WritingA concise yet wide-ranging survey of the invention and evolution of writing. The invention of writing marked the real beginning of civilization as we know it. Without writing, scholarship, religion, philosophy--and indeed, knowledge of every kind--would be rudimentary, for all these things depend on the traditions of communicable intelligence that only writing really secures. As a conscious and systematic activity, writing began in the fourth millennium B.C., its first known manifestation being cuneiform in Mesopotamia; its second, the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Each represents an immense step forward in human intellectual development. Later, and still more dramatically, comes the first alphabetic script, which originated in Phoenicia and from which all the known alphabetic scripts used today are derived.--Adapted from jacket. |
Contents
CONTENTS | 7 |
ANALYTIC SCRIPTS OF ANCIENT | 35 |
PHONETIC SCRIPTS | 104 |
Copyright | |
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adaptation Alphabet Museum alphabetic writing ancient Arabic Aramaic alphabet Assyrian Aztec Babylonian boustrophedon Brahmi Byblos characters Chinese script Chinese writing civilisation consonants Cretan Crete CRUZ culture cuneiform script cursive Cypriote syllabary Cyrillic decipherment demotic earliest Early Canaanite Early Hebrew Easter Island eastern Egypt Egyptian hieroglyphic Egyptian hieroglyphic writing eighth century B.C. Etruscan Etruscan alphabet extant fifth century B.C. form of writing Greek alphabet Hebrew alphabet Hittite Hittite hieroglyphic ideograms ideographic Indian indigenous Indus Valley script inscribed inscriptions invention Japanese kana kind Lachish language Latin alphabet letters Linear Mayan script Minoan minuscule modern monumental Mycenaean Nabataean ninth century offshoots origin Palestine papyrus period Persian Phaistos Disc Phoenician phonetic values pictographic Plate pseudo-hieroglyphic represent right to left Roman scholars Schrift scribes Semitic Semitic alphabet seventh century B.C. signs Slavonic Square Hebrew stele stone style Sumerian syllable symbols Syria system of writing tablets tion Ugarit vowels word written