What peoples first invented writing. When did writing first appear? The meaning of the word "writing"

The emergence of writing was a grandiose event in its historical significance and consequences. Writing in comparison with speech is a fundamentally new means of communication that allows you to consolidate, store and transmit speech information using descriptive characters. Written signs are material objects-intermediaries in the communication of people with each other.

Unlike direct speech communication, writing is capable of overcoming the spatial and temporal boundaries of human communication, going beyond the direct interaction of subjects, and expanding the content of communication in space and time.

With the emergence of writing, the process of communication, as it were, acquires two new "dimensions" - historical and geographical. One obscure Egyptian scribe over four thousand years ago, reflecting on the meaning of the letter, wrote on papyrus: “A person disappears, his body becomes dust, all those close to him disappear from the surface of the earth, but the scriptures make him remember him through the lips of those who pass it on to the lips of others. ... A book is more needed than a house built, better than a luxurious palace, better than a monument in a temple. "

In the history of writing (and especially its specific types) there are still many secrets, mysteries, undeciphered pages. Not all details of this process are fully clarified by science. This is not surprising: after all, the process of the formation of writing lasted for millennia (starting, perhaps, from the Upper Paleolithic). And nevertheless, the main stages of this process have already been thoroughly identified, studied, and now very few people are in doubt.

Types of writing

Subject letter

It is generally accepted that the first, rudimentary forms of non-speech (pre-written) means of transmitting information are associated with the so-called subject writing. Subject writing is a collection of objects, things that were artificially created (or combined from natural things) by one person (or group) to transfer any information to another person (group). Branches stuck along the path, notches on a tree, ornaments made of stones informing fellow tribesmen following the direction of movement, smoke from a fire as a sign of danger, a bunch of arrows as a symbol of a declaration of war, etc. It is likely that such a subject letter was widely used already in the Upper Paleolithic. With the help of subject writing, as well as magical rituals and symbols, mankind for a long time mastered the sign function of things - the ability of a certain thing to point to something else, fundamentally different from the thing itself - to other things, phenomena, processes.

But subject writing is abstract in nature and, as a rule, requires prior agreement for its adequate understanding. If not, then the information may be misunderstood. A vivid example here is the story of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus about the message that the Scythians sent to the ancient Persian king Darius who invaded their country. They composed a subject letter from a bird, a mouse, a frog and five arrows. Darius drew from this epistle a meaning opposite to that which the Scythians put in. And the result was the death of the Persian army.

Pictography

The next step in the development of writing consisted in the transition to the use of pictorial means of securing information. The first pictorial means are represented by drawing writing - pictography.

Pictography is the fixation and transmission of information using pictures. Pictographic writing appeared during the heyday of primitive society in the Upper Paleolithic. With the help of sequential placement of a number of drawings depicting individual specific objects, certain information about economic, social, military and other situations is transmitted. Pictographic writing had many undeniable merits, which determined the possibility of its development into higher forms of writing, up to phonetic. These advantages include:

· The ability to introduce new intermediate links of the narrative;

· A sufficiently high level of abstraction, highlighting the main, essential;

· No need for realism of the image, such a letter contains significant opportunities for schematization and development into conventional images.

The main directions of the historical development of pictography are as follows: development of a single way of drawing a picture, understandable for all (or most) representatives of a given tribe (clan, community); fixing for each drawing a more or less definite meaning, meaning (in other words, a tendency towards general validity and uniqueness, although, of course, it was still far from complete uniqueness); enrichment of the set of pictographic drawings with such signs that make it possible to concretize the text, pictograms, especially with regard to account, ownership of names, etc. Due to the frequent need to transfer names, a qualitatively new and promising technique has appeared - the image of people's names with some objects that are similar in sound , but having, of course, a completely different nature. This is how the beginnings of phonetic writing are gradually born.

Over the course of several millennia, pictographic writing gradually developed into ideographic writing, where drawings are replaced by certain characters. Ideographic writing developed in the direction from the image of certain representations (images, concepts), regardless of their sound in oral speech, to hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs simultaneously indicated both the images (representations, concepts) and the sounds that make up the words denoting these images (representations, concepts). At the turn of the IV-III millennium BC. hieroglyphic writing was already widely used in Mesopotamia, and in 2400 BC. it turned into an ordered verbal and syllabic writing of the cuneiform type. Cuneiform writing was a rather complex system, consisting of several hundred and even thousands of special Signs. Its mastering required significant specialization and professionalization. In ancient Babylonian society, a whole social layer was formed - the layer of scribes. During the III millennium BC. the Egyptian hieroglyphics also take shape.

Phonetic writing

The highest form of writing that took shape in the 2nd millennium BC was phonetic writing, in letters, in which signs do not denote objects, but syllables, sounds, and individual sound designations are graphically conveyed. The first alphabetical letter was invented by the Phoenicians. Phoenician writing formed the basis of ancient Greek, as well as Aramaic writing, from which the Indian, Persian, and Arabic writing systems later arose.

Due to the possibility of storing, accumulating and transferring knowledge, writing turned out to be the most important incentive for accelerating the development of spiritual culture, it was the most important precondition for the formation of science.

History of writing

The first writing that appeared on Earth is Sumerian. It happened about 5 thousand years ago.

Their writing is called cuneiform in its later form. They wrote on clay tablets using a sharpened reed stick. If the tablets were burned in an oven and dried, then they became eternal (survived to our time), thanks to them, we can trace the history of the origin of writing.

There are 2 hypotheses about the origin of writing:

Monogenesis (invented in 1st place)
polygenesis (in several foci).

Writing is presented in 3 primary foci, the connection of which has not been proven:

Mesopotamian (Sumerians)
Egyptian (according to the theory of monogenesis, it was brought from the Sumerians)
the writing system of the Far East (Chinese, according to the theory of monogenesis, was brought from the Sumerians).

Sometimes people would send different objects to each other instead of writing. Greek historian Herodotus, who lived in the 5th century. BC e., talks about the "letter" of the Scythians to the Persian king Darius. A Scythian messenger came to the Persian camp and put gifts before the king, "consisting of a bird, a mouse, a frog and five arrows." The Scythians did not know how to write, so this is how their message looked like. Darius asked what these gifts meant. The messenger replied that he was ordered to hand them over to the king and return immediately. And the Persians must figure out the meaning of the "letter" themselves. Darius consulted with his soldiers for a long time and finally said how he understood the message: a mouse lives in the earth, a frog lives in water, a bird is like a horse, and arrows are the military courage of the Scythians. Thus, Darius decided, the Scythians give him their water and land and submit to the Persians, giving up their military courage.

But the military leader of the Persians Gobrius interpreted the "letter" differently: "If you, Persians, do not fly away like birds into the heavens, or like mice do not hide into the ground, or do not leap into lakes like frogs, then you will not come back and fall under the blows of our arrows ".

As you can see, subject writing can be interpreted in different ways. The history of the war between Darius and the Scythians showed that Gobrius turned out to be right. The Persians could not defeat the elusive Scythians who roamed the steppes of the Northern Black Sea region, Darius left with his army from the Scythian lands.

Actually writing, descriptive writing began with drawings. Writing with drawings is called pictography (from Latin pictus - pictorial and Greek grapho - I write). In pictography, art and writing are indivisible, therefore archaeologists, ethnographers, art historians, and literary historians are engaged in rock carvings. Everyone is interested in their own area. For the historian of writing, the information contained in the drawing is important. A pictogram drawing usually denotes either some kind of life situation, for example, hunting, or animals and people, or various objects - a boat, a house, etc.

The first inscriptions were about household chores - food, weapons, supplies - objects were simply depicted. Gradually, the principle of isomorphism is violated (that is, a reliable image of the number of objects - how many vases there are, we draw as many). The image loses its connection with the subject. Instead of 3 vases, there is now a vase and 3 dashes that convey the number of vases, thus. quantitative and qualitative information is given separately. The first scribes had to distinguish and understand the difference between qualitative and quantitative signs. Then iconicity develops, its own grammar appears.

