. When writing on clay first arose, the scribe would try to make an artistic representation of what he was referring to. This is a logical first step in writing as if you wanted to record that you had three sheep, you would draw a picture of a sheep and then add to the picture some marking to indicate that you had three of them. Thus the earliest stage in writing arose, pictograms.

Pictograms, although not really writing in the modern sense of the term, do represent a method of communicating an event or message. They also "led to true writing through a process of selection and organization." As people wanted to write more down and in a faster method, the pictograms lost their artistic look and took on a more "stylised representation of an object by making a few marks in the clay . . . ." The writing was eventually written in "horizontal lines