Picturing The First Writing

Picturing

the First

Writing

Debbie Barry

2 Picturing The First Writing

Published by:

Debbie Barry

2500 Mann Road, #248

Clarkston, Michigan 48346

USA

Copyright © 2013 by Deborah K. Barry.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

by any means without the written permission

of the author.

ISBN-13: 978-1490363707

ISBN-10: 149036370X

Picturing The First Writing 3

Originally submitted as a college

assignment:

Ashford University

ENG321: Introductory Linguistics

Michael O'Donnell

February 27, 2012


Picturing the First

Writing

Modern Western writing finds its

roots in the earliest societies of Africa.

When humans first think to record events of

their lives by carving or painting images on

rocks and on cave walls, writing is born.

This first pictorial writing gives rise, over

many generations, to systematic picture

writing, called hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs, in

turn, evolve into alphabets that are used by

many languages today. “[I]t is through

Ancient Egypt that the Western world shares

an important legacy with Africa: the

emergence … in Egypt of a form of writing

from which all modern scripts are

genetically descended” (Abraham, 2011,

para. 3). Many experts believe that the

European Phoenician alphabet is the mother

of all modern scripts, but archaeological


evidence suggests that the Phoenician

alphabet also has its roots in Egyptian

hieroglyphics. Although written language

developed independently in human cultures

all over the world, modern writing is a

descendant of pictorial communications in

ancient Africa.

The first evidence of writing, or of

recording ideas and events in a lasting,

visual manner, is found about 15,000 BCE,

when cave drawings first appear. “Cave art,

called petroglyphs … are literal portrayals of

life at that time” (Fromkin, et. al., 2011, p.

541). Petroglyphs of realistically-rendered

animals, people, and the activities of ancient

people provide a vivid record for modern

scientists of ancient human cultures. “The

ability to record thoughts and sounds goes

far back in human antiquity” (Houston,

2004, p. 223). The recording of ideas in

pictures or in organized writing illustrates

the creativity of the human mind, and a

desire to keep a permanent record of ideas


that may be passed on to future generations.

These pictorial communications, or

petroglyphs, represent whole words and

ideas with individual pictures. The meaning

of a painting or etching of a running stag

with antlers is concrete, meaning a running

stag with antlers. As far as can be

ascertained, it is not yet a representation of

an abstract idea.

“Pictographic writing has been found

throughout the world, ancient and modern:

among Africans, Native Americans

including the Inuits of Alaska and Canada,

the Incas of Peru, the Yukagirians of

Siberia, and the people of Oceania”

(Fromkin, et. al., 2011, p. 542).

Pictographic records have been identified in

Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas,

where writing systems appear to have

developed independently in parallel with

one another. Regardless of geography,

humans have a desire to make lasting

records of the events of their lives. Stephen


D. Houston (2004) writes that “script origins

… occur in moments of societal change: the

Olmec decline, the institution of expansive

dynastic control in Egypt, city-state

administration in Mesopotamia, the

appearance of Shang” (p. 239). No doubt,

the first occurrences of petroglyphs in Africa

also take place is periods of societal change,

as proto-humans become fully-aware

humans and begin to build human

civilization.

Archaeological evidence shows that

early man may communicate through

drawings before he uses verbal language.

Arthur J. Evans (1903) makes the claim that

“Man drew before he talked” (p. 51). In

modern humans, verbal language comes

naturally for young children and written

language must be learned with some effort.

Even in modern humans, however, young

children and persons with developmental

disabilities that limit the acquisition of

spoken language will draw to express


thoughts and emotions. “Engraved patterns

on the side of ostrich eggs dating back to the

Stone Age could be the oldest form of

written communication known to man …

The etchings, thought to be 60,000 years

old, were used to mark the eggs, which had

been turned into water flasks by hunter-

gatherers in Africa” (Alleyne, 2010, paras.

1-2). These etchings date to the period in

which Homo neanderthalensis lived in

northern Africa. Anya Luke-Killam (2001)

writes that “any speech production

capabilities in Homo neanderthalensis would

have been severely limited by the

physiology specific to that species” (p. 1).