At the turn of the IV - III millennium BC. e. Pharaoh Narmer conquered Lower Egypt and ordered to perpetuate his victory. The relief drawing depicts this event. And in the upper right corner there is a pictogram that serves as a signature for the reliefs. The falcon holds a rope threaded through the nostrils of a human head, which appears to emerge from a strip of earth with six papyrus stalks. The falcon is a symbol of the victorious king, he holds the head of the defeated king of the North on a leash; the land with papyri is Lower Egypt, papyrus is its symbol. Six of its stems - six thousand prisoners, since the sign of papyrus means a thousand. But was it possible to convey the name of the king with a drawing? How do you know his name was Narmer?

It turns out that at this time the Egyptians had already begun to distinguish signs from the drawings that did not denote the drawn object, but the sounds that made up its name. The drawing of a dung beetle meant three sounds of HPR, and the drawing of a basket meant two sounds of NB. And although such sounds remained drawings, they have already become phonetic signs. The ancient Egyptian language had words with one-, two-, and three-letter syllables. And since the Egyptians did not write vowels, monosyllabic words represented one sound. When the Egyptians had to write a name, they used one-letter hieroglyphs.

The transition from concrete to abstract objects, which do not correspond to a visual image. Chinese hieroglyphs arose from drawings (13th century BC) Until now, hieroglyphs have changed little, but the grammar of the language has changed (a modern Chinese can read texts written in BC, recognizes the symbols, but does not catch the meaning). The drawing is stylized, simplified, standardized.
In the end, in all the centers of the globe, signs begin to display sounds. Signs were tied to the sound of the whole word. It was very difficult to use such a letter - it is an art. A very complex writing system, but it satisfied the ancients, because it could be used only by a limited caste of people for whom this knowledge was a means of subsistence.

The need to quickly write complex and long texts led to the fact that the drawings were simplified, they became conventional symbols - hieroglyphs (from the Greek hieroglyphoi - sacred letters).

In the 12-13 centuries. BC. in the Middle East - the time when the Sinai inscriptions appeared. This is a step towards drastically reducing the number of written characters. Signs were developed that indicated the syllable. Writing became syllabic. For different words, the combination of consonant and vowel is different.
Thanks to the presence of such monosyllabic characters denoting one sound, the alphabet stood out from the complex writing system. Phoenicians, having become acquainted with these letters, based on them created their own alphabetic writing, simplifying the signs of syllabic writing. An indifferent vowel was attributed to each sign of this writing. Arabs and Jews used a letter without vowels. There was a complex system of guessing, which nevertheless gave constant failures. Later, a system of vocalizations appeared, but nevertheless, in everyday life, Jews and Arabs used a letter without vocalizations.

The Greeks adopted the Phoenician system. Greek is Indo-European. The Greeks introduce signs for vowels - this is a coup. The Greeks invented a complete writing system. All vowels were depicted. Later they began to depict stress (place and type), aspiration. We also introduced an image of a prosody (analogue to notes), which is impossible in the case of Russian writing and therefore is not used by us.

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Federal Agency for Education

Federal State Educational Institution of Higher Professional Education

"Russian State University of Service and Tourism"

(FGOUVPO "RGUTiS")

Branch of the Federal State Educational Institution of Higher Professional Education "Russian State University of Service and Tourism" in Samara (Branch of FGOUVPO "RGUTiS" in Samara)

Faculty "Social and cultural service and tourism"

Department of "Social Sciences"

TEST

By discipline: "Russian language in professional communication"

On the topic: "The history of writing"

Completed: 2nd year student

correspondence department

group Tz-201 Matyunina E.A.

Checked: Art. teacher

Stepukhina N.A.

Samara, 2011

Introduction

1. Subject writing

2. Pictographic writing

3. Ideographic writing (Sumerian)

4. Syllabic writing. Cuneiform

5. First alphabets

6. The birth of Slavic writing

7. Cursive

Conclusion

List of used literature

Applications

Introduction

To live in this world, you need to be able to read and write, otherwise you will find yourself on the sidelines of modernity. And yet the fate of one person, if he did not know the written language, would not have changed as dramatically as the fate of all mankind. For almost a million years, generations of people were connected only by threads of myths and rituals, and different tribes - only by bizarre rumors. The invention of the alphabetic writing was the great step that led humanity from barbarism to civilization. At that moment, when the name of the leader, or god, or tribe was first carved, scribbled, or the name of a tribe - we will never know for sure - then history began. The times when writing did not exist are called prehistoric. Previously, there were two realities for a person: an ordinary, momentary, events in which occurred insofar as they can be seen, heard or remembered, and the unchanging reality of myths that reigned over time. Myths and rituals were then the only treasury of human achievement. Now a third reality has appeared - historical, it is also informational. A person was included in the flow of history, thanks to the mass media, he now knows about events that he has never seen, with the help of other means developed on the basis of writing, he can tell about himself to descendants with whom he will never talk. Previously, only divine phenomena were not subject to time, now human deeds also stand the test of time. What a person does today will be remembered not only by his contemporaries, but also by distant descendants. Science could not have received any significant development without relying on the work of its predecessors.

At the beginning of the 21st century, it is unthinkable to imagine modern life without books, newspapers, indexes, and the flow of information. The emergence of writing has become one of the most important, fundamental discoveries on the long path of human evolution. In terms of significance, this step can perhaps be compared with making a fire or switching to growing plants instead of a long period of gathering. The development of writing is a very difficult process that lasted for millennia. Slavic writing, the successor of which is our modern writing, entered this row more than a thousand years ago, in the 9th century AD.

1. Subject letter

Initially, people did not have any writing. Therefore, it was quite difficult to transmit information over long distances. Sometimes people would send different objects to each other instead of writing.

“The Greek historian Herodotus, who lived in the 5th century. BC e., talks about the "letter" of the Scythians to the Persian king Darius. A Scythian messenger came to the Persian camp and put gifts before the king, "consisting of a bird, a mouse, a frog and five arrows." The Scythians did not know how to write, so this is how their message looked like. Darius asked what these gifts meant. The messenger replied that he was ordered to hand them over to the king and return immediately. And the Persians must figure out the meaning of the "letter" themselves. Darius consulted with his soldiers for a long time and finally said how he understood the message: a mouse lives in the earth, a frog lives in water, a bird is like a horse, and arrows are the military courage of the Scythians. Thus, Darius decided, the Scythians give him their water and land and submit to the Persians, giving their military courage. But the military leader of the Persians Gobrius interpreted the "letter" differently: "If you, Persians, do not fly away like birds into the heavens, or like mice do not hide into the ground, or do not leap into lakes like frogs, then you will not come back and fall under the blows of our arrows ".

The retold legend reveals the fact that originally people tried to convey information using various objects. Famous historical examples of object writing are also wampum (Iroquois letterrepresented by multi-colored shells strung on a rope) and kippu (Peruvian letter, in which information was conveyed by color and the number of knots on the ropes). Sure, subject letter was not the most convenient means of transmitting information and over time people came up with more versatile tools.

2. Pictographic writing

The most ancient and simplest way of writing, it is believed, appeared in the Paleolithic - "story in pictures", the so-called pictographic writing (from Latin pictus - drawn and from Greek grapho - I write). That is, "I draw and write" (some American Indians still use pictographic writing in our time). The letter is, of course, very imperfect, because you can read the story in pictures in different ways. Therefore, by the way, not all experts recognize pictography as a form of writing as the beginning of writing. In addition, for the most ancient people, any such image was animated. So the "story in pictures", on the one hand, inherited these traditions, on the other, it demanded a certain abstraction from the image.

