The Development Of Ancient Systems Of Writing In Iraq And Egypt :: essays research papers

The Development of antique Systems of Writing in Iraq and EgyptAncient systems of indite in the Middle East arose when people require amethod for remembering important information. In both Ancient Iraq and AncientEgypt each of the stages of typography, from pictograms to ideograms tophonetograms, evolved as a response to the hold to submit much complex ideas.Satisfaction of this need gave us the two more or less famous forms of ancient theme,cuneiform from ancient Iraq, and hieroglyphics from ancient Egypt. Both of theseforms of writing evolved and their use spread to other peoples even after theoriginators of the scripts had passed on.Some of the oldest writing found in the Middle East dates from 8000 to 3000B.C. This corresponds to the approximate time catamenia that the people of theregion went from living a nomadic life to colony in villages and tradingamong themselves. When trading large or varying types of commodities you need amethod for recording. To meet this need developed a image system for therecording of financial data. These tokens were of varying shapes for variousthings, two to collar centimetres in size, and used for enumeration and keepingtrack of goods and labour.These tokens eventually had to be stored so they wouldnt be misplaced orlost. To secure them, they were placed in opaque clay envelopes. To paint a picturewhat was inside the envelope markings were made on it, eventually someonerealized that all you had to do was mark on the clay what was in the envelopeand you discard the tokens alto repulseher. With this major development we get thefirst writing on clay tablets.In Ancient Mesopotamia the well-nigh readily available material for writing onwas clay. When writing on clay first arose, the scribe would try to make anartistic original of what he was referring to. This is a logical firststep in writing as if you wanted to record that you had three sheep, you woulddraw a photograph of a sheep and then add to the picture so me marking to indicatethat 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 epitomise a method of communicating an event or message. They also " lead to truewriting through a process of selection and organization." As people wanted towrite more down and in a faster method, the pictograms lost their artistic lookand took on a more "stylised representation of an object by making a hardly a(prenominal) marksin the clay . . . ." The writing was eventually written in "horizontal lines