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Cuneiform “Although
human beings have been living and dying for a million years, they have
been writing for only six thousand years.” René
Etiemble The oldest record of human activity are the paintings found at Lascaux and elsewhere. They were created 22,000 years ago. It was another 17,000 before the art of writing was invented. Cuneiforms, the oldest alphabet, first served the purpose of recording agricultural data. Thanks to tablets found in Sumerian schools with the teacher’s text on one side and the pupil’s copy on the other, it has been possible to trace how people learned to write cuneiform. Clay tablets and styluses were used and the impressions were in the form of wedges.
While cuneiform signs were spreading from Sumer throughout Mesopotamia, other writing systems were appearing and being developed in nearby Egypt and distant China. From one end of the world to the other, people, seeing writing as a divine gift, set themselves to record their past on stone, clay, and papyrus. |
