21-es tétel

• Sumer


  • Land of the world's first real cities
  • Mastered irrigation
  • Cities grew, so too did the temples to the gods
  • Temples served as enormous warehouses for the vast wealth of the city
  • With an economy of this size, with tons of supplies moving in and out of the temple each day, they needed to keep records somehow
  • This led directly to the invention of writing
• Oldest writing systems


  • Cuneiform
  • Hieroglyphics
  • Alphabet
• Cuneiform

  • The first known form of writing
  • Most important contribution of the Sumerians
  • Over 700 symbols with different meanings that varied with each city state and changed over time
  • Created by using a stylus to carve small but intricate symbols on a clay tablet
  • Initially represented objects and ideas, but over time evolved to include phonetic elements
• Writing in ancient Egypt

  • One of the major cultural achievements
  • Earliest texts were religious messages: praises of the gods or curses
  • People believed the written idea had power
  • Earliest written characters were called hieroglyphs, which means holy cravings
  • Handwritten form of hieroglyphic writing was developed that required the writer to write with ink on papyrus
  • Later, they invented simpler characters and developed the so-called Demotic and Hieratic writing systems
  • Some are "phonograms" and represent sounds like with cuneiform
  • Others are "ideograms" and represent entire words
  • Hieroglyphics were often inscribed on temples, tombs, and other structures
  • Translating them was nearly impossible until the Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799
• Rosetta Stone


  • A large carved stone with three versions of a decree dating to 196 BCE in Egypt
  • The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek
  • This allowed translators to decode the hieroglyphic symbols
• Phoenician writing system

  • Invented the alphabet
  • Based on Egyptian hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic writing
  • Unlike previous writing systems, the Phoenician alphabet used symbols to represent individual sounds (consonants)
  • This innovation greatly simplified writing and made it more accessible
  • The writing system of Hebrew and Greek are based on the Phoenician alphabet, which makes in the root of latin and Cyrillic alphabets, too
• Greek alphabet

  • Has its roots in the Phoenician alphabet, which the Greeks adapted around the 8th century BCE
  • They modified and expanded it to suit their language, creating the first true alphabet in the process
  • The early Greek alphabet had both uppercase and lowercase forms, with the uppercase letters being used primarily for inscriptions and the lowercase for more casual writing
  • The Greek letters are still in use today in various fields, such as mathematics, physics
• Latin alphabet

  • The Romans modified the Greek alphabet, reducing the number of letters to 23 (excluding the letter "J")
  • It later evolved into the modern Latin alphabet used in English and many other languages
  • The Latin alphabet spread with the expansion of the Roman Empire and became the dominant writing system in Western Europe
  • It was used for the writing of Latin, the language of scholarship, administration, and the Catholic Church
  • The Latin alphabet, in particular, has become a global standard and is the foundation for a vast number of languages spoken today
• The Chinese writing system developed independently and is one of the oldest continuous writing systems in the world
• In India the earliest form of Sanskrit writing can be traced back to the Vedic period
• The Vedas, the oldest sacred texts of Hinduism, were transmitted orally for centuries before being committed to writing
• The script used during this period is known as Vedic Sanskrit
• With the rise of major ancient civilizations, writing became more formalized, and manuscripts on materials like papyrus and parchment gained popularity
• Ancient texts, religious scriptures, and literary works were copied and preserved through handwritten manuscripts