It's pervasive. You see it everywhere. In fact, you're looking at it right now.
We see letters that form words, words that make phrases, and sentences that inform us. Today, we'll begin our study of this amazing human invention and see how it came to be and how it advanced civilization. Transcribing spoken words is only one way to record thoughts.
That is, writing does not have to be alphabetic. It can be pictographic, with symbols representing images. The way public toilets are identified with male and female symbols all across the globe.
And even that is evolving now too. But symbols are just as valid a way of expressing a thought as any word written in an alphabet. If we jump back, oh, 30,000 years to the time of pre-alphabetic writing, people communicated using pictures.
Today we can still see their handiwork painted on the walls and ceilings of caves. Pictographs are pictures of things. ball, a flower, or a bison.
There's no doubt about what it is because that's what it looks like. Prehistoric man created cave paintings by mixing all sorts of things like water, soil, and plant juice to make paint. and by building brushes from sticks, leaves, small stones, and animal hair.
There are multiple theories for why prehistoric man created cave paintings. One theory is that they painted representations of past events. Another theory is that they used cave paintings as a way to teach hunting techniques. Yet another theory is that they created cave paintings because they thought that by painting a desired event, that event might actually happen? Well today we still use pictographs.
We can call these contemporary pictographs. They are visual representations of the actual thing. There's no doubt of what this is when you look at it. time between 30,000 BC and 3500 BC there was a shift.
Now they were still using pictures of things but these pictographs became a little bit more involved. They created pictures of creatures. what we now refer to as ideographs because they could take on more complex meanings. So for instance the skull and crossbones didn't necessarily mean you were going to be seeing a skull and crossbones. It could mean danger.
It could mean pirates. It could mean poison. So it depended on the context or where it was when you actually saw the thing.
And of course we still use ideographs today. Even consider this Nike swoosh. It's really just a check mark. But yeah, we associate Nike with all sorts of things that are athletic. Not only from the Olympics, but to the quality of the garments that they make.
And of course if we get into religious symbols, there's a whole discourse that can happen when we start to talk about our ideologies. Currency symbols too. The US dollar symbol, the Euro, the pound, the yen.
These are all symbols. These are all ideographs. To get from symbols to written language there had to first be a need and then a spark that resulted in great advancement.
I suppose similar to what's happened in our world in the past 30 years with the digital revolution. of the oldest and most enduring structures in Western civilization is the alphabet. So where did man and civilization, I'm sorry, so where did civilization begin?
Civilization, and the term refers to where we finally have cities grow up and tribal life breaking apart. It happened in Mesopotamia. Where is that? So Mesopotamia, if we look at this world map, we need to go all the way over here to the Middle East, over near Africa, Saudi Arabia, Sinai Peninsula.
So let's zero in on that and we can see this area where we've got Africa in the lower corner and we've got the Middle East on the right. And these two areas, Egypt with its hieroglyphs and this area of Mesopotamia, this is actually where the first dynasties and the first civilizations rose up. This is the cradle of civilization. So it was along the Tigris and Euphrates River in the Sumar area that we first saw these large cities and then followed by the Egyptian kingdoms along the Nile. People navigated the rivers for food and trade and harnessed the water for farming.
Alphabetic writing originated in the desert south of the Holy Lands, spreading through Semitic communities in Sinai and the desert south of Palestine. The ancient Mesopotamians, or the early Sumerians, wrote using ideograms, graphic symbols representing ideas or objects, as far back as 3500 BC. And by 3100 BC, a codified writing system was actually in place.
So here is this Mesopotamia. We can see from this map, it gives us an idea of the geography of the area and it's called the Fertile Crescent. This whole area that sweeps around where these mountains are. And if we can see then that this area of Sumar is really perfectly situated for human settlement and growth because it has these two rivers that are coming together, the Tigris and the Euphrates. They join up down here in Sumar.
So although the lower valley where the Tigris and the Euphrates meat was dry and it didn't have extensive natural resources, especially plant variety, the conditions for growing and harvesting food were ripe. It was fed by heavy rains from all of those surrounding mountains above it, and the water would rush down the mountains to flood the lower valleys, bringing invaluable soil and water it needed to grow crops on a huge scale. food was produced there, some of the cities of ancient Sumar grew to over 100,000 and possibly over 200,000 inhabitants.
Along with the rain, the water that came into the valley brought an abundance of silt from which the people made clay. Lots and lots of clay. Here's an idea of what their civilization may have looked like. This building that you see off on the far right is called a ziggurat and this is actually a depiction of the city of Lagos.
And this is... The ziggurats served as the religious center of the city-states of Sumar, and each ziggurat was dedicated to the city's gods and deities. Priests managed the ziggurats, but kings too ran and served in ceremonies that were intended to bring about the city-state good fortune, good crops, and protection from invaders.
the skill of the stone carvers were seen on the great government buildings and the religious temples their craftsmanship is something to be marveled at even today this assyrian stone culture is a picture of Lamassu, a deity that's a combination of three animals, or actually two animals and a human head. So we have a human head, a bull or a lion's body, and eagle wings. The Sumerians were the first humans to harness the power of water. This ruin, built on the hillside, was constructed so water ran through it.
