Component-I (A) – Personal Details

Component-I (A) – Personal details:

Prof. P. Bhaskar Reddy Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati.

Prof. P. Bhaskar Reddy Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati . & Dr. K. Muniratnam Director i/c, Epigraphy, ASI, Mysore.

Prof. P. Bhaskar Reddy Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati.

Prof. V. Sakunthalamma Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati.

Component-I (B) – Description of module:

Subject Name Indian Culture

Paper Name Indian Epigraphy

Module Name/Title History of Writing

Module Id IC / IEP / 06

Knowledge of the prehistoric man, Material culture, Pre requisites Ancient world civilizations, communication and writing system

To know about the communication system in the Objectives prehistoric world, Origin and development of writing in Ancient civilizations and Indian Subcontinent

Writing / Cuneiform / Hieroglyphs / Indus script / Keywords Pictographs / Ideography / Alphabet

E-text (Quadrant-I) :

1. Introduction:

Writing may be thought of a set of commonly accepted graphic signs used to represent communication, historical writing a set of signs which represents a spoken language. Thus, a writing system is a set of visible or tactile signs used to represent units of language in a systematic way.

True writing is the content of a linguistic utterance encoded so that the other reader can reconstruct, with a fair degree of accuracy, the exact nature of written down, is later development.

The history of writing instruments by which humans have recorded and conveyed thoughts, feelings and grocery lists is, in some ways, the history of civilization itself. In past centuries, scientists had used writing as one of the "markers" of civilization. While it is true that writing systems appear to develop in agricultural and urban cultures, by no means it is a requirement for civilization. This is how we know our story through the drawings, signs and words we have recorded.

2. Prehistoric Writing :

Scholars make a reasonable distinction between prehistory and history of early writing. The concept of writing in essence, is the transference of thought or language into a re-readable form. Language existed long before writing, emerging probably simultaneously with sapience, abstract thought and the Genus Homo. The earliest forms of this art have been long considered to be represented by Pictograms, simple images which enabled the transfer of information through pictures. Before letters were invented, the easy way to communicate thoughts in writing was to use symbols and pictures that usually represented the things they were about.

The transfer of more complex information, ideas and concepts from one individual to another, or to a group, was the single most advantageous evolutionary adaptation for species preservation.

It is thought that human beings developed language c. 35,000 BC as evidenced by cave paintings from the period of the Cro-Magnon Man (c. 50,000-30,000 BC) which appear to express concepts concerning daily life. These images suggest a language because, in some instances, they seem to tell a story (say, of a hunting expedition in which specific events occurred) rather than being simply pictures of animals and people.

The advent of a writing system, however, seems to coincide with the transition from hunter- gatherer societies to more permanent agrarian encampments when it became necessary to count ones property, whether it be parcels of land, animals or measures of grain or to transfer that property to another individual or another settlement.

Overtime, the need for writing changed and a development sign into script is what we call ‘cuneiform’ in Mesopotamia. . It has been widely accepted that writing evolved in the Middle East. Mesopotamian scribes recorded daily events, trade, astronomy and literature on clay tablets. The standard, widely repeated story is that clay tokens were used in Mesopotamia around 8,000–7,500 BC onward to record quantities of agricultural commodities being traded; and, this is certainly true.

There have been many explanations concerning the origins of writing, from mythological to scientific. Often writing is so revered that myths and deities were drawn up to explain its divine origin.

In ancient Egypt, for example, the invention of writing is attributed to the god Thoth (Dhwty in Egyptian), who was not only the scribe and historian of the gods but also kept the calendar and invented art and science.

In Mesopotamia, among the Sumerians the god Enlil was the creator of writing. Later during Assyrian, and Babylonian periods, the god Nabu was credited as the inventor of writing and scribe of the gods.

Among the Maya, the supreme deity Itzamna was a shaman and sorcerer as well as the creator of the world.

In China, the invention of writing was not attributed to a deity but instead to a ancient sage named Ts'ang Chieh, who was a minister in the court of the legendary Huang Ti (Yellow Emperor).

