Writing

Around 10,000 years ago, agriculture was invented and its wake the ability to write down words was developed. These were needed to record the corn and wheat and oxen man was beginning to trade in.

The Sumerians invented one of the earliest systems of writing called cuneiform in around 3500 BC. The Sumerian writing form represented words with symbols made of wedge-shaped strokes. The writing was impressed onto wet clay with a reed pen and baked hard in the Sun. Then they were carried somewhere else for others to read. We know that its first uses were for trade, accounting and administration.

The earliest signs were mostly scratched "word" pictures, but soon they stood as symbols for objects, ideas and sounds. The Sumerian writing system was adopted by other civilisations in the Middle East, such as the Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite and Old Persian empires.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, a Noah's ark tale, is loosely based on the historical King Gilgamesh who ruled Sumerian Uruk (modern day Iraq) in 2700 BC. The oldest written story known to exist it originated from five Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh, which were later used as source material for a combined epic in Akkadian. The first surviving version of epic work dates to the 18th century BC.

The Deluge tablet of the Gilgamesh in Akkadian By BabelStone 

The ancient Egyptians began using hieroglyphs, a type of writing that uses symbols or pictures to stand for sounds and words, about 3300 or 3200 BC. For instance an eye means "see".

Ancient Egyptians didn't use Hieroglyphics as an everyday writing system. They reserved this for special functions. The Egyptians used two script-like writing systems called Hieratic and Demotic for general use. This eventually became the Coptic script.

The last of the early civilisations to develop writing was China, in about 1400 BC. Chinese has a huge number of characters: in the region of 50,000 making it profoundly ill-suited to such labour-saving innovations as printing, typewriting or word-processing, Despite this the language has continued to evolve as a working script.

The scripts in use in the world up to the second millennium BC (in Egypt, Mesopotamia or China) all required the scribe to learn a large number of separate characters - each of them expressing either a whole word or a syllable. For them writing was an arcane skill, requiring years of study to learn large numbers of characters.

The extensive trade of Phoenicia (modern-day Syria, Lebanon, and northern Israel) required much book-keeping and correspondence. In about 1500 BC, the Phoenicians developed an entirely new approach to writing. The marks made by their scribes attempted to capture the sound of a word. which required an alphabet of individual letters.

The Phoenicia alphabet writing system was spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it was adopted and modified by many other cultures. The Aramaic alphabet, modern Hebrew script and the Greek alphabet (with its descendants Latin, Cyrillic, Runic, and Coptic) all derives from the Phoenician.

The model for all Western alphabets was the Etruscan, itself based on the Greek alphabet, which had modified the Phoenician consonantal alphabet by adding vowel letters to it. It was developed in 800 BC.

Etruscan writing. By Sailko 

The earliest known example of writing in Latin by a woman is a birthday invitation from 100 AD at Vindolanda, Northumberland in North East England. She sent the invitation to Sulpicia Lepidina, wife of Flavius Cerialis, commander at Vindolanda.

On September 11, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present. Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him their greetings.

The Olmecs were a pre-Mayan people who flourished in the Gulf Coast region of Mexico, ca. 1250–400 BC. They are believed to have invented the first writing system in the Americas. The evidence is based on Cascajal Block, a tablet-sized writing slab made of serpentinite found in the ancient Olmec heartland of coastal southeastern Mexico. The block holds a total of 62 glyphs, some of which resemble plants such as maize and pineapple, or animals such as insects and fish. Many of the symbols are more abstract boxes or blobs.

Byzantine⸒Greeks⸒hadn’t⸒figured⸒out⸒the⸒concept⸒of⸒spaces⸒so⸒they⸒wrote⸒like⸒this⸒instead. It was Irish monks who invented spacing between written words.

It is thanks to Charlemagne the Great's interest in commanding monks to copy ancient manuscripts that today we possess most of the Latin classics. The style they used to copy- Carolingian, is the style most books are printed in today. In October 781, Charlemagne commissioned from a scribe called Godesalc a manuscript of the gospels. Godesalc completed his book for the king of the Franks in April 783. The Godesalc Evangelistary, as it is now called, is the first book in which the script known as Carolingian minuscule appears. The text uses conventional capitals, but the dedication is in these lower-case letters.

During most of the Middle Ages, few people, including kings and emperors, were able to read or write. The clergy were the only ones with these skills.

Leonardo da Vinci used "mirror writing" (from right side of page to left) for his personal and private notes. This helped prevent others from stealing his ideas, protected his scientific theories from scrutinization by the Roman Catholic Church, and as a left-hander, also eliminated smudging.

Quipos was an Andean writing system which didn't use ink and paper/tablets/skins. Information was encoded in an intricate system of strings of colored yarn tied in a variety of knots. This system survived until just after the Conquistadors.

In the 1820s a Cherokee silversmith named Sequoyah, impressed by European written languages, invented a writing system with 85 characters that was considered superior to the English alphabet.  His young daughter was the first to learn it, but they were initially accused of practicing sorcery. However, after they used the writing system to communicate with each other while separated, the town realized it was simply a method of communication. Within 25 years, nearly 100% of the Cherokee population had become literate.

"It was a dark and stormy night," a catchphrase that has become shorthand for bad writing, comes from the opening line of the 1830 novel Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The phrase was first used in print by Washington Irving in his 1809 A History of New York.

Stalin saved the Chinese written script by talking Mao out of completely replacing it with full scale Romanization.

American schools no longer teach cursive writing as part of their curriculum. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) that were introduced in 2010 did not include a requirement for students to be proficient in handwriting or cursive writing, which led many schools to remove handwriting instruction from their curriculum. Instead, the CCSS emphasized the development of keyboarding skills and digital literacy. However, some states have added cursive writing back in the curriculum, as many educators and parents argue that cursive writing has cognitive, educational and cultural benefits.