Also living in Africa at this time are Homo

erectus and Homo habilis. According to

Luke-Killam (2001), “it is not clear that

Homo habilis fossil brain evidence is

sufficient enough to claim that this hominid

had language-like skills. Likewise, fossil

brain evidence does not clearly indicate that

Homo erectus had definite language


abilities” (p. 2). The ostrich egg etchings,

then, are evidence that written language

exists in northern Africa before humans

acquire the physical ability to use verbal

language.

Sumerian cuneiform writing and

Egyptian hieroglyphic writing appear at

roughly the same time in human history.

About 4,000-3,000 BCE, both of these

systems flourish. “Over the centuries the

Sumerians simplified and conventionalized

their pictography. They began to produce

the symbols of their written language by

using a wedge-shaped stylus that was

pressed into soft clay tablets” (Fromkin, et.

al., 2011, p. 543). The wedge-shaped marks

are a more refined, reproducible form of

picture writing, with each symbol

representing an object or an idea. Similarly,

“Egyptian hieroglyphics made up a formal

writing system used by the Ancient

Egyptians that contained a combination of

pictographs … and ideographs … that later


evolved into a phonetic … script”

(Abraham, 2011, para. 4). The Egyptians

use highly stylized images to represent

objects and ideas, which become syllabic

writing. Where petroglyphs only record

objects and their interactions, cuneiform and

hieroglyphics carry human expression

further by representing ideas. Each symbol

in cuneiform or in hieroglyphics represents a

word or a part of a word. Two or more

symbols may be required to represent a

single thought, and the same individual

symbol may occur in two or more words

with very different meanings. Dr. Konrad

Tuchscherer asserts that every modern script

descends from ancient Egyptian

hieroglyphic traditions: “’Every modern

script is descended genetically, in some way

… from the ancient Egyptian script

tradition,’ says Dr Konrad Tuchscherer,

associate professor of history and director of

Africana Studies at St John's University in

New York” (Abraham, 2011, para. 24).


Tuchscherer’s claim excludes Chinese and

other East Asian scripts. He holds that,

although cuneiform and hieroglyphics occur

concurrently in history, cuneiform dies out

and hieroglyphics remain as the ancestor of

written language. Dr. Gunter Dreyer and his

team of German archaeologists support this

claim with their research that shows that

“the world's earliest examples of writing

were … from Africa, an estimated 500 miles

south of the Nile Delta and dating to the

33rd century BCE” (Abraham, 2011, para.

29). From this origin in Egyptian

hieroglyphics, written language then moves

north to the Phoenicians.

The Phoenician alphabet, which is

often identified as the source of modern

writing, grows out of Egyptian hieroglyphics

about 1,500 BCE. The Phoenicians refine

earlier pictographic writing into a

consonantal alphabet. With this new

language, symbols represent discrete sounds.

The symbols, which may now be called


letters, may be combined in limitless ways

to produce a limitless number of words.

This new alphabet allows a broader

expression of human thought through

writing, as any spoken words may now be

written. There are still limits to written

language, however, as vowel sounds are not

depicted in the West Semitic syllabary of the

Phoenicians. The same combination of

consonants may have several different

meanings, depending on the vowel sounds

that are inserted between the consonants.

The letters of the Phoenician alphabet reflect

the sounds of verbal speech in the Semitic

world.

The limitation on the consonantal

alphabet is eased about 1000 BCE when the

“Ancient Greeks borrow the Phoenician

consonantal alphabet” (Fromkin, et. al.,

2011, p.553). The Greek alphabet includes

letters that represent discrete vowel sounds,

as well as consonants. Greek words include

the required vowels in their spelling, so each


word is distinct. The reader no longer needs

to divine which vowels the writer intended

to include between the consonants in order

to understand the meaning of a word.