The Indian tradition believed that the script of Brahmi was given to mankind by the God Brahma.

3. Stages of Writing:

The invention of writing was not an one time-event, but a gradual process initiated by the appearance of symbols. The early writing system begins with small images used as words, literarily depicting the question. Man used all sorts of methods and devices for transmission of thought, image symbols, artillery symbols etc. This rude system of conveying ideas are found everywhere around 40,000 BC or earlier. The pictures began as representing what they were, pictographs, and eventually, certain pictures represented an idea or concept, ideographs, and finally to represent sounds.

There are several ways which the early writing evolves beyond the pictorial stages. Scholars have noticed a few broad phases in the development of writing since it first emerged around the close of the fourth millennium B.C. in Western Asia and Northern Africa.

In the earliest of the phases, man expressed his ideas by drawing picture, and in this picture- writing, a picture represented a whole word or vocal expression indicating as idea or an object.

Gradually, as time passed on, the pictures came to convey something more than their visual implications, while the shapes of the pictures were also undergoing slight modifications in course of time. Thus the pictographs came to be ideographic symbols.

The next phase of development witnessed the evolution of phonetic values for some of the hundreds of symbols available so that they became syllabic symbols whereas the others remained ideographic signs.

At the following stage, alphabetic value of some of the syllabic symbols gradually developed. At first most of the signs remained syllabic only a few becoming alphabetic; later a limited number of symbols bearing alphabetical value were found sufficient to write the language. The writing on the prehistoric seals discovered in India belongs to a transitional stage between the last two stages, the symbols being partly syllabic and partly alphabetic.

4. Writing in World Cultures :

The emergence of writing in given area is usually followed by several centuries of fragmentary inscriptions. The first writing system of early Bronze Age was not a sudden invention. Rather, they developed based on early tradition of symbol systems that can be classified as proper writing but have many of the characteristics of writing. These systems may be described as ‘proto writing’. They used ideographic or early mnemonic symbols to convey information, but probably directly contained no nature language. These systems prevailed as early as 7th millennium BC (Neolithic period) evidenced by the Jiahu symbols in China.

Writing emerged in many cultures from Bronze Age. The popular scripts of the ancient world cultures are the cuneiform writing of Sumerians, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Chinese logographs, Indus script of Indus valley civilization and the Olmec script of Mesoamerica (Maya).

It is generally agreed that true writing of language was independently conceived and developed in three places Mesopotamia, Egypt and Harappa from 3,500 to 3,200 BC. The Sumerian archaic (pre-cuneiform), writing and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are considered the earliest writing system, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3,500 BC.

The cuneiform script was first developed by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) about 3,500 BC. The original Sumerian writing system derives from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. This has evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using a round shaped stylus impinged into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers. By about 3,200 BC cuneiform began to represent syllables of the Sumerian language.

It is considered the most significant among the many cultural contributions of the Sumerians and the greatest of those of the Sumerian city of Uruk which advanced the writing cuneiform c. 3,200 BC.

The writing system of the Egyptians was already in use before the rise of the early dynastic period (c. 3,150 BC) and came to be known as hieroglyphics.

The above independent writing systems arose in the same time, historian debate whether these writing systems were developed completely independent of Sumerian writing or were inspired by via a process of cultural diffusion.

The earliest writing system evolved independently and at roughly the same time in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but current scholarships suggested the Mesopotamian writing appeared first.

Similar debate surrounds the Indus script of Indus valley civilization of ancient India, (2,600 BC), which is still undeciphered.

