Oral History and the Origins of Writing and Literature

• The following information comes directly from the World History Book, World History: Perspectives on the Past.

                                       

Prehistoric Times

• Neanderthals may not have been capable of truly articulate speech. If so, the Cro-Magnons’ advanced linguistic skills may have enabled them to plan complex cooperative projects that gave them an edge over the Neanderthals.

                                                                 

• Prehistory—the long period of time before people developed writing. Writing was developed about 5,500 years ago.

                                                          

Questions

• If writing was only invented about 5,500 years ago, how long do you think it was before ALL people could read and write?

• How do we know things about civilizations and people that did/do not use a system of writing?

                                   

Oral History• A culture that did not have a writing system

often “handed down its history and laws by word of mouth… Griots [West African record keepers] memorized the great deeds of past kings, family histories, and important events in their village.”

                                

Civilizations in Southwest Asia • Scribes—professional writers

• Every group of people had its own culture—its own way of life including language, tools, customs, and rules. To be considered a civilization instead of just a culture, the following traits were essential: the growth of cities, specialized workers (including scribes and schoolmasters), writing, advanced technology, and complex institutions.

                                          

• Sumerians invented writing as a necessity of city life. Priests needed some way to keep track of the grain and other merchandise that moved in and out of the temple storehouses. Merchants needed accounts of debts and payments. The first written symbols, therefore, stood for commonly traded objects—a donkey, an ox, a sack of grain. These signs were called pictographs because they pictured the things they stood for.

                             

Sumerian Pictographs

Sumerian Pictographs

• Eventually, ideas became associated with certain pictures. For example, a house might also stand for the idea of protection or safety. Such signs are known as ideograms.                       

• Still later, signs came to stand for certain sounds. Cuneiform signs did not stand for single sounds, as letters in the alphabet do today. Instead, each cuneiform sign stood for a whole syllable. By putting groups of signs together, scribes could write full sentences and express many ideas. They could create everything from financial records to poems.

                          

• Sumerian writing grew more and more efficient. The earliest tablets used about 2,000 different signs. By 3000 B. C., that number had been reduced to 800. By 2500 B. C., the number had been cut down even further to about 600 written signs. However, this was still such a large number that only a few people learned to read or write.

                          

• Babylon’s merchants, farmers, and workers needed written laws to help them resolve disputes…therefore made a collection of laws known as Hammurabi’s Code. Scribes carved these laws on a stone column, or stele. The eight-foot stele contained more than 3,500 lines of cuneiform characters.

                                                 

• On their travels, Phoenician merchants needed a simplified kind of writing to keep business records. Cuneiform, with its 600 symbols, was much too cumbersome. Consequently, the Phoenicians discovered a way to keep records using just 22 symbols.

                                          

• The Phoenician writing system first appeared around 900 B. C. Soon it was carried to trading centers all over the Mediterranean world. Later, the Greeks and Romans changed the shapes of the 22 letters and added 4 others, making the alphabet we know today. The word “alphabet,” in fact, comes directly from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, “aleph” and “beth.”

                                          

• The invention of the alphabet was immensely important. Unlike cuneiform, the Phoenician way of writing was a simple system that many people could master fairly quickly. True, the majority of the population still could not read or write. However, over the centuries, literacy (the ability to read and write) became more widespread. The growth of science and industry many years later would have been impossible without this spread of literacy.

                                          

Ancient Egypt

To win the highest posts, either in the army or in the government, people had to be able to read and write. Thus, most high positions went to people who had been born into families wealthy enough to send their children to school. But even humble village scribes taught their own children and perhaps some of their friends’ children.

                                                         

• Crude pictographs had been the earliest form of writing in Egypt, but scribes quickly developed a better system. For most of ancient Egypt’s history, scribes used the form of writing that we call hieroglyphics. This term comes from the Greek words “hieros” and “glyphe” meaning “sacred carving.

                                       

Ancient India and China • p. 76-77 - The Aryans had no writing system.

Instead, their priests preserved their culture from generation to generation by memorizing long hymns and poems. When the Aryans migrated to India, they brought a rich collection of myths, or tales of their gods…Aryan priests could sing from memory a great number of long and complicated hymns, each one suited to a different religious ritual. Some of these hymns may date back to 1500 B. C.

                                       

• p. 86—“The earliest evidence of Chinese writing comes from Shang times. At Anyang and other Shang cities, archeologists have found hundreds of animal bones and tortoise shells with written symbols scratched on them. The strange objects are known as oracle bones because priests used them to foretell the future. Some of the characters are very much like those in a modern Chinese newspaper.

                                                          

• In the Chinese method of writing, each character stands for an idea, not a sound. Recall that many of the Egyptian hieroglyphics stood for sounds in their spoken language. Sumerian cuneiform and the Phoenician alphabet also corresponded to spoken language. In contrast, there were practically no links between China’s spoken language and its written language. One could read Chinese without being able to speak a word of it.

                                          

Examples of Chinese Characters

• The Chinese system of writing had one great advantage. People in all parts of China could learn the same system of writing, even if their spoken languages were very different. Thus, the Chinese written language was very important in unifying a large and diverse land.

                  

Questions• Explain the difference between ideographs,

pictographs, and alphabets. What advantage do alphabets have over ideographs and pictographs?

• Explain the role of literacy and education in invasions and take-overs.

• Explain the importance of literacy and education to people within various societies.

• What is a scribe? Why were scribes important?

• What is the difference between a culture and a civilization?

• Where does the word “alphabet” come from?