Including clear vowel sounds in the Greek

alphabet reflects the changing sounds of

verbal language as written language moves

around the eastern end of the Mediterranean

from north-eastern Africa to southern

Europe. Recent archaeological discoveries

in Greece confirm the use of writing in

Europe in this period. “Archaeologists have

found a clay tablet bearing the earliest

known writing in Europe, a 3,350-year-old

specimen that is at least 150 years older than

other tablets discovered in the region”

(Maugh, 2011, para. 1). “Found in an olive

grove in what’s now the village of Iklaina …

the tablet was created by a Greek-speaking

Mycenaean scribe between 1450 and 1350

B.C.” (Than, 2011, para. 3). Maugh and

Than both discuss the same discovery, made

in the summer of 2010, of a small, clay


tablet that is found is the remains of an

ancient fire in Iklaina, Greece. The tablet is

inadvertently preserved when it is burned in

a rubbish heap, thus firing the clay and

making it strong and hard. The tablet can be

read, and is written in a Greek language

called Linear B, which “is related to the

older hieroglyph system used by the ancient

Egyptians” (Than, 2011, para. 18). The

discovery of this tablet is physical evidence

that Greek writing descends from Egyptian

hieroglyphs, which, in turn, descend from

ancient petroglyphs.

Approximately 750 BCE, “Etruscans

borrow the Greek alphabet” (Fromkin, et.

al., 2011, p. 553). In the spring of 1881,

“the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston

received … [an] interesting little unguent

vase or perfume bottle” (Norton, 1881, p.

165). The jar is important because it is a

piece of Etruscan pottery from Corneto,

Italy. On the jar is a series of Etruscan

letters that Signor Gian Francesco


Gainurrini interprets as “M I M U L U K A

V I I E S I” (Norton, 1881, p. 165). The

letters, a facsimile of which appears in the

article about the jar, are plainly visible, and

where the interpretation shows a “U,” the

original inscription contains a character that

looks like an English “Y.” “Signor

Gamurrini reads the words composing the

inscription, Mi mulu kaviiesi, and translates

them, … ‘I am Mulus, or Mulvius, the son

of Cavius’" (Norton, 1881, pp. 165-166).

The Etruscan writing is rendered left to

right, just as modern English, French, and

related languages are written. The spelling

of “kaviiesi” appears to give the clue that

Mulus is the son of Cavius, using an

inflectional morpheme to indicate the

relationship. This Etruscan inscription

shows the use of both consonants and

vowels to produce written words. The

Greek and Etruscan alphabets are both

known as epichoric alphabets, which means

that they are “peculiar to a limited area”


(Epichoric, 2012, para. 1). It is interesting

that the inscription is written as a single

word, without spaces or symbols to indicate

where one word ends and the next word

begins. Also, the letters are all majuscules –

what are modernly called capitals or upper-

case letters – and that there are no

minuscules, or lower-case letters in use.

This lack of minuscules is because

“minuscule or lower case letters first

appeared sometime after 800 AD” (Ager,

2012, para. 3). At the time the Etruscan

unguent jar was crafted, there was not yet a

distinction drawn by the use of two different

forms of the same letter.

Features of modern writing develop

in Greek and Etruscan writing. “Around

500 BC the direction of writing changed to

horizontal lines running from left to right …

[and] [d]iacritics to represent stress and

breathings were added to the [Greek]

alphabet in around 200 BC” (Ager, 2012,

para. 4). Modern European languages are


written horizontally across the page, running

from left to right. Many modern languages,

including French, Spanish, and Greek

continue to use diacritic marks to indicate

stress or to give particular letters special

sounds.

About 500 BCE, “Romans adapt the

Etruscan/Greco alphabet to Latin” (Fromkin,

et. al., 2011, p. 553). The Roman, or Latin

alphabet is used to this day, and “[m]ost

European alphabets use Latin (Roman)

letters, adding diacritic marks to

accommodate individual characteristics of a

particular language” (Fromkin, et. al., 2011,

p. 553). Latin letters are familiar to every

person who reads and writes modern

English. While the letters may be rendered

in many decorative fonts that may include

added curlicues, whorls, serifs, and any

number of decorative features, the letters

remain intelligible to English readers. The

many artistic flourishes that may be added to

Latin letters do not change the meanings of


the letters. The cuneiform and hieroglyphic

systems of the past must be rendered with

great precision, avoiding any extraneous

marks, or the written message will be

changed. Although diacritic marks may

change the meaning of certain letters of the

Latin alphabet, artistic flourishes neither add

nor subtract meaning.

