Writing And Reading

I am sending you messages on this page. You are reading what I have written. You may not know or care, but this act had its origin over 10,000 years ago. I care, so I am sharing the story with you. I care because I really love being able to communicate with you. I am blown away by the tortuous trail we had to follow to achieve what we think of as a simple act.

Forget about recent innovations like computers and the internet. These events have changed our lives, my life, in an astoundingly short time. How we got here, though, was an agonizing evolutionary process, spread across wide stretches of our world and over many centuries of time. We know most about the development of the Sumerian language system which is the one related to the one we use in our daily lives. That story goes back to the eighth millennium before the Common Era.

Recorded communication (found in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq) by archeologists,) initially centered around our movement of goods, using physical clay objects, shapes, varying by product, stored in clay boxes. Over time these physical shapes (called tokens) were represented by different marks (symbols) made with a stylus on a flat clay tablet. These were like the Cuneiform symbols ((or pictographs,) commonly called hieroglyphics) well known of the Egyptian records.

This evolutionary process added indications of quantities and, finally, the innovation that was transformational.

Increasing complexity in the marketing systems dictated that the merchants name had to be inscribed on the tablets. This was communicated by symbols of things which had the oral sound of the merchants name when spoken. This meant the spoken word was now expressed in written form. Writing as we know it had its genesis.

I am sure I am confusing you. Let me summarize. We have tokens from 8000 B.C.E. to 3500 B.C.E., pictographs from 3500 B.C.E. to 3000 B.C.E. and phonetic symbols being used 3000 B.C.E to 1500 B.C.E., letters standing for individual sounds.

This kind of usage spread to areas outside Sumer. Translation of names in phonetic form spread in the Near East to many linguistic groupings, appearing in the Indus valley, among Semitics, the Caucasians, and in Crete and mainland Greece (1400-1200 B.C.E.).

The invention of the alphabet is thought to have occurred around 1500 B.C.E among the proto Sinaitic-proto-Canaanite peoples. This involved departing from syllable-based usage and hundreds of symbols, to usage based on the first letter of the word they stood for (in previous pictographs), and only 22 of these letters, streamlining the written language.

This usage had been adopted by the Etruscans in Italy. When the Romans conquered the Etruscans, they added this to their practice and carried it to every part of their empire.

Fast-forward this saga to our Middle Ages. In the year 1439, the printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg. He decided to launch his venture by printing the Bible (available in Latin). He printed 200 in three years. This was very speedy compared with the traditional method by hand which took a year for every copy. But in this era of illiteracy, buyers were few and far between. Gutenberg died bankrupt and penniless.

The buyer of his invention moved to Venice, then the center of the western commercial world. This international coming and going stimulated interest in the exchange of written information for various purposes. Success with the printing press spurred others into the business. Suddenly books and printed news were available cheaply and on a grand scale, fostering the world-wide exchange of ideas and improving literacy. Some people view this development as the single act which fueled the Renaissance.

Charlemagne of France is reported to have standardized the alphabet to the form we have now. He also introduced lower-case letters, the kind we are mostly using here.

Where we are going from here remains for us to imagine. In spite of the images all around us, the printed word, with or without paper, still persists. What will come next?

What stories do you want to tell?