Writing was developed independently several times in different places and both the writing materials and the types of script show great variation. The earliest true writing developed in southern Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium bc Uruk culture. The writing material was clay (see clay tablets) which were first inscribed and later impressed with a stylus to produce the characteristic wedgeshaped signs which have given the name cuneiform to this script. The earliest signs were pictograms (‘picture writing’, in which the signs represent stylized pictures of the objects in question), but these rapidly developed into ideograms (with the signs being used to indicate not only the original object, but also associated objects or concepts). By the succeeding Jemdet Nasr phase a phonetic element was present, with signs representing a sound as well as an object or idea. The fully developed cuneiform was a syllabic script, with a separate sign for each syllable, but it retained numerous ideograms for use as determinatives (signs used to indicate the classificatory group of a word spelt out in syllabic signs, e.g. a name of a deity would be accompanied by the determinative for deity). Some 2000 cuneiform signs appear in early tablets and even the ‘slimmed-down’ script of the Babylonian period had between six and seven hundred, of which about 300 were still ideograms. In spite of its manifest awkwardness, cuneiform — perhaps because of its primacy as a writing system — was used remarkably widely (throughout western Asia) and over a remarkably long period (about 3000 years). Initially developed to write Sumerian, it was adapted in the mid-3rd millennium bc to write the Semitic Akkadian. It was later used for a range of other Semitic languages inside and outside Mesopotamia, and for other languages in far-flung regions, including Elamite and later Persian in Iran, Hittite and Urartian in Anatolia. Perhaps as early as the earliest Uruk tablets are examples of the probably related ProtoElamite script of Iran. The Egyptian hiero glyphic script, used for inscriptions on stone, painting on walls and subsequently also writing with a rush pen on papyrus, appears almost as early (well before 3000 bc). There is dispute as to whether the Egyptians developed writing independently or whether the art was diffused from Mesopotamia. The Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley had a writing system of its own, dated to the second half of the 3rd millennium bc; it is found almost exclusively on stamp seals and seal impressions. It has not been deciphered, but as it has nearly 400 symbols, it is assumed to be a syllabic script, since pictographic or ideographic scripts have thousands of symbols and alphabetic ones rarely more than 40. The first true alphabet, with signs for individual letters, seems to have developed in the Levant. There are some indications that this took place in the first half of the 2nd millennium bc, but the first clear evidence comes from Ugarit in the mid-2nd millennium, where an alphabetic script of 32 letters was in use; simplified cuneiform symbols were used. Over the succeeding centuries a modified alphabet of 22 letters was developed and, largely through the travels of the Phoenicians, it spread throughout the Mediterranean to the Greeks and other groups. The Phoenician alphabet is in fact ancestral to most of the alphabets in use today, including Greek, Roman, Arabic and Hebrew. In China writing developed independently, first appearing on oracle bones of the Shang dynasty. They are inscribed in fully developed Chinese characters. The Chinese still use this ideographic script, which employs tens of thousands of symbols, of which 30005000 are in relatively common use. In Europe the only pre-classical writing occurs in the Aegean in the 2nd millennium bc the hieroglyphic and Linear A scripts of the Minoans, as yet undeciphered, and the Linear B of the Mycenaeans, used to record an early form of Greek. The use of clay tablets as the writing material suggests that the Aegean writing system was derived from western Asia, where such usage had a long history before the 2nd millennium BC. The development of writing in the Americas was restricted in extent and scope. It occurred only in Mesoamerica and falls into two main groups the glyphic writing of the Maya and related groups, found in inscriptions carved on monuments (see calendar), and the pictographic writing of Post-Classic groups such as the Mixtecs and Aztecs, found on manuscripts of bark or deerskin known as codices (see Codex). It is interesting to study the context in which writing arose in different areas. In Mesopotamia it was almost certainly developed to cope with the complex bookkeeping requirements of the temple communities, and a high proportion of Mesopotamian tablets of all periods are administrative documents. The Aegean Linear A and B scripts clearly served the same function in the Minoan and Mycenaean palace organization. An administrative origin could be argued also for Egyptian and Harappan writing, although the evidence is less impressive in these cases. In other parts of the world, however, the context in which writing was developed seems to be ritual this appears to be the case both for the Chinese oracle bones and for the elaborate calendrical records of the Maya.
The Macmillan dictionary of archaeology, Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1983Copied