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Agate bead dedicated by Ibbi-Sin king of Ur.
Mesopotamia, around 2000 before Christ
Writing is the representation of thought and human language by signs.
It is a sustainable and privileged means of communication between men.
Information mainly from "Birth of writing: cuneiforms and hieroglyphs". Editions of the Meeting of National Museums but also "Mysteries of the Alphabet" by Mr. A. Ouaknin.
On this page, the origins of the modern European alphabet are noted by★ .
Approximately 30 000 BC : Wall paintings in Europe. Oldest cuts on the bones.
Around 15 000 BC : Paintings of the Lascaux and Altamira caves.
Around 9 000 BC : Painted pebbles from Azilian culture in Ariège, France.
Around 3 300 BC : Invention of pictographic writing in Lower Mesopotamia: Sumer Country.
Around 3200 BC : Proto-hieroglyphs on a cliff south of Luxor. It is not yet a question of writing in the true sense of the word, but of symbols that will later become signs of writing in the Pharaonic era. Incised on the wall, we can see a bull's head and a species of great stork (jabiru) which will later become a hieroglyph
translating the Egyptian notion of ba, the capacity for a being to manifest itself in different forms.
Around 3 100 BC :
★ Beginning of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.
Around 2 800 - 2 600 BC : The Sumerian script becomes cuneiform.
Around 2 500 BC : The peoples of the Indus Valley use an original script that has not been deciphered.
Around 1 800 BC : Akkadian becomes the international diplomatic language of the entire Middle East.
Around 1 500 BC :
- Invention of the hieroglyphic Hittite system. (In Anatolia: Turkey)
- Chinese ideographic writing on bronze vases and oracular bones.
- Minoan writing called "linear B" in Crete.
- ★ Alphabetical writing in Sinai: Protosinetic inscriptions.
This alphabet (from the great existing writing system, the Egyptian hieroglyph) has given rise to different writings such as Hebrew, Phoenician, Greek,
to the modern European alphabet, passing through Etruscan and Latin.
Protosinetic writing consists of about 30 signs that are neither ideographic nor syllabic, but alphabetic.
In addition, similar protocananéen inscriptions in the regions of Lebanon and Palestine could be older and more evolved.
These regions were in close relationship with the Egyptians.
The sphinx of Sinai, end of the twelfth dynasty,
around 1800 BC British Museum.
On this sphinx we read the name of the goddess Baalat for whom the Canaanites who served the Egyptians at Sinai had a particular devotion.
Around 1 400 BC : Traders in Ugarit (North Syrian Coast) use a consonantal, Semitic Cuneiform alphabet. The Ugarit language ranks among the Canaanite Semitic group. However, it is not the forms of these letters that are at the origin of the modern European alphabet.
Around 1 100 BC :
★ First known inscriptions in Phoenician linear alphabet.
Around 900 BC : The Phoenicians spread their consonant alphabet, precursor of our alphabet, through the Mediterranean
Around 800 BC :
★ The Greeks invent the modern alphabet with vowels.
The oldest known Greek texts are written from right to left, like all the Semitic alphabets.
The direction of writing remained a long time undecided (from right to left, from left to right and sometimes even boustrophedon) before settling from left to right.
Between 800 and 700 BC :
★ Etruscan alphabet.
600 BC :
★ Latin alphabet.
★ 3th century: European modern alphabet.
♦ From the Greek alphabet, alongside the modern European alphabet, develop:
- Italic alphabets
- The Coptic alphabet (II-III century)
- The Gothic alphabet (4th century)
- The Armenian alphabet (5th century)
- The Georgian alphabet
- The Glagolitic alphabet (9th century)
- The Cyrillic alphabet (9th century)
15th century : Invention of the printing press by Gutenberg.
♦ Indian writing:
The proto-Indian script of the Indus Valley (2,500 BC), quoted above, disappears without leaving any derivatives.
It was in the 3rd century BC, long after, that two writings appeared:
brahmi writing and the writing kharoshti (it disappears without descent).
This apparition occurs after the passage of Alexander the Great in the valley of the Indus (4th century BC) and especially after the Persian conquest of Darius I (-522, -486),
arguments in favor of a Semitic filiation of these alphabets.
The Brahmi script is also probably of Phoenician origin because of the graphic proximity of certain letters.
Brahmi writing The Brahmi script gives birth to three great groups of writings, the devanagari which comes from the group of writings
northern.
The devanagari is an alphasyllabary script that is written from left to right.
It is now one of the most widely used scripts in India, being used mostly to write Hindi, the most spoken language in India, but also Nepali and several other Indian languages.
It is also in Devangari that Sanskrit is mainly written in India and in the West.
Sanskrit (local name: संस्कृतम् saṃskr̥tam, meaning "speech, language" then translated "completed") is a language of the Indo-European
family in the Indo-Iranian branch
All of the Neo-Indian languages derive from Sanskrit.
The oldest form of Sanskrit attested is called Vedic: it is the language in which are written the Vedas, the oldest set of texts of Hinduism.
Note that the numeral system of brahmi is the ancestor of Arabic numerals.
♦ Arabic writing:
It appears in the 7th century.
The Arabic writing is, with the square hebrew, the only consonant writing still in use.
It spread through the conquests of Islam from the eighth century
This alphabet is traced back to Aramaic in its Nabataean (Nabatean cursive) or Syriac variant.
The alphabet has 28 letters (29 with the hamza) and is written from right to left like the other Semitic writings.
It was in the 7th century that signs appeared to differentiate some letters too close.Y are introduced signs of vocalization for 3 short vowels, three long vowels are already noted.
When changing the letters of the alphabet, the order of letters has been changed: the Arabic alphabet no longer follows the order of other Semitic alphabets.
The Arabic alphabet is an abjad, the reader must know the structure of the language to restore the vowels.
Moreover, noting only 3 vowels, this alphabet is poorly adapted to languages with many vowels. This is one of the reasons that
led the Turks to abandon it in favor of the Latin alphabet in 1928.
The need to magnify the sacred word and the absence of iconography have allowed the development of the art of calligraphy.
