ROOTS OF WRITING (Or, Live with Rebus and Kelly Show )

1. ROOTS OF WRITING(Or, Live with Rebus and Kelly Show) Ancient Studies

2. Around 3500 B.C., as cities were growing across Mesopotamia, a writing system (a representation of spoken language) emerged. Mesopotamian writing was non-alphabetic (like Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese ideograms). • The first use of making marks on clay tablets probably was for accounting—keeping track of numbers for inventory and sales. Eventually, the writing evolved into more diverse uses and became a more complex system of signs.

3. The first script was pictographic, each sign representing an object.Try pictographic writing for yourself. In your class notes, draw a picture of a star (to represent a star in the night sky).

4. Does your star look something like this? Or maybe this?

5. Over time, scribes transformed the pictographs into something that looks a bit more like writing as we know it. • Here is the evolution of the cuneiform for “star”:

6. Another example: Foot

7. Picture-writing is not very efficient, however, because thousands of images would be needed to communicate all the possible ideas. Mesopotamian scribes solved this problem by attaching more than one meaning to the individual picture-signs. Soon scribes started applying the rebus principle to these signs. A sign could be read for its sound value rather than its meaning. The sign then became a phonogram (sound sign) or, when grouped together with other signs, an ideogram (idea sign) rather than a pictogram.

8. For example the sign X could mean ‘eye' or the sound ‘i'. It could thus have the following possible meanings: eye; I = first person; aye = yes, ‘i'. A picture of a thin man could mean ‘thin', i.e. not fat, or the sound ‘thin'. Combine that with the sign for ‘king' which could mean ‘the king is thin' or ‘thinking'. From 3000 B.C. this writing system is found across Mesopotamia.

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10. As signs drawn on clay were increasingly used to represent sounds rather than actual objects it was less important to draw them as pictures. Instead of dragging a piece of sharpened reed across the damp clay, scribes started to impress the end of the reed into the clay at an angle. This created little lines which look like wedges. Signs began to be made up of little wedge strokes and, since the Latin word for wedge is cuneus, this form of writing is known today as cuneiform – “wedge-like.”

11. From around 2350 B.C. cuneiform was adapted to write languages other than Sumerian. Increasingly Akkadian became the main written language of Mesopotamia while cuneiform was adopted in surrounding regions to write languages such as Hittite and Elamite.

13. Schools and Schooling Literacy was not widespread in Mesopotamia. The scribes had to undergo training, and then became entitled to call themselves dubsar (scribe). They became members of a privileged group who could look down on their fellow citizens. Generally it was only boys who learnt to be scribes, though a few female scribes are known. The patron goddess of scribes was the goddess Nisiba. In later times her place was taken by the god Nabu of Borsippa. His symbol was the writing instrument or stylus. Life in a Babylonian school is presented in a group of Sumerian literary tablets (composed around 1700 B.C.). These became part of scribal training and were copied and recopied down to around 650 B.C.

14. Schooling began around the ages of 5 or 6 in the e-dubba, ‘tablet-house'. The headmaster was called ummia and he was helped by the adda e-dubba‘father of the tablet house'. The main teaching and discipline was in the hands of an older student. All these people had to be flattered or bribed with gifts to avoid a beating. Archaeologists have not found any building which can be identified with certainty as a school. It is possible that students were taught in the courtyards of houses or perhaps temples.

16. Sources • http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/writing/story/sto_set.html • Ouaknin, Marc-Alain. Mysteries of the Alphabet. New York: Abbeville, 1999. Story

17. More Sources • http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/staff/resources/background/bg18/home.html • Hammurabi’s Code excerpt from Painted Rock to Printed Page by Frances Rogers (NY: J.B. Lippincott, 1960)