first development of scriptures

SUMERIA, EARLY EGYPT & WRITING

The Old World is a wider,
much more varied stage than the New.
By 6000 or 7000 B.C. there were already quasi-civilised communities,
appearing in various fertile regions of Asia and
in the Nile Valley.

At that time
north Persia and western Turkestan and south Arabia
were all more fertile than they are now, and there are traces
of very early communities
in these regions.

It is in lower Mesopotamia, however, and in Egypt
that there first appear cities, temples, systematic irrigation,
and evidences of a social organisation rising above the level of a mere barbaric village-town.

In those days the Euphrates and Tigris
flowed by separate mouths into the Persian Gulf,
and it was in the country between them that the Sumerians
built their first cities.

About the same time, for chronology is still vague,
the great history of Egypt was beginning.

These Sumerians
appear to have been a brownish people
with prominent noses.
They employed a sort of writing that has been deciphered,
and their language is now known.
They had discoverd the use of bronze and
they built great towerlike temples
of sundried brick.

The clay of this country is very fine;
they used it to write upon, and so it is that their inscriptions have been preserved to us.

They had cattle, sheep, goats and asses, but no horses.
They fought on foot in close formation, carrying spears and shields of skin.
Their clothing was of wool and they shaved their heads.

Each of the Sumerian cities seems generally
to have been an independent state with a god of its own
and priests of its own.

But sometimes
one city would establish an ascendancy over others
and exact tribute from their population.

A very ancient inscription at Nippur
records the 'empire,' the first recorded empire,
of the Sumerian city of Erech.

Its god
and its priest-king claimed an authority
from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea.

At first writing
was merely an abbreviated method of pictorial record.
Even before Neolithic times men were beginning to write.
The Azilian pictures to which we have already referred before show the beginning of the process.

Many of them record hunts and expiditions,
and in most of these the human figures are plainly drawn.
But in some the painter would not bother with heads and limbs;
he just indicated men by a vertical and one or
two transverse strokes.

From this
to a conventional cendensed picture-writing
was an easy transition.

In Sumeria,
where the writing was done on clay with a stick,
the dabs of the characters soon became unrecognisably unlike the things they stood for, but in Egypt where men painted on walls
and on strips of the papyrus reed {the first paper}
the likeness to the thing imitated
remained.

From the fact that the wooden styles used in Sumeria
made wedge-shaped marks the Sumerian writing is called cuneiform
{= wedge-shaped}.

An important step towards writing
was made when pictures were used to indicate not the thing represented but some similar thing.

In the rebus
dear to children of a suitable age, this is still done today?
We draw a camp with tents on a hill, and the child is delighted
to guess that this is the name
Kamphorst.

The Sumerian language was a language made up
of accumulated syllables rather like some contemporary Amerindian languages, and it lent itself very readily to this syllabic method of writing words expressing ideas that could not be conveyed
by pictures directly.

Egyptian writing
underwent parallel developments.
Later on, when foreign peoples with less distincly syllabled methods of speech were to learn and use these picture scrips,
they were to make those further modifications and simplifications that developed at last into
alphabetical writing.

All true alphabets of the later world
derived from a mixture of the Sumerian cuneiform and the Egyptian hieroglyphic {priest-writing}.

Later in China there was to develop
a conventionalised picture-writing, but in China it never got to the alphabetical stage.

The invention of writing
was of very great importance in the development of human societies.
It put agreements. laws, commandments on record.
It made a continuous historical consciousness
possible.

It is interesting to note
that in ancient Sumeria seals were greatly used.
A king or a nobleman or a merchant would have his seal often very artistically carved, and would impress it
on any clay document he wished
to authorise.

So close
had civilisation got to printing 6,000 years ago.
Then the clay was dried hard and became permanent.
For the myDi-reader must remember that in the land of Mesopotamia for countless years, letters, records and accounts were written
on comparatively
indestructable
tiles.

To that fact we owe
a great wealth of recovered
knowledge.

Also bronze, copper,
gold, silver and, as a precious rarity, meteoric iron were known
in both Sumeria and Egypt
at a very early stage.