3. Sumerian letter (ideographic)

In the IV-III millennia BC. e. in Ancient Sumer (Western Asia), in Ancient Egypt, and then, in II, and in Ancient China, a different way of writing arose: each word was conveyed by a pattern, sometimes specific, sometimes conditional. For example, when it came to the hand, the hand was drawn, and the water was depicted as a wavy line. They also designated a house, a city, a boat with a certain symbol ... The Greeks called such Egyptian drawings by hieroglyphs: "hiero" - "sacred", "glyphs" - "carved in stone". The text composed of hieroglyphs looks like a series of drawings. This letter can be called: "writing a concept" or "writing an idea" (hence the scientific name of such a letter - "ideographic"). However, how many hieroglyphs had to be remembered! Frenchman François Champollion (XIX century), has revealed the riddle of Egyptian hieroglyphics. He suggested that hieroglyphs are not writing-drawings (which they are so similar in shape to), but designations of letters and syllables. Based on his guess, Champollion was able to decipher the inscriptions on Egyptian monuments and tombs. (Appendix 1)

4. Syllabic writing. Cuneiform

An extraordinary achievement of human civilization was the so-called syllabic writing, the invention of which took place during the III-II millennia BC. e. Each stage of the formation of writing recorded a certain result in the advancement of mankind along the path of logical abstract thinking. First, it is the dismemberment of the phrase into words, then - the free use of pictures-words, the next step is the dismemberment of the word into syllables. We speak in syllables, and children are taught to read syllables. To arrange the writing in syllables, it would seem, what could be more natural! And there are many fewer syllables than words composed with their help. But it took many centuries to come to such a decision. Syllabic writing was used already in the III-II millennia BC. e. in the Eastern Mediterranean. (This letter is called syllabic; its classic examples are Cretan (Minoan) writing and Maya writing). The famous cuneiform script is predominantly syllabic. Klimwriting - the earliest known writing system. The form of writing was largely determined by the writing material - a clay tablet, on which, while the clay was still soft, a wooden writing stick or a pointed reed squeezed out signs; hence the "wedge-shaped" strokes. The oldest monument of Sumerian writing is a tablet from Kish (Appendix 2) (about 3500 BC). It is followed in time by documents found at the excavations of the ancient city of Uruk, dating back to 3300 BC. e. The emergence of writing coincides in time with the development of cities and the accompanying complete restructuring of society.

They still write in a syllabic way in India and Ethiopia.

5. The first alphabets.

The next step on the path to simplifying writing was the so-called sound writing, when each sound of speech has its own sign. But coming up with such a simple and natural way turned out to be the most difficult thing. First of all, it was necessary to guess how to dismember the word and syllables into separate sounds. But when this finally happened, the new method showed undeniable advantages. It was necessary to memorize only two or three dozen letters, and the accuracy in reproducing speech in writing is incomparable with any other method. Over time, it was the letter writing that began to be used almost everywhere.

Theory

Terterian tablets (room.Tgbliёle de la Tgrtgria) -- three unfired clay tablets, discovered in 1961 by Romanian archaeologists near the village of Terteria (rum.Tartaria) in the Romanian county of Alba, at about 30 km from the city of Alba Iulia. The finds were accompanied by 26 clay and limestone figurines, as well as the burnt skeleton of an adult male.

Two rectangular plates, one -- round, with holes drilled in two of them. The diameter of the round plate does not exceed 6 cm, the rest are even smaller. On one side of the tablets are depictions of a horned animal, a branch of a tree and a number of relatively abstract symbols (possibly a hunting scene).

The Terterian inscriptions became an archaeological sensation, especially after the authoritative archaeologist Maria Gimbutas, engaged in the restoration of the culture and religion of pre-Indo-European Europe, declared the pictograms on them to be the oldest form of writing in the world. If Gimbutas's assumption is correct, then the so-called "ancient European writing" existed on the continent long before the Minoan (which is traditionally considered the first writing system in Europe), but also before the Proto-Sumerian and Proto-Chinese writing systems. According to the book of Gimbutas in 1991, this system appeared in the first half of the 6th millennium BC. bC, spread between 5300-4300 and disappears by 4000 BC. e.

Researcher S. Wynn (1973) identified 210 characters of writing, consisting of 5 basic elements and representing a modification of about 30 basic characters. The number of characters indicates that the writing was syllabic. H. Haarmann (1990) found about 50 parallels between this system and the Cretan and Cypriot writing. Maria Gimbutas. Slavs: Sons of Perun, Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2007.

Most researchers do not share Gimbutas's views. At first, after the publication of the finds in Terteria, the prevailing opinion in science was that the pictograms denoted the belonging of a particular object (usually ceramics) to a certain person. However, the widespread use of pictograms in different countries over the centuries has cast doubt on the validity of this hypothesis.

According to another theory, the Terterian type pictograms can be explained by comparison with the first examples of Minoan and Sumerian writing. As in the case of cuneiform writing, the original function of the pictograms could have been to keep track of property and indicate its value. This theory is supported by the argument that pictograms were often applied to the bottoms of pots. About one-sixth of the pictograms are signs resembling a comb or a brush, -- it could be primitive numbers.

Currently, the most generally accepted explanation of the pictograms from Terteria as signs of a ritual and cult nature, which were used in the administration of religious rites, after which they lost their meaning. The person in whose grave the tablets were found could have been a shaman. Proponents of this theory point to the absence of the evolution of pictograms throughout the entire existence of the Vinca culture, which would be difficult to explain if they were related to the fixation of trade.

None of the writing systems almost never existed in their pure form and does not exist even now. For example, most of the letters of our alphabet, like a, b, c and others, correspond to one specific sound, but in the letters-signs i, yu, e there are already several sounds. We cannot do without elements of ideographic writing, say, in mathematics. Instead of using the words "two add two equals four", we use conventional signs to get a very short form: 2 + 2 \u003d 4. The same is in chemical and physical formulas.

The earliest alphabetic texts were found in Byblos (Lebanon). The peoples in whose language vowel sounds were not as important as consonants were among the first to use literal sound writing. So, at the end of the II millennium BC. e. the alphabet originated among the Phoenicians, ancient Jews, and Arameans. For example, in the Hebrew language, adding different vowels to the consonants K - T - L gives a family of the same root words: KeToL - kill, KoTeL - murderer, KaTuL - killed, etc. It is always clear by ear that we are talking about murder. Therefore, only consonants were written in the letter - the semantic meaning of the word was clear from the context. By the way, ancient Jews and Phoenicians wrote lines from right to left, as if such a letter had been invented by left-handers. This ancient method of writing is still preserved among the Jews, and all peoples using the Arabic alphabet write in the same way today.

One of the first alphabets on Earth - Phoenician.

From the Phoenicians - inhabitants of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, sea traders and travelers - alphanumeric writing passed to the Greeks. From the Greeks, this principle of writing penetrated into Europe. And from the Aramaic writing, according to the researchers, almost all the alphabetic writing systems of the peoples of Asia have their origin.

The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters. They were arranged in a certain order from `aleph, bet, gimel, dalet ... to tav. Each letter had a meaningful name: `aleph - ox, bet - house, gimel - camel and so on. The names of the words seem to tell about the people who created the alphabet, communicating the most important thing about it: the people lived in houses (bet) with doors (dalet), during the construction of which nails (vav) were used. He was engaged in agriculture, using the power of oxen (`aleph), cattle breeding, fishing (meme - water, nun - fish) or roaming (gimel - camel). He traded (tete - cargo) and fought (zain - weapon).

The researcher who paid attention to this notes: among the 22 letters of the Phoenician alphabet, there is not a single one whose name would be associated with the sea, ships or sea trade. It was this circumstance that prompted him to think that the letters of the first alphabet were not created by the Phoenicians, recognized sailors, but, most likely, by the ancient Jews, from whom the Phoenicians borrowed this alphabet. But be that as it may, the order of the letters, starting with `aleph, was given.

