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. 1 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. 2 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. 3 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. 4 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