The invention of the writing

In our daily life we face all the time and everywhere written texts: While reading a book or searching our way through town, while looking over the newest newspaper or being irritated by an advertisement which confronts us on the streets or also just while writing a message.

But how does it come, that we have this privilege today: to be not only able to give information to each other through spoken words but also on the paper. Where did the first people think about writing down there thoughts, about creating symbols which represent sounds of their spoken language.

I will not talk about the language of numbers because writing down numbers for the purpose of record keeping began long before the writing of actual words.

So do you believe me if I tell you that this wonderful inventions was made by the ancient Greeks?

It was kind of in the beginning of the civilization of the ancient Greeks: somewhere between the 8th and the 7th century BC the people in the Metropolis of the old Greek culture-Athens started to write down laws, their knowledge and their thoughts about philosophy.

With their compact knowledge they inherited from their surrounding they were able to create the basis culture. They could not really stabilize it without writing down some of the rules for their society or without being able to communicate more easily over big distances. So that they could create a better system it is said that they created a written language and therefore were able to pass on all the information better. It is common knowledge that the given information will not remain the same if a lot of people transmit it, because each of them passes it on in their own way with the information they understood or also misunderstood.  

Of course they had some help for the first steps, the ability to communicate through pictures was perfected in so many different cultures in the centuries before. But they never used it to create whole sentences reflecting perfectly what the persons were saying or thinking, showing the diversity of their language.

Now it’s your turn, do you believe that the Greeks invented the written language or do you think that I told you stories created in my mind?

Solution:

Shame on me, I did not tell you the truth. It is generally agreed that the written language (not only numbers) was invented independently in two places: in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC and Mesoamerica around 600 BC. But there are also historians debating if the writing systems in Egypt around 3200 BC and in China around 1200 BC were also invented independently.

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