The Mesopotamian cuneiform script invented in Sumer, however, offers a well-documented evolution over a continuous period of 10,000 years from a prehistoric antecedent to the present-day alphabet. This antecedent of the cuneiform script was a system of counting and recording goods with clay tokens. The evolution of writing from tokens to pictography, syllabary and alphabet illustrates the development of information processing to deal with larger amounts of data in ever greater abstraction. Its evolution is divided into four phases:

∙ Clay tokens representing units of goods were used for accounting (8000–3500 BC) ;

∙ The three dimensional tokens were transformed into two-dimensional pictographic signs, and like the former tokens, the pictographic script served exclusively for accounting (3500–3000 BC) ;

∙ Phonetic signs, introduced to transcribe the name of individuals, marked the turning point when writing started emulating spoken language and, as a result, became applicable to all fields of human experience (3000–1500 BC) ;

∙ With two dozen letters, each standing for a single sound of voice, the alphabet perfected the rendition of speech. After ideography, logography and syllabaries, the alphabet represents a further segmentation of meaning.

The early cuneiform writers established a system which would completely change the nature of world in which they lived. Cuneiform as created by the Sumerians adopted and evolved through the writings of many other people, including the Akkadians, Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians and Hurrians. Cuneiform inspired the Old Persian alphabet, but was eventually replaced by the Phoenician alphabet.

The Phoenician writing system, though quite different from that of Mesopotamia, still owes its development to the Sumerians and their advances in the written word. The origin of most alphabetic writing systems can be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet was perhaps the first alphabetic script to be widely used the Phoenicia-traded around the Mediterranean and beyond, and setup cities and colonies in parts of Southern Europe and North Africa. The Phoenicians contribution of the alphabet made writing easier and more accessible to other cultures, but the basic system of putting symbols down on paper representing words and concepts began much easier.

The Phonetic writing systems of the Greeks, and later the Romans, came from Phoenicia. The Greek alphabet evolved sometime in the period after collapse of Mycenaean civilization in 1,200 BC and prior to rise of ancient Greece in 800 BC. The Greek inscriptions from 8th century are similar to Phoenician letter forms.

The Greek and Latin scripts served as the basis for European script, in the same way the Semitic Aramic script would provide the basis for Hebrew, Arabic and possibly Sanskrit.

Independently of the Near East or Europe, writing was developed in Mesoamerica by the Maya c. 250 CE (though some evidence suggests a date as early as 500 BC).

The last of early civilizations to develop writing is China in about 1,600 BC. But China out does the others in devising a system which was evolved, as working script, from that day to this. They have also provided the script for entirely different language, Japanese.

5. Writing in Indian Subcontinent :

The writing in the Indian Subcontinent begins with the undeciphered script found on the seals and other relics of the Indus Valley civilization, which flourished, according to recent estimates, around 2,600 BC. But after the decline of the Indus Valley culture, the graphic record of India is virtually a total blank for well over a thousand years until the time of the Ashokan inscriptions, the earliest definitely datable written records of the historical period, around the middle of the third century BC.

The Brahmi script is one of the most important writing systems in world by virtue of its time depth and influence. This elegant script appeared in India most certainly by 5th century BC in some of the earliest historical inscriptions. The script was wide prevalent in the edicts of Ashoka of 3rd century BC in the entire Indian Subcontinent. Most importantly, it is the ancestor to hundreds of scripts in South, South-East and East-Asia.

The Kharosthi script more or less contemporary with the Brahmi script, appearing around 3rd century BC mainly in North-Western Indian Sub-continent and some examples do occur in India.

In the list of 64 scripts occurring in the Lalitavistara, a text in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, Brahmi occupied first and followed by Kharosthi. Thus both of them were considered to be the two major scripts of Indian subcontinent during the Mauryan period. Both Kharosthi and Brahmi were first encountered in the edicts of Ashoka. The Aramaic and Greek versions were also found in some minor rock edicts of Ashoka in North – Western Indian Subcontinent. In the post-Mauryan period, the Greek language and script were used in the coin legends of the Indo-Greeks, Indo-Scythians, Indo-Parthian and Kushanas.

6. Summary:

Since its inception, writing has served to communicate the thoughts and feelings of the individual and that of a Person’s culture, their collective history, their experiences with human condition, and preserve those experiences for future generation.