Greek writing, as already mentioned, comes from Phoenician. There are more letters in the Greek alphabet that convey all the sound shades of speech. But their order and names, which often did not have any meaning in the Greek language, remained, albeit in a slightly modified form: alpha, beta, gamma, delta ... At first, in ancient Greek monuments, the letters in the inscriptions, as in the Semitic languages, were located on the right- to the left, and then, without interruption, the line "curled" from left to right and again from right to left. Time passed until the left-to-right version of the letter was finally established, now spreading throughout most of the world. (Appendix 3)

Latin letters originated from Greek, and their alphabetical order has not fundamentally changed. At the beginning of the 1st millennium A.D. e. Greek and Latin became the main languages \u200b\u200bof the vast Roman Empire. All ancient classics, to which we still treat with trepidation and respect, are written in these languages. Greek is the language of Plato, Homer, Sophocles, Archimedes, John Chrysostom ... Cicero, Ovid, Horace, Virgil, St. Augustine and others wrote in Latin.

Meanwhile, even before the Latin alphabet spread in Europe, some European barbarians already had their own written language in one form or another. A rather distinctive letter has developed, for example, among the Germanic tribes. This is the so-called "runic" ("rune" in German means "secret") writing. It arose not without the influence of the already existing writing. Here, too, a certain sign corresponds to each sound of speech, but these signs received a very simple, slender and strict outline - only from vertical and diagonal lines. (Appendix 4)

6. The birth of Slavic writing.

Cultural scientists, both domestic and foreign, in relation to writing, often divide peoples into two categories: written and non-written. A.A. Formozov believed that some kind of writing, consisting of conventional signs, drawn in lines, existed in the steppe zone of Russia already in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. e. A.S. Lvov and N.A. Konstantinov dated the origin of Slavic writing to the end of the 1st millennium BC. e., and the first derived it from cuneiform, the second through the Black Sea signs from the Cypriot syllabic writing. What are these claims based on? There is a whole group of archaeological sites containing signs of scraps of texts of an ancient, not yet read letter. These are, first of all, the monuments of the Russian Black Sea region (Chersonesus, Kerch, Olvia) - stone slabs, gravestones, amphorae, coins, etc. Indications of the Slavic writing that existed before Constantine and Methodius are contained in the chronicles and other literary sources of the 9th-10th centuries. The most important of them is the legend of Chernorizets Brave "On the Tribes", which concerns a number of Slavic tribes, including, possibly, the eastern ones. It is indicated here that the Slavs did not have books before they adopted Christianity, but they used "lines and cuts" for fortune telling and counting. The accuracy of this observation is confirmed by the fact that traces of fortune-telling with "cuts" (cutting of known signs) survived at a later time, for example, they are mentioned in epics. After the adoption of Christianity, Brave continues, the Slavs recorded their speech in Latin and Greek letters, however, inaccurately, since Latin and Greek letters could not convey many Slavic sounds.

It is significant that Brave attributes the initiative to master the ancient alphabets to the Slavs themselves, and not to the Christian missionaries who came to the Slavic countries. One of the earliest Russian chronicles, "The Tale of Bygone Years," documentary evidence that Kievan Rus at the beginning of the 10th century. had writing. According to academician B.A. Rybakov, the first real traces of the Kiev chronicle date back to the 60s of the 9th century. and are associated with the activities of the Kiev prince Oskold.

A vivid evidence of the presence of writing in Russia even before the adoption of Christianity are the texts of the treaties of the Russian princes with Byzantium of the 10th century.

Reflecting on the evolution of Slavic writing, L.V. Cherepnin suggested that it passed "the path common to all peoples - from a drawing depicting a certain image or concept, through images corresponding to words, to syllabic and, finally, sound (or phonetic) writing" - that is, on the first steps, he was characterized by both pictographic and ideographic (symbolic) signs. V.A. Istrin expressed doubt that one nation could go through all these stages on its own, without borrowing from neighbors, since the history of writing would have to stretch over centuries and even millennia. Rybakov, they remove this objection: clear traces of the proto-Slavic culture can be seen from the end of the 3rd millennium BC. e., Proto-Slavic - the middle of the II millennium BC. So, an unconditional historical fact is that on the eve of the activities of Constantine and Methodius, the Slavs had and simultaneously used three types of writing. It follows that the feat of Constantine and Methodius, consisting in the "creation of Slavic writing", cannot be understood in such a way that they created it from scratch, "from scratch", having turned the Slavs from a non-written people into a written people. But they really "created writing" - the one that immediately entered the cultural fund of the majority of Slavic peoples, the one that we now use in a developed version (the Slavic alphabet).

The oldest Slavic written monuments that have come down to us are made in two significantly different alphabets - Glagolitic and Cyrillic. (Appendix 5). The history of their origin is complex and not completely clear. The name "glagolitic" is derived from the verb - "word", "speech". In alphabetical composition, the Glagolitic alphabet almost completely coincided with the Cyrillic alphabet, but sharply differed from it in the shape of the letters. It has been established that the origin of the Glagolitic letters is mostly associated with the Greek minuscule alphabet, some letters are based on the Samaritan and Hebrew letters. There is an assumption that this alphabet was created by Constantine the Philosopher.

The Glagolitic alphabet was widely used in the 60s of the 9th century in Moravia, from where it penetrated into Bulgaria and Croatia, where it existed until the end of the 18th century. It was occasionally used in Ancient Russia.

The Glagolitic alphabet corresponded well to the phonemic composition of the Old Slavonic language. In addition to the newly invented letters, it included correspondences to Greek letters, including those that, in principle, were not needed for the Slavic language. This fact suggests that the Slavic alphabet, according to the conviction of its creators, had to fully correspond to the Greek one.

By the shape of the letters, two types of glagolitic can be noted. In the first of them, the so-called Bulgarian Glagolitic, the letters are rounded, and in the Croatian, also called Illyrian or Dalmatian Glagolitic, the shape of the letters is angular. Neither type of Glagolitic has sharply defined boundaries of distribution. In its later development, the Glagolitic alphabet adopted many signs from the Cyrillic alphabet. The Glagolitic alphabet of the Western Slavs (Czechs, Poles and others) did not hold out for a relatively long time and was replaced by the Latin script, while the rest of the Slavs later switched to the Cyrillic type. But the Glagolitic alphabet has not completely disappeared to this day. So, it is used, or at least was used before the start of the Second World War in the Croatian settlements of Italy. Newspapers were even printed in Glagolic script. The name of another Slavic alphabet - Cyrillic - comes from the name of the 9th century Slavic educator Konstantin (Cyril) the Philosopher. There is an assumption that it was he who was its creator, but there is no exact data on the origin of the Cyrillic alphabet.

The emergence of Slavic writing originates in the 9th century, it was at that time that the alphabet was compiled. History compilation of the Slavic alphabet as follows: the Moravian prince Rostislav asked the Byzantine emperor Michael III to translate Christian liturgical books from Greek into the Slavic language. Michael III entrusted this difficult task to the Greek monksCyril and Methodius . Cyril with Methodius and compiled the first Slavic alphabet, at first it was compiledglagolitic , and thencyrillic .

Basedcyrillic not only Russian writing arose, but the writing of other Slavic peoples - Serbs and Bulgarians.Cyrillic was much simpler than Glagolitic in writing letters, and that is why it became more widespread. Subsequently cyrillic completely supplanted the verb.

For their activitiesCyril and Methodius , were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. The creation of the Slavic alphabet was of great importance for the cultural and scientific development of our people.Cyril and Methodius have done a great job.

The spread of writing in Russia was facilitated by the adoption of Christianity. At monasteries and churches they translated and copied sacred books, opened the first schools.

