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The Development Of Ancient Systems Of Writing In Iraq And Egypt - Online Term Paper

The Development Of Ancient Systems Of Writing In Iraq And Egypt



Ancient systems of writing in the Middle East arose when people needed a
method for remembering important information. In both Ancient Iraq and Ancient
Egypt each of the stages of writing, from pictograms to ideograms to
phonetograms, evolved as a response to the need to express more complex ideas.
Satisfaction of this need gave us the two most famous forms of ancient writing,
cuneiform from ancient Iraq, and hieroglyphics from ancient Egypt. Both of these
forms of writing evolved and their use spread to other peoples even after the
originators of the scripts had passed on.
Some of the oldest writing found in the Middle East dates from 8000 to 3000
B.C. This corresponds to the ...

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they wouldn't be misplaced or
lost. To secure them, they were placed in opaque clay envelopes. To indicate
what was inside the envelope markings were made on it, eventually someone
realized that all you had to do was mark on the clay what was in the envelope
and you discard the tokens altogether. With this major development we get the
first writing on clay tablets.
In Ancient Mesopotamia the most readily available material for writing on
was clay. When writing on clay first arose, the scribe would try to make an
artistic representation of what he was referring to. This is a logical first
step in writing as if you wanted to record that you had three sheep, you would
draw a picture of a sheep and then add to the picture some marking to indicate
that you had three of them. Thus the earliest stage in writing arose, pictograms.

Pictograms, although not really writing in the modern sense of the term, do
represent a method of communicating an event or message. They also "led to ...

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for
plow meant the tool, if there was a symbol of a man in front, the symbol for
plow would be interpreted as plowman.
The most advanced stage of development was the phonetogram. A phonetogram
is a symbol that represented the pronunciation of part of a word. Phonetograms
developed from symbols for words that sounded like the syllables of other words.
For example you could have the symbol "4" and "C" in modern writing go together
to make the symbol 4C, which would represent four seas, but if you added the
determinative ' to make it 4'C' it could be read as the word "foresee". Thus a
transition from pictographic to phonetographic. With this, you could adapt a
script to write the ...

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PAPER DETAILS
Added: 3/29/2004 08:37:23 AM
Category: World History
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 1763
Pages: 7

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