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Writing. M emory. Alternatives to Writing. The invention of writing. Long before people learned to write, they made up stories People had to develop an accurate memory Stories could be preserved in their original form; they could be improved or expanded.
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The invention of writing • Long before people learned to write, they made up stories • People had to develop an accurate memory • Stories could be preserved in their original form; they could be improved or expanded
Can such oral literature be preserved? • If it is not transferred to a written medium, it can be irrevocably lost • E.g. a sudden catastrophic break in the life of the community-foreign conquests might easily, through massacre, enslavement, and mass deportation, wipe out the memory of what had been a shared inheritance
Invention of writing • The earliest written documents are records of the first advanced, centralized civilizations, those that emerged in the area we know as the Middle East • These documents contain commercial, administrative, political, and legal information
Origins of civilization • It was based on agriculture • It flourished in regions where the soil gave rich rewards: • Valley of the Nile –annual floods under the Egyptian sun • Valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, which flowed through the Fertile Crescent, a region centered on modern Iraq
Development of cities • Civilization begins with cities; the word itself is derived from a Latin word that means “citizen” • Thebes, Memphis in Egypt, Babylon, Nineveh in the Fertile Crescent • Cities were centers for the administration of the irrigated fields • Centers for government, religion, and culture
The beginning of civilization • Writing and cities • 3000 B.C. – the pharaohs of Egypt began to build their pyramids as well as to record their political acts and religious beliefs in hieroglyphic script • The Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians began to build the temples of Babylon and record their laws in cuneiform script on clay tablets
Where was writing first developed? • Region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers • 3300 B.C. –earliest texts • Characters were inscribed on tablets of wet clay with a pointed stick • The characters were pictographic • 2800 B.C. scribes began to use the wedge-shape end of the stick to make marks – the resulting script is known as cuneiform, from the Latin word cuneus, a wedge
Cuneiform • Efficient • It stayed in use through the vicissitudes of two millennia (Akkadians, Babylonians, etc) • It was on clay tablets and in cuneiform script that the great Sumerian epic poem Gilgamesh was written down – totally forgotten until modern excavators discovered the tablets and deciphered the script
Unlike cuneiform and hieroglyphic, this ancient writing system was destined to survive until the present day (22 signs for consonantal sounds)
Phoenician alphabet Who developed the script? • Phoenicians, the Semitic peoples of the Palestinecoast • The Phoenicians have left us no literary texts, but the Hebrews, another Semitic people, used the system to record their history in what Christians call the Old Testament
Mixed Writing R u hapi?
share stories • note financial transactions • record history • imagine the future • express love, hatred, humor or melancholy. • other reasons?
influences the ways we think • contributes to the way we learn • fosters personal development • connects us to others • promotes success in college and at work
Activity • In pairs, list as many different specific types of written communication that you can think of. (7 minutes)
Which of these have been around the longest, the most recent?
How do we communicate today? What impact have new technologies had on writing?