Culture, unlike artistic flourishes,

does change the meaning of words written

with Latin letters. While the letters of

Beowulf are the same letters as those used to

write the Declaration of Independence, the

sounds associated with the letters has

changed dramatically over time. As verbal

vocabularies and language sounds change

over time, the spelling of written words also

changes. Spelling is irrelevant in verbal

speech, which is based entirely on sound and

inflection, but written language requires

conventions of spelling to express the

sounds of verbal language in a way that will

be intelligible to readers. The progression of


the spelling of various words according to

the way they sound in spoken language at a

given period may be observed by examining

the words at the ends of rhymed couplets in

the poetry of Chaucer and of Shakespeare.

While the words may not appear to rhyme in

modern English, it is clear that they did

rhyme, or sound alike, in Middle English.

Alphabets descending from Egyptian

hieroglyphics through the Latin alphabet

continue to evolve into the modern era. The

minuscule letter, which is the most common

form of the letters of the modern English

alphabet, was introduced in the 8th

century

CE as the “Carolingian minuscule letter”

(The origins of abc, 2010, para. 35).

Majuscule and minuscule forms of the same

letter share the same sound. A word may be

written using any combination of majuscules

and minuscules without changing the

meaning of the word, and there have been

periods in the history of written English

when either form of a letter might be used


interchangeably in a manuscript. In modern

English, there are rules and conventions for

the use of majuscules, which are now called

capitals. Capital letters are used only in

specific ways in modern English, and

minuscules, or lower-case, letters, are used

for the majority of English writing.

With the advent of the Internet and

digital communications, there is a growing

trend to reintroduce certain pictographic

symbols in modern, written communication.

These symbols, which are usually called

emoticons, are reminiscent of the Egyptian

hieroglyphics from which modern writing

descends. They are made from series of

punctuation marks and a few letters, and

some are fairly complex. The most common

are the smile and the wink. The smile is

made with a colon and a closing parenthesis,

and some computer programs with translate

that combination into a pictogram of a circle

containing two eyes and a smiling mouth:

. The wink is similar, using a semicolon


in place of a colon: ;). As online social

networking sites and chat rooms flourish,

these modern pictograms or hieroglyphics

become more and more common. Many

younger Internet users use more complex

pictograms in their communications, such as

a heart to indicate a feeling of love from the

writer of a message to the reader of the

message: <3. A pictogram the purpose of

which appears to be a mystery to adult users,

but which is popular among young users, is

the shark: (^^^). As written language

continues to evolve, it is possible that these,

or similar, pictograms may enter the

alphabet or the written lexicon as formal

expressions of written ideas.

Although written language

developed independently in human cultures

all over the world, modern Western writing

is a direct descendant of the petroglyphs of

north-eastern Africa. The Phoenician

alphabet, which is often given as the mother

of all modern scripts, has its roots in


Egyptian hieroglyphics. Ancient

petroglyphs may be created by early humans

who have not yet acquired the physiological

capacity for articulate speech. The concrete

ideas contained in petroglyphs are distilled

by the Sumerians and the Egyptians into

systems of stylized images that represent

syllables; Sumerian cuneiform writing dies

out, leaving Egyptian hieroglyphic writing

as the ancestor of modern writing. The

Phoenicians borrow the Egyptian

hieroglyphics and create a consonantal

alphabet that uses letters instead of syllabic

symbols to create written words. Later, the

Greeks borrow the Phoenician alphabet and

add letters to represent vowel sounds. The

Etruscans carry the Greek alphabet into

Italy, where it becomes the Latin alphabet

that is still used in many modern languages,

including French, Spanish, and English.