This was the first civilization to have indoor plumbing. If you have a hard time imagining what this ruin may have looked like back in the day, here's an artist's rendition. Perhaps it was the Garden of Eden. These are the same hills that archaeologists have found what they believed to be the ruins of Noah's Ark, which seem to be confirmed with today's carbon dating.
But back to the silk from all the river runoff. The Sumerians found an excellent use for it, aside from making clay pots and vases. They used it to record knowledge. They made tablets from the clay, documents, and lined the walls of the very first archives and libraries with knowledge.
The marks they pressed into the clay are called cuneiform writing, the earliest known form of writing dating back as early as 3500 BC. The There are different theories on how cuneiform developed. The first and most popular is that pictograms, or drawings representing actual things, were the basis of cuneiform writing. Early pictograms resembled the objects they represented. But through repeated use over time, they began to look simpler, even abstract.
These marks eventually became wedge-shaped and formed the cuneiform script, which allowed people to convey sounds and abstract concepts. Cuneiform was written on damp clay that was formed into tablets using a blunt reed. The reed acted like a pen or a pencil and is often referred to as a stylus. The impressions left by the the stylus were wedge-shaped, which gave rise to the name cuneiform. Cuneiform actually means wedge-shaped.
The clay tablets were left outside to dry, or they were fired in kilns. Different forms of cuneiform exist, just like different forms of language exist today. For humans, writing meant a huge technological and cultural revolution. Information was at last to be recorded in a more secure way instead of just by human memory. This is a rare messenger tablet dated about 3500 BC with a list of provisions supplied to the messenger for a journey, such as bread, dates, oil, and wine.
The messenger tablets are always small and highly valued, for the writing upon them is finer and better than tablets of any other type. This tablet is for a butcher's bill for one large fat kid, one sheep, three lambs, seven she goats, and other animals killed for market and delivered on the 14th day of the month. The date and the total of the bill are written on the edges.
Uniform writing changed over time. In this diagram you can see how the symbols were pictographs in 3500 BC but much more abstract markings or ideographs 3,000 years later. Here's another example.
So some of the key points about writing being a major contribution to Western civilization, it was because particularly in Phoenicia, where trade dominated, writing allowed merchants to keep ledgers and records of their transactions and gave people proof of their purchases using a common set of symbols. Writing made it possible for people to send messages with couriers to faraway lands without actually traveling themselves. And writing allowed people to send messages to faraway lands without actually traveling themselves. And writing allowed people to send messages to faraway lands without actually traveling themselves. And writing allowed people to send messages to faraway lands without actually traveling themselves.
And writing allowed people to send messages to faraway lands without actually traveling themselves. And writing allowed people to send messages to faraway lands without actually traveling themselves. And writing allowed people to send messages to faraway lands without actually traveling themselves. And writing allowed people to send people to pass on their accumulated knowledge to future generations. From that fertile crescent, cuneiform writing moved north across the ancient Near East and into Phoenicia.
Phoenicia is this area right between well it's Arabia and Egypt but this waterway or this edge here which is now Lebanon was Phoenicia. They were seafaring empire based on trade and carry the alphabetic writing west, especially into Greece, where it first was evidenced around 850 BC. Everywhere it went it promoted literacy, learning, and law, and so did the supposition that ideograms were the way to write. There are many cultures, many styles of cuneiform writing, and many languages that existed within this Mediterranean region at this time. And as you might imagine, this led to confusion.
There was a real need to make financial transactions clear to everyone. The solution came as a set code of symbols that everyone could understand. So there, in Phoenicia, for the very first time ever, we see names given to the letters themselves. Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Delef. In the shapes of the letters themselves, it's possible to see their figurative origin as an aid to memory.
A is formed by the way it looked because it looks like an ox. Turn it sideways. And it has horns.
And aliph is the Phoenician word for ox. B, Beth, is the Phoenician word for house, which was originally a rectangle divided in half as if it were an aerial drawing of a two-story room. All this was designed to help Phoenicians learn. A pictographic reminder of the alphabet's sounds, which make it much easier to use than the daunting variety of sounds. required in either cuneiform or hieroglyphic writing.
And so it was that the Phoenician alphabet became the first formal alphabet. Each symbol or letter was based on sound. When we sound something out phonetically, we're using the sounds of the letters to understand how the word is pronounced. Phoenicians gave us something else too, the word phonetic. The Phoenician alphabet has only 22 letters.
They're all consonants, no vowels. In much the same way we teach children the alphabet today by having them recite A for apple, B is for boy, C is for cat, the Phoenicians learned their ABGs with much similar mnemonics. A is for Aleph, B is for Beth, G is for Gimel, because their world was one of oxen and camels.