Levelliteracy in Russia in the XI-XII century was quite high. And even ordinary people were literate. The level of literacy of that time can be judged by the birch bark letters found by archaeologists in Novgorod. These were personal correspondence, contracts and letters from gentlemen to their servants. And since the gentlemen wrote letters to the servants, means the servants could read! It is surprising! ON. History of writing / N.A. Pavlenko. Minsk: Higher school, 1987.S. 22 .: slavic writing alphabet drawing

There are 43 letters in the Cyrillic alphabet. Of these, 24 are borrowed from the Byzantine statutory letter, the remaining 19 are invented anew, but in graphic design they are similar to the first. Not all borrowed letters retained the designation of the same sound as in the Greek language - some received new meanings in accordance with the peculiarities of Slavic phonetics.

In Russia, the Cyrillic alphabet was introduced in the 10-11 centuries in connection with Christianization. Of the Slavic peoples, the Bulgarians have kept the Cyrillic alphabet for the longest time, but at present their writing, like the letter of the Serbs, is the same as the Russian one, with the exception of some signs intended to indicate phonetic features.

The oldest form of the Cyrillic alphabet is called the charter. A distinctive feature of the charter is sufficient clarity and straightforwardness of the outlines. Most of the letters are angular, broad and heavy. Exceptions are narrow rounded letters with almond-shaped bends (O, S, E, R, etc.), among other letters they seem to be compressed. This letter is characterized by thin lower lengthening of some letters (P, Y, 3). These lengthenings can be seen in other types of Cyrillic as well. They act as light decorative elements in the overall picture of the letter. Diacritical marks are not yet known. The letters of the charter are large and stand apart from each other. The old charter knows no gaps between words.

Starting from the 13th century, a second type of writing developed - semi-ustav, which subsequently supplants the ustav. In connection with the increased need for books, it appears as a business letter from scribes who worked on order and for sale. The semi-statute combines the goals of convenience and speed of writing, is simpler than a statute, has significantly more abbreviations, is often oblique - towards the beginning or end of a line, is devoid of calligraphic rigor.

In Russia, the semi-ustav appears at the end of the 14th century on the basis of the Russian charter; like him - it is a straight handwriting (letters are vertical). Retaining the last spelling of the charter and its outline, it gives them an extremely simple and less clear look, as measured craft pressures are replaced by a more free movement of the pen. Semiustav was used in the 14-18 centuries along with other types of writing, mainly with cursive and ligature.

7. Cursive

In the 15th century, under the Grand Duke of Moscow Ivan III, when the unification of the Russian lands ended, Moscow turned not only into the political, but also the cultural center of the country. First, the regional culture of Moscow begins to acquire the character of an all-Russian one. Along with the increasing demands of daily life, the need arose for a new, simplified, more comfortable writing style. Cursive writing became it.

Cursive writing roughly corresponds to the concept of Latin cursive. Among the ancient Greeks, cursive writing was in wide use at an early stage in the development of writing, and it was partly also among the southwestern Slavs. In Russia, cursive writing as an independent form of writing emerged in the 15th century. The cursive letters, partially connected with each other, differ from the letters of other types of writing by their light style. But since the letters were equipped with many all kinds of signs, hooks and additions, it was rather difficult to read what was written.

Although the cursive writing of the 15th century, in general, still reflects the character of the semi-ustav and there are few strokes connecting the letters, but in comparison with the semi-ustav, this letter is more fluent.

Cursive letters were largely carried out with lengthening. In the beginning, the signs were composed mainly of straight lines, as is characteristic of the charter and semi-ustav. In the second half of the 16th century, and especially at the beginning of the 17th century, semicircular strokes become the main lines of the letter, and some elements of Greek italics are noticeable in the general picture of the letter. In the second half of the 17th century, when many different types of writing spread, and cursive writing features characteristic features of this time - less ligature and more roundness. Cursive writing of that time is gradually freed from the elements of Greek italics and moves away from the forms of semi-ustav. In the later period, straight and curved lines acquire balance, and the letters become more symmetrical and rounded.

At the beginning of the 18th century, in connection with the strengthening of the Russian national state, in conditions when the church was subordinated to secular power, science and education acquired particular importance. And the development of these areas is simply unthinkable without the development of book printing.

Since in the 17th century books were printed mainly with church content, the publication of books with secular content had to start almost anew. A big event was the publication in 1708 of Geometria, which had long been known in Russia in handwritten form.

The creation of books new in their content required a new approach to their publication. Concern for the readability of the book and the simplicity of its design is characteristic of all publishing activities in the first quarter of the 18th century.

One of the most important measures was the reform in 1708 of the Kirillov printed semi-ustav and the introduction of new editions of the civil type. Of the 650 book titles published under Peter I, about 400 were printed with the newly introduced civilian type.

Under Peter I, a reform of the Cyrillic alphabet was carried out in Russia, which eliminated a number of letters unnecessary for the Russian language and simplified the outline of the rest. This is how the Russian "citizen" ("civil alphabet" as opposed to "church") arose. In "civilian", some letters were legalized that were not included in the original composition of the Cyrillic alphabet - "e", "I", later "y" and then "" e ", and in 1918 the letters" i "were removed from the Russian alphabet , "" ("Yat"), "" ("fit") and "" ("Izhitsa") and at the same time canceled the use of "hard sign" at the end of words.

Over the centuries, the Latin script has also undergone various changes: “i” and “j”, “u” and “v” were delimited, separate letters were added (different for different languages).

A more significant change affecting all modern systems consisted in the gradual introduction of a mandatory word division, and then punctuation marks, in the functional differentiation (since the era of the invention of typography) uppercase and lowercase letters (however, the latter distinction is absent in some modern systems, for example, in Georgian letter).

Conclusion

Now a person is included in the flow of history, thanks to the mass media, he now knows about events that he has never seen, with the help of other means developed on the basis of writing, he can communicate about himself to descendants with whom he will never talk. What a person does today will be remembered not only by his contemporaries, but also by distant descendants. Science could not have received any significant development without relying on the work of its predecessors. A good tradition of scientific work - a thorough chewing of previous research with the subsequent isolation of crumbs of new knowledge - was formed on the basis of the ability to delve into rich libraries and get education with the help of textbooks, in which they left their accumulated knowledge, perhaps long-dead luminaries.

James G. Breasted, the celebrated Chicago historian and orientalist, once said: "The invention of writing and a convenient system for writing on paper was more important for the further development of the human race than any other intellectual achievement in human history." I also subscribe to this statement. Such views received the support of ethnographers, who repeatedly argued that, just as language distinguishes a person from an animal, so writing distinguishes a civilized person from a barbarian.

How do these positions look in the light of history? Is it true that it is to writing that we owe mainly those drastic changes that have brought man to civilization? Throughout the ancient world, writing appears in a period of sudden growth of all those diverse elements, the aggregate of which we usually call civilization. Whenever it happens, the appearance of writing coincides in time with such a surge in the development of the state, crafts, trade, industry, metallurgy, means and means of communication, agriculture and the domestication of animals, in comparison with which the cultures of all previous periods, which were unwritten, seem extremely primitive. However, there is no need to argue that the emergence of writing was the only factor to which we owe the rise of civilization. It seems to me that the combination of factors - geographic, social and economic - leading to the emergence of a developed civilization, simultaneously created a set of conditions under which it was impossible to do without writing. Or, in other words, "writing exists only in the conditions of civilization, and civilization cannot exist without writing." Gelb I.E. The experience of studying writing M.: Raduga, 1982, p. 211

Writing is, of course, a phenomenon, writing connects us with centuries, keeps in its memory the history of peoples, civilizations and individuals. How to evaluate the importance of writing in human culture? I think it is impossible to estimate, but it is impossible to underestimate precisely ...