Over time, letters are added to and

subtracted from alphabets to accommodate

the sounds of languages, and some modern


languages use diacritic marks to indicate

stress. As spoken and written languages

continue to evolve, alphabets may also

continue to evolve. Specialized symbols

used in Internet communications, called

emoticons, may one day be accepted letters

of an expanded alphabet.


References

Abraham, C. (2011). Africa had its own

writing systems! New African, 509,

82-87. Retrieved from ProQuest

database.

Ager, S. (2012). Greek alphabet. Retrieved

from http://www.omniglot.com/

writing/greek.htm

Alleyne, R. (2010, March 2). Ostrich egg

markings could be earliest form of

writing. The DailyTelegraph, 7.

Retrieved from ProQuest database.

Epichoric. (2012). Merriam-Webster Online

Dictionary. Retrieved from

http://www.merriam-

webster.com/dictionary/epichoric

Evans, A. J. (1903). Pre-Phoenician writing

in Crete, and its bearings on the

history of the alphabet. Man, 3, 50-

55. Retrieved from

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2840854


Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N.

(2011). An introduction to language

(9th ed.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth.

Houston, S. D. (2004). The archaeology of

communication technologies. Annual

Review of Anthropology, 33, 223-

250. Retrieved from

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2506485

2

Luke-Killam, A. (2001). Language

capabilities of Homo erectus &

Homo neanderthalensis.

Retrieved from

http://www.lllf.uam.es/~clase/acceso

_local/LgCapabili.pdf

Maugh, T. H. (2011, April 3). Preserved

tablet rewrites history of ancient

Greece. Tulsa World, A12.

Retrieved from ProQuest database.

Norton, C.E. (1881). An ancient Etruscan

unguent jar. The American Art

Review, 2 (10), 165-166. Retrieved


from http://www.jstor.org/stable/

20559876

Than, K. (2011, March 30). Ancient tablet

found: Oldest readable writing in

Europe. National Geographic News

[Electronic version]. Retrieved from

https://talesfromthelou.wordpress.co

m/tag/athens-archaeological-society/

The origins of abc. (2010). Retrieved from

http://ilovetypography.com/2010/08/

07/where-does-the-alphabet-come-

from/


Debbie Barry and

her husband live in

southeastern

Michigan with their

two sons and their

two cats. The

family enjoys

exploring history through French and Indian

War re-enactment and through medieval re-

enactment in the Society for Creative

Anachronism (SCA). Debbie grew up in

Vermont, where she heard and collected

many family stories that she enjoys retelling

as historical fiction for young audiences.

Debbie graduated summa cum laude with a

B.A. in dual majors of social sciences with

an education concentration and of English in

2013.


Also look for these titles by Debbie Barry:

Books for Young Learners: Around the Color Wheel

Colors and Numbers

Stories for Children: Bobcat in the Pantry

Born in the Blizzard and Freshet

Expressing the Trunk

Gramp’s Bear Story

When Mary Fell Down the Well

Writing Competition

History and Genealogy: Family History of Deborah K.

Fletcher

Grandma Fletcher’s Scrapbooks

Nana’s Stories

Property Deeds and other Legal

Documents of the Fletcher and

Townsend Families

Property Deeds and other Legal

Documents of the Fletcher and

Townsend Families, 2nd Edition

with Digital Scans

The Red Notebook

The Red Notebook, 2nd Edition with

Digital Scans

Zoa Fletcher’s Photos

Zoa Has Her Way


Other Topics: A Journey Through My College

Papers: Undergraduate Series

American Students Are Crippled By

Cultural Diversity Education

Debbie’s Vision in Art, Volumes 1-4

Debbie’s Writing

Indifferent Universe

Loss

More Than Just Monogamy

Nature in Early American Literature

Religion and Myth in English Poetry

The Evil of Grendel

The Heart’s Vision

The Heart’s Vision in Color

Picturing The First Writing

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