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A Sumerian tablet with cylinder seal impression of a hunter with hunting dogs and boars. 3100-2900 BC. Uruk |
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A Sumerian Writing Tablet. |
Since the primordial time, spoken words and pictures have intermingled with each otheras a means of communication . Humans have used words to paint pictures verbally, and inversely have painted pictures to communicate an idea. This is why writing and graphic design are intimately interrelated. Yet there is a more profound relationship between the two from an artistic perspective. Both words and pictures are used in the act of creation; that is art. If texts are not primarily for creation but for communication, then writings, with their prescribed functions of educating and instructing, would seem to be only a secondary art form. Yet calligraphy, throughout its history, has had a curious relationship with art. Besides communicating the socio-cultural and scientific ideas of various civilizations into conceptual ideas, the nature and limitations of writing have sometimes influenced the form and direction of abstract art.
The first attempts at writing was by the Sumerian priesthood in about 3100 BC who designed simplified images of their temple properties on chunks of wet clay and marked the number of the items on that clay. This was a reliable accounting report — a message — for keeping track of the changes in the wealth of a temple. After allowing the wet clay to bake hard in the sun, these tablets conveyed a recorded graphic message to various stakeholders. Examples of this early system represents some of the earliest texts found in the Sumerian cities of Uruk and Jamdat Nasr around 3300 BCE. These tablets were the first manifestation of graphic design as a mean to conveying a conceptual message in a fast, simple and economic way1 .
In Sumer, at first the pictures of things represented those very same things ( these are called pictographs). Then certain pictures represented some ideas and concepts (these are called ideographs) and finally they represented sounds. The writing characters of the Sumerians were adopted by the East Semitic peoples of Mesopotamia and Akkadian became the first Semitic writing system that would be used by the Babylonians and Assyrians.
Egypt developed writing shortly after the Sumerians. Greeks called the Egyptian writing characters hieroglyphs in about 500 BC. The reason was that the Egyptian writing was mainly used for holy texts; hieros and glypho mean ‘sacred’ and ‘engrave’ in Greek. Egyptian legends attribute the invention of language to Taautos, from Byblos in Phoenicia, who was the father of tautology or imitation. He is also credited with with the first written characters in two millennium BC .
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| The Papyrus of Ani is a version of the Book of the Dead for the Scribe Ani. This vignette (small scene that illustrates the text) is Chapter for not letting Ani’s heart create opposition against him in the God’s Domain 2. (1240s BC) |
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Scribe’s exercise tablet with hieratic text on wood, related to Dynasty XVIII, reign of Amenhotep I, c. 1514-1493 BC. Text is an excerpt from The Instructions of Amenemhat II (Dynasty XII), and reads: “Be on your guard against all who are subordinate to you … Trust no brother, know no friend, make no intimates.
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| Merneptah Stele — also known as the Israel Stele or Victory Stele of Merneptah — is an inscription by the Ancient Egyptian king Merneptah (R;1213 to 1203 BC), which appears on the reverse side of a granite stele erected by the king Amenhotep III. It was discovered by Flinders Petrie in 1896 at Thebes. |
Most of the treasure of the ancient literature is written in Akkadian, the most ancient of Semetic languages, which is written in a logosyllabic cuneiform writing system of Sumerian origin. There were many other Semitic languages such as Amorite, Ugaritic and that of the Canaanites of Phoenicia . Many of these alphabets were derived from the Phoenician linear quasi-alphabet of 22 signs, first attested at Byblos and externally similar to the Proto-Byblian script. The Phoenician was the origin of the European alphabets, whereas all the Asiatic alphabets are derived from the Aramaic variants of the Phoenician.In fact many of the existing scripts such as Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew among others are derived from Phoenician characters. Greece in the 8th century BC adopted the Phoenician alphabet with very little variation. According to Herodotus:
The Phoenicians who came with Cadmus – amongst whom were the Gephyraei – introduced into Greece, after their settlement in the country, a number of accomplishments, of which the most important was writing, an art till then, I think, unknown to the Greeks. At first they used the same characters as all the other Phoenicians, but as time went on, and they changed their language, they also changed the shape of their letters. At that period most of the Greeks in the neighborhood were Ionians; they were taught these letters by the Phoenicians and adopted them, with a few alterations, for their own use, continuing to refer to them as the Phoenician characters – as was only right, as the Phoenicians had introduced them. The Ionians also call paper ‘skins’ – a survival from antiquity when paper was hard to get, and they did actually use goat and sheep skins to write on.
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Translation of the Phoenician text according to Sabatino Moscati:
To [our] Lady Ishtar. This is the holy place // which was made and donated // by TBRY WLNSH [= The faries Velianas] who reigns on // Caere [or: on the Caerites], during the month of the sacrifice // to the Sun, as a gift in the temple. He b//uilt an aedicula [?] because Ishtar gave in his hand [or: raised him with her hand] // to reign for three years in the m//onth of KRR [=Kerer], in the day of the burying // of the divinity. And the years of the statue of the divinity // in his temple [might be ? are ?] as many years as these stars.
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Phoenician alphabet |
Source : http://guity-novin.blogspot.co.id/2013/09/prelude-in-beginning-history-of-writing.html#One
