Part Four
The first written language was the Sumerian cuneiform. Writing mainly consisted of records of numbers of sheep, goats, cattle, and quantities of grain. Eventually, clay tablets were used as a writing surface and were marked with a reed stylus to produce the writing.
Thousands of such clay tablets have been found in the Sumerian city of Uruk. The earliest Sumerian writing consists of pictures of the objects mentioned such as sheep or cattle. Eventually, the pictures became more abstract and were to consist of straight lines that looked like wedges.
Part Five
The earliest cuneiform was an accounting system consisting of pictograms representing commodities such as sheep and a number. The clay tablets found might for example simply state “ten sheep”. Such writing has its limitations and would not be regarded as a complete writing system.
A complete writing system is only developed with the process of monetization. This occurs when the symbol ceases to represent an object and begins to represent a spoken sound, which in early cuneiform would be a word. This process was assessed when the symbols which initially looked very like the object they represented gradually became more abstract and less clearly related to an object.
However while the symbol became more closely connected to words, it was words dealing with objects, such as sheep, birds, or pots. It was still not possible to write more abstract ideas such as father, running, speech, or foreigner.
The solution to this problem was known as the rebus principle. Words with the same or similar pronunciation to an abstract word could be used to represent the abstract word. The sign for the eye could be used to represent the word “I”. The sign for deer could represent the word “dear”.
Which word is referred to by the picture is decided by an additional sign. Pictographs that originally represented a word began to represent the sound of the word. The rebus principle is used to represent abstract words in all word writing systems in Sumer, Egypt, China, and in the Aztec and Mayan writing in central America.
Part Six
The Rebus principle lead to cuneiform becoming a form of logo-syllabic writing consisting of both logograms and syllabic writing. The effect of the change from logographic to logo-syllabic writing was substantial. Logographic writing cannot produce normal prose and is restricted to nouns, numbers, names, and adjectives.
The vast majority of early Sumerian writing consisted of bureaucratic records of products received or products distributed. Only when syllabic writing was introduced into cuneiform did it become possible to write prose such as myths and royal propaganda.
The next major development in writing in the old world was the development of the alphabet. The alphabet was developed out of Egyptian hieroglyphs which contained 24 signs for 24 Egyptian consonants. About 1700 BC Semites who knew Egyptian hieroglyphs began making certain changes in their writing system.
They put the letters in a particular sequence and gave them simple names to assist learning and ease of memory. They also dropped the logograms and other signs used in hieroglyphs and just kept the Egyptian consonants and restricted the signs to those for individual consonants.
Finally, they introduced vowels into their alphabet. Alphabets were soon to spread over most of the world as they provide both flexibility and simplicity for a writing system.