List of used literature

1. Gelb I.E. The experience of studying writing M.: Raduga, 1982. - p. 30 - 223.

2. Zhirinovsky V., Sinitsin E. History of Russian culture of the 9th - 19th centuries, 2004. - p. 92 - 191.

3. Vlasov V.G. Slavic alphabet and Slavic educators. M.: Knowledge, 1989. - p. 6 - 62.

4.http: //savelaleksandr.narod.ru/IZOB/page11.html

5. The emergence and development of a letter / V.А. Istrin. Moscow: Nauka, 1965.S. 36 - 46 .:

6. N.A. History of writing / N.A. Pavlenko. Minsk: Higher school, 1987.S. 22 .:

7. Ivantsov V.P. From drawing to alphabet. Rostov n / a: Rostov book publishing house, 1957. - 36 p.

8. Gimbutas M. Slavs: Sons of Perun. Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2007.

Applications

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Appendix 4

Appendix 5

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Ministry of General and Professional

Education Russian Federation

RGRTA

Department of "History"

Discipline "Culturology"

Abstract on the topic:

"History of the development of writing"

Completed :

Art. gr. 070

G.V. Ruchkin

Checked:

A.I. Kupreev

Ryazan 2001

Introduction 3

1.Notal writing 3

2.Pictogram 4

3.Hieroglyph 6

4.Alphabet 7

Conclusion 9

References 10

WRITING

Introduction

Writing appeared around 3300 BC. in Sumer, by 3000 BC in Egypt, by 2000 BC in China. In all regions, this process followed the same pattern: drawing - pictogram - hieroglyph - alphabet (the latter appeared among the Phoenicians in the 1st millennium BC). Hieroglyphic writing determined the peculiarities of thinking of the peoples of the East, the ability to think in symbols. The hieroglyph does not convey the sound of a word, but conventionally depicts an object or is an abstract sign - a symbol of a concept. A complex hieroglyph consists of simpler elements, endowed with their own meaning. Moreover, there can be several of these values.

Inscriptions are found on the walls of the borders, on shards, clay tablets, parchments. Egyptian papyri sometimes reach 30-40 meters in length. Whole libraries are found in the ruins of ancient palaces. During the excavations of Nineveh, 25,000 cuneiform tablets belonging to the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal were found. These are collections of laws, reports of scouts, decisions on court issues, medical prescriptions.

Let's consider each step of the development of writing separately.

1. Nodular pymenosity

One of its first types was nodular writing. A certain number of knots tied on a rope conveyed this or that message. Simultaneously with the nodular writing, a picture letter arose, in which notes were made using drawings.

The writing system was gradually improved. Each sign of the drawing acquired new meanings, the number of signs increased, their outlines changed, less and less remembering the images of objects.

2. PICTOGRAM

Pictogram - one of the types of prescription, which is a drawing letter, or painting - the image of objects, events and actions using conventional signs. For example, a sign depicting a leg can mean "walk", "stand", "bring". Pictographic writing with elements of hieroglyphics used by the Aztecs has been known since the 14th century. There was no definite system for the arrangement of pictograms: they could follow both horizontally and vertically, and by the bustrofedon method (the opposite direction of adjacent "lines", that is, a series of pictograms). The main systems of Aztec writing are: signs to convey the phonetic appearance of a word, for which the so-called rebus method was used (for example, to write the name Itzcoatl, an arrow itz-tli was depicted over a snake coatl); hieroglyphic signs that convey certain concepts; proper phonetic signs, especially to convey the sound of affixes. By the time of the Spanish conquest, which interrupted the development of the Aztec writing, all these systems existed in parallel, their use was not regulated. The material for writing was leather or paper strips folded in the form of a screen.

Instead of an image, arbitrary graphic symbols were also used. This writing was used in economic records, where the number of concepts is limited by the very content of the letter and in ritual records as an auxiliary tool. The earliest records date back to 3000 BC. In ancient Egypt, there were verbal - syllabic pictograms that denoted not only concepts, but also purely sound elements of a word or part of it. From the Sumerian writing, some types of cuneiform developed - small wedge-shaped signs. Each icon of such a letter consists of wedges in various combinations and denotes a sound, syllable, or word and was written from left to right on clay tablets. The most studied and deciphered cuneiform of Mesopotamia.

Sumerian and Babylonian-Assyrian cultures differed in many respects from the ancient Egyptian. It is enough to look at Egyptian hieroglyphic or hieratic texts and compare them with any cuneiform system to feel the depth of the difference between the two cultural worlds.

Writing in Greek culture of the XXII-XII centuries. played a limited role. Like many peoples of the world, the inhabitants of Hellas first of all began to make picturesque notes, known already in the second half of the 3rd millennium. Each sign of this pictographic letter denoted a whole concept. The Cretans created some signs, though a few, under the influence of Egyptian hierographic writing, which arose in the 4th millennium. Gradually, the forms of signs were simplified, and some began to denote only syllables. Such a syllabic (linear) letter, which had already taken shape by 1700, is called letter A, which still remains unsolved.

After 1500, a more convenient form of writing was developed in Hellas - the syllabic letter B. It included about half of the signs of the syllabic letter A, several dozen new signs, as well as some signs of the most ancient drawing writing. The counting system, as before, was based on decimal notation. Writing in syllabic writing was still carried out from left to right, however, the writing rules became more strict: words separated by a special sign or space were written along horizontal lines, individual texts were supplied with headings and subheadings. Texts were drawn on clay tablets, scribbled on stone, written with a brush or paint or ink on vessels.

The Achaean letter was accessible only to educated specialists. He was known by the servants in the royal palaces and some layer of the possessing townspeople. Sumerian pictograms also gave rise to hieroglyphs.

3. Hieroglyphs

The basis of the ancient Egyptian writing was formed by hieroglyphs (from the Greek "hieros" - "sacred" and "glyph" - "cut out") - figured signs denoting whole concepts or individual syllables and sounds of speech, the name "hieroglyph" originally meant "sacred, printed on letters". The main writing material was made from papyrus, a tropical aquatic plant similar to a reed. From the cut stems of papyrus, a core was isolated, dismembered into thin long strips, laid them in two layers - along and across, moistened with Nile water, leveled, compacted with blows of a wooden hammer and polished with an ivory tool, The resulting sheet did not wrinkle when folded and when unfolded it became smooth again. The sheets were joined into scrolls up to 40 meters long. However, hieroglyphic inscriptions were included in paintings and reliefs. They wrote on them from right to left with a thin reed stick. A new paragraph began with red paint (hence the expression “ red line ”), And the rest of the text was black. The ancient Egyptians considered the god Thoth to be the creator of writing. As the god of the moon, Thoth is the governor of Ra; as time - divided time into days and months, kept chronology and wrote chronicles; as the god of wisdom - created writing and counting, which he taught people. He is the author of sacred books, the patron saint of scientists, scribes, archives, libraries. Thoth was usually depicted as a man with the head of an ibis.

During the era of the New Kingdom, colored drawings appeared on the scrolls, as, for example, in the "Book of the Dead".

Initially, the Chinese made their notes on the shells of skulls, animal bones; later on bamboo plates and silk. The bound tablets were the first books.

Hieroglyphic writing has serious drawbacks: the number of characters in the system (from several hundred to many thousands) and the difficulty in mastering reading. According to the calculations of Chinese scientists, only in the most ancient inscriptions of the 14th - 11th centuries BC. there are about 2000 different hieroglyphs. It was already an advanced writing system.

4. ALPHABET

All the types of writing described above could not stand the competition alphabet.

Phoenicians, who kept constant trade records, need a different, simple and convenient letter. They came up with an alphabet in which each character - a letter - means only one specific sound of speech. They are derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Phoenician alphabet consists of 22 simple letters, all of which are consonants due to the fact that consonants played the main role in the Phoenician language. To read a word, the Phoenician had to see its skeleton, which consisted of consonants.

The letters in the Phoenician alphabet were arranged in a specific order. This order was also borrowed by the Greeks, but in the Greek language, in contrast to the Phoenician language, vowel sounds played an important role.

Greek writing was the starting point for the development of all Western alphabets, the first of which was Latin.

For a long time, there was an opinion that the letter came to Russia along with Christianity, with church books and prayers. A talented linguist, Cyril, creating a Slavic letter, took as a basis the Greek alphabet, consisting of 24 letters, supplemented it with hissing characteristic for Slavic languages \u200b\u200b(f, , w, h) and several other letters, Some of them have survived in the modern alphabet - b, b, b, s, others have long gone out of use - yat, yus, izhitsa, fita. So the Slavic alphabet originally consisted of 43 letters, similar in spelling to Greek. Each of them had its own name: A - "az", B - "beeches" (their combination formed the word "alphabet"), C - "lead", G - "verb", D - "good" and so on. The letters in the letter meant not only sounds, but also numbers. "A" - number 1, "B" - 2, "P" - 100. In Russia, only in the XVIII century. Arabic numerals have replaced "alphabetic" ones.

As you know, the Church Slavonic language was the first to receive literary use from the Slavic languages. For some time, along with the Cyrillic alphabet, another Slavic alphabet, the Glagolitic alphabet, was in use. It had the same composition of letters, but with a more complex, ornate spelling. Apparently, this feature predetermined the further fate of the Glagolitic alphabet: by the XIII century. she almost completely disappeared. This is not the place to dwell on which Slavic tribe this language belonged to the Bulgarians or Pannoyans.

The graphics of the Cyrillic alphabet underwent changes, as a result of which letters were excluded that were unnecessary for conveying the sounds of modern Russian speech. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters.

In the middle of the first millennium of our era, the Turkic-speaking peoples already used their own writing system, called the runic writing. The first information about runic inscriptions appears in Russia at the end of the 18th century. Russian and foreign scientists copied and published some samples of ancient Turkic runic inscriptions. According to the latest research, runic writing originated before our era, possibly in the Saka time. In the III-V centuries AD, there were two variants of runic writing - Hunnic and Eastern, which existed on the territory of Zhetysu and Mongolia. In the VI-VII centuries. on the basis of the latter, the ancient Turkic writing system, called the Orkhon-Yenisei, developed. The Hunnic runic writing served as the basis for the development of the Bulgar and Khazar writing, as well as the writing of the Kangars and Kipchaks. The main material for writing among the Turkic-speaking peoples was wooden plates. This is what the Kypchak proverbs say: "I wrote, wrote, wrote five trees", "I wrote a large inscription on the top of a tall tree." These sayings also testify to the wide spread of writing among the Kypchaks and other Turkic-speaking peoples. For example, the riddle "Raising my eyes, I read endlessly", meaning the sky and the stars, could have been invented by people for whom reading was a normal phenomenon. This riddle was widespread among the Kypchaks. Along with the use of the Sogdian language, the Turks used the Sogdian alphabet to convey their own speech. Later, after some modifications, this alphabet was named "Uyghur", since the ancient Uyghurs used it especially widely in the 9th-15th centuries.

Conclusion

The basis of any ancient culture is writing. The ancient East is rightfully the birthplace of writing. Its emergence was associated with the accumulation of knowledge, which was no longer possible to keep in memory, the growth of cultural ties between people, and then the needs of states. The invention of writing ensured the accumulation of knowledge and its reliable transmission to descendants. Various peoples of the Ancient East developed and improved writing in different ways, creating, finally, the first types of alphabetic writing. The alphabetic Phoenician letter, which was later revised by the Greeks, formed the basis of our modern alphabet.

LIST OF REFERENCES

1. Culturology. uch. allowance. Edited by L.V. Yuzhakova Ryazan 1999;

2. Verzhbitskaya A. Culturology. Cognition. M., 1996;

3. Zvegetsev V.A. History of linguistics 19th - 20th centuries, M., 1965;

4. Reformatskiy A.A. Introduction to linguistics. M., 1967;

5. B.S.E. Volume 19, pp. 571 - 576;

6. History of Russia from ancient times to the end of the 17th century / Ed. A.N. Sakharova, A.P. Novoseltseva. - M., 1996;

7. Latin America: an encyclopedic reference book, vol. I - M., Soviet encyclopedia, 1979;

The first written language appeared on Earth 5000 years ago. It was the writing of the Sumerians.
Writing was called cuneiform in its later form. The letter was made with a special stick made of reeds on clay tablets. Then these tablets were dried and burned in an oven, so they have survived to this day.

There are 2 hypotheses about the origin of writing:

monogenesis (invented in one place)
polygenesis (in several foci).

Writing is presented in 3 primary foci, the connection of which has not been proven:

mesopotamian (Sumerians)
egyptian (according to the theory of monogenesis, it was brought from the Sumerians)
the writing system of the Far East (Chinese, according to the theory of monogenesis, was brought from the Sumerians).

Writing is developing in the same way everywhere - from drawings to written signs. Pictography turns into a graphic system. Drawing writing turns into language graphics not when drawings disappear (for example, in Egypt, drawings were used, but this is not drawing writing), but when we can guess in which language the text is written.
Sometimes people instead of letters sent each other various objects.
Greek historian Herodotus, who lived in the 5th century. BC e., tells about the "letter" of the Scythians to the Persian king Darius. A Scythian messenger came to the Persian camp and put presents before the king, "consisting of a bird, a mouse, a frog and five arrows." The Scythians did not know how to write, so this is how their message looked like. Darius asked what these gifts meant. The messenger replied that he was ordered to hand them over to the king and return immediately. And the Persians must figure out the meaning of the "letter" themselves. For a long time, Darius consulted with his soldiers and finally said how he understood the message: a mouse lives in the earth, a frog lives in water, a bird is like a horse, and arrows are the military courage of the Scythians. Thus, Darius decided, the Scythians give him their water and land and submit to the Persians, giving their military courage.
But the military leader of the Persians Gobrius interpreted the “letter” differently: “If you, Persians, do not fly away like birds into the heavens, or like mice do not hide into the ground, or like frogs do not jump into lakes, then you will not come back and fall under the blows of our arrows ".
As you can see, subject writing can be interpreted in different ways. The history of the war of Darius with the Scythians showed that Gobrius turned out to be right. The Persians could not defeat the elusive Scythians who roamed the steppes of the Northern Black Sea region, Darius left with his army from the Scythian lands.
Actually writing, descriptive writing began with drawings. Writing with drawings is called pictography (from Latin pictus - pictorial and Greek grapho - I write). In pictography, art and writing are indivisible, therefore archaeologists, ethnographers, art historians, and literary historians are engaged in rock paintings. Everyone is interested in their own area. For the historian of writing, the information contained in the drawing is important. A pictogram drawing usually denotes either some kind of life situation, for example, hunting, or animals and people, or various objects - a boat, a house, etc.
The first inscriptions were about household chores - food, weapons, supplies - objects were simply depicted. Gradually, the principle of isomorphism is violated (i.e., a reliable image of the number of objects - how many vases there are, we draw as many). The image loses its connection with the subject. Instead of 3 vases, there is now a vase and 3 dashes that convey the number of vases, thus. quantitative and qualitative information is given separately. The first scribes had to distinguish and understand the difference between qualitative and quantitative signs. Then iconicity develops, its own grammar appears.
At the turn of the IV - III millennium BC. e. Pharaoh Narmer conquered Lower Egypt and ordered to perpetuate his victory. The relief drawing depicts this event. And in the upper right corner there is a pictogram that serves as a signature for the reliefs. The falcon holds a rope threaded through the nostrils of a human head, which appears to emerge from a strip of earth with six papyrus stalks. The falcon is a symbol of the victorious king, he holds the head of the defeated king of the North on a leash; the land with papyri is Lower Egypt, papyrus is its symbol. Six of its stems - six thousand prisoners, since the sign of papyrus means a thousand. But was it possible to convey the name of the king with a drawing? How do you know his name was Narmer?
It turns out that at this time the Egyptians had already begun to distinguish signs from the drawings that did not indicate the drawn object, but the sounds that made up its name. The drawing of a dung beetle meant three sounds of HPR, and the drawing of a basket meant two sounds of NB. And although such sounds remained drawings, they have already become phonetic signs. The ancient Egyptian language had words with one-, two-, and three-letter syllables. And since the Egyptians did not write vowels, monosyllabic words represented one sound. When the Egyptians had to write a name, they used one-letter hieroglyphs.
The transition from concrete to abstract objects, which do not correspond to a visual image. Chinese hieroglyphs arose from drawings (13th century BC) Until now, hieroglyphs have changed little, but the grammar of the language has changed (a modern Chinese can read texts written in BC, recognizes the symbols, but does not grasp the meaning). The drawing is stylized, simplified, standardized.
In the end, in all the centers of the globe, signs begin to display sounds. Signs were tied to the sound of the whole word. It was very difficult to use such a letter - it is an art. A very complex writing system, but it satisfied the ancients, because it could be used only by a limited caste of people for whom this knowledge was a means of subsistence.
The need to quickly write complex and long texts led to the fact that the drawings were simplified, they became conventional symbols - hieroglyphs (from the Greek hieroglyphoi - sacred letters).
In the 12-13 centuries. BC. in the Middle East - the time of the appearance of the Sinai inscriptions. This is a step towards drastically reducing the number of written characters. Signs were developed that indicated the syllable. Writing has become syllabic... For different words, the combination of consonant and vowel is different.
Due to the presence of such one-syllable signs, denoting one sound, from the complex writing system, alphabet... Phoenicians, having become acquainted with these letters, based on them created their own alphabetic writing, simplifying the signs of syllabic writing. An indifferent vowel was attributed to each sign of this writing. Arabs and Jews used a letter without vowels. There was a complex system of guessing, which nevertheless gave constant failures. Later, a vowel system appeared, but nevertheless, in everyday life, Jews and Arabs used a letter without vowel.
The Greeks adopted the Phoenician system. Greek is Indo-European. The Greeks introduce signs for vowels - this is a coup. The Greeks invented a complete writing system. All vowels were depicted. Later they began to depict stress (place and type), aspiration. We also introduced an image of a prosody (analogue to notes), which is impossible in the case of Russian writing and therefore is not used by us.
Is it possible to answer the question: who, what person invented the writing system? Who was the first to use alphabetic writing? There is no answer to these questions. The emergence of writing was caused by the requirement of the life of society and the state, the economic activity of people - and writing appeared. But alphabets were created later, in our era, a new era, educated by people of their time. So, Cyril and Methodius created a letter for the Slavic languages. Mesrop Mashtots created an alphabetic writing for the Armenian language. Together with his students, Mashtots went to different countries to study writing. It was "a real scientific, perhaps the world's first linguistic expedition, which set as its goal the development of the alphabet," wrote a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences DA Olderogge.
The peoples of the Far North and Siberia did not have a written language before the October Revolution. Now the researchers of the Institute of the Peoples of the North have created an alphabetical letter for them.
There were many illiterates in the Tajik Republic, since the Arabic script, which was once used by Tajiks, is very difficult. Now Tajiks write in Tajik in Russian letters.
Writings are also being created in the countries of modern Africa.

People have always tried to record and transmit to posterity information about the experience accumulated in different spheres of life. This is clearly demonstrated by almost all countries of the world.

The simplest and most intuitive form of recording is a drawing. Ancient artists depicted real objects. Scientists believe that the rock paintings in the Lascaux cave testify to a religious ritual.

Gradually, the images became more and more conventional and symbolic. The drawing turned into a sign, which gave impetus to the emergence of writing.

We bring to your attention a brief history of writing.

Coptic alphabet

The rapidly developing trade and crafts, requiring accounting, led to the creation of writing. The most ancient type of writing is pictographic.

A pictogram is a schematic drawing that depicts the things, events and phenomena in question. This letter was very descriptive and quite suitable for conveying small messages.

But when the need arose to convey some abstract thought or concept, conventional icons began to be included in the number of pictograms. Let's say, it began to be depicted as a circle inside another circle, and water - as a wavy line.

The history of writing begins around 3200 BC, when people first began to think about the transmission and preservation of information. In the beginning, they used pictograms to represent words.

Initially, Egyptian writing was pictographic: each sign depicted an object. Later, the drawing was no longer associated with the meaning of the word, but with the sound. For example, the drawing of the mouth represented the letter "r".

Gradually, the icons became less and less like drawings, and standard conventional symbols appeared. The Mesopotamian scribes wrote on tiles made of raw clay, because there was a lot of it in Mesopotamia.

The signs were applied with stylos - reed nibs with a triangular end, so the Sumerian writing began to be called cuneiform. After the tiles were dried in the sun or burned in an oven, they became durable and could be stored for more than one millennium.

The writing of the Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians was cuneiform. It was adopted and used for two thousand years by the ancient Persians.

Number systems

The Babylonian number system is based on the number 60, so in Ancient Babylon the number 87 is 60 + 27. Over time, the decimal number system prevailed in the world: the number 87 is 8 tens and 7 units. However, 87 minutes for our contemporaries is equal to 1 hour 27 minutes, that is, the same as for the ancient Babylonians. And this is not a coincidence. To measure time, as well as angles, we use the sixtiesimal number system of the ancient Babylonians.

Egyptian writing

At the next stage in the development of writing, a sign (symbol) began to denote not only a specific object, but also a sound.

The type of writing in which the image denoted sound was called hieroglyphic.

History claims that hieroglyphic writing was created in 3100 BC and did not change for 3 thousand years. The scribes of Ancient Egypt used a reed pen to write their inscription on papyrus.

Later, hieroglyphic writing became widespread in the Far East - in China and Korea. Hieroglyphs in China appeared around 1700 BC. Their designs became more conventional during the Zhou Dynasty (1122-256 BC).

With the help of hieroglyphs, it was possible to reflect any, even the most abstract thought.

However, everyone who wanted to learn how to write had to memorize several thousand signs, so few people knew how to write and read in ancient times.

Ancient Egyptian scribes kept writing implements - ink and reed styles with an obliquely cut end in wooden pencil cases that were convenient to carry.

The first true alphabet (Proto-Canaanite) appeared in the Middle East around 1700 BC. It consisted of 30 symbols, each of which denoted a specific sound.

Most of the letters in the modern English alphabet date back to Phoenician. The table shows the oldest forms of the Greek and Latin alphabets.

At the end of the 2nd millennium BC. e. the ancient Phoenicians invented the alphanumeric alphabet, which served as a model for the Hebrew, Arabic, Latin and ancient Greek alphabets.

How the numbers were written

The history of writing is also fascinating in how people tried to learn how to write numbers to indicate quantity.

A wolf bone was found on the territory, on which about 32 thousand years ago, an ancient man scribbled 55 marks (5 groups of 11 marks)

Ancient man counted something in this way. But what? We will never know. Historians suggest that he counted the animals that he managed to kill while hunting.

Symbols for numbers greater than 10 appeared in 3400, and in Mesopotamia in 3000 BC. e.

In Mesopotamia, they wrote with reed sticks on tablets made of raw clay. Under pressure, the track turned out to be wider and deeper, and where the style was taken out, it was thinner. This cuneiform tablet dates from 1900-1700. BC e. The teacher wrote a proverb on it, which the student had to copy on the back.

In the ancient Egyptian number system and in cuneiform for numbers 1; ten; 100; 1000; 10,000; 100,000 and 1,000,000 were used different symbols, and, in order to designate a large number, the numbers were repeated.

This was the case for the ancient Romans, and then for the ancient Romans: X stood for 10, XX - 20, XXX - 30, С - 100, ССС - 300, etc. his appearances are a separate fascinating story.

Among the cuneiform tablets discovered by archaeologists, "school notebooks" have been preserved, so it is known that the multiplication table was known in Mesopotamia.

The Egyptian disciples knew only addition, multiplication and division by two. To multiply, say, by four, they multiply the number by two and add (double) the answer.

Key dates

The history of writing is the history of the amazing development of human thought from the simplest forms to extremely complex abstract languages.

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