HOME

The start of written language

Cave paintings || Clay tokens || Greek and Latin || Wax tablet and stylus || Inks

CAVE PAINTINGS

The history of writing instruments by which humans have recorded and conveyed thoughts, feelings and grocery lists, is the history of civilization itself. This is how we know the story of us, by the drawings, signs and words we have recorded.

 

The cave man's first inventions were the hunting club (not the auto security device) and the handy sharpened-stone, the all-purpose skinning and killing tool. The latter was adapted into the first writing instrument. The cave man scratched pictures with the sharpened-stone tool onto the walls of his cave dwelling. The cave drawings represented events in daily life such as the planting of crops or hunting victories.  

Back to Top

CLAY TOKENS

With time, the record-keepers developed systematized symbols from their drawings. These symbols represented words and sentences, but were easier and faster to draw and universally recognized for meaning. The discovery of clay made portable records possible (you can't carry a cave wall around with you). Early merchants used clay tokens with pictographs to record the quantities of materials traded or shipped. These tokens date back to about 8,500 B.C. With the high volume of and the repetition inherent in record keeping, pictographs evolved and slowly lost their picture detail. They became abstract-figures representing sounds in spoken communication.

Back to Top

 

 

GREEK AND LATIN

The alphabet replaced pictographs between 1700 and 1500 B.C. in the Sinaitic world. The current Hebrew alphabet and writing became popular around 600 B.C. About 400 B.C. the Greek alphabet was developed.

Greek was the first script written from left to right. From Greek followed the Byzantine and the Roman (later Latin) writings. In the beginning, all writing systems had only uppercase letters, when the writing instruments were refined enough for detailed faces, lowercase was used as well (around 600 A.D.)

Above is a Latin inscription. It says:

To the Shades of the Dead, in memory of Lusia Polybia:
Felix made (this) for his dearest wife;
as (did) Lusia Mystice, (whose) sister (she was); as (did) also Lusius Hermes, her sister's husband: she was well-deserving of it.
Also for themselves and their family and their descendants.

Back to Top

WAX TABLETS AND STYLUS

The earliest means of writing that approached pen and paper as we know them today was developed by the Greeks. They employed a writing stylus, made of metal, bone or ivory, to place marks upon wax-coated tablets. The tablets made in hinged pairs, closed to protect the scribe's notes. The first examples of handwriting (purely text messages made by hand) originated in Greece. The Grecian scholar, Cadmus invented the written letter - text messages on paper sent from one individual to another.

 

Back to Top

Pictographs stamped into wet clay

THE DEVELOPMENT OF INKS

Writing was advancing beyond chiseling pictures into stone or wedging pictographs into wet clay. The Chinese invented and perfected 'Indian Ink'. Originally designed for blacking the surfaces of raised stone-carved hieroglyphics, the ink was a mixture of soot from pine smoke and lamp oil mixed with the gelatin of donkey skin and musk. The ink invented by the Chinese philosopher, Tien-Lcheu (2697 B.C.), became common by the year 1200 B.C. Other cultures developed inks using the natural dyes and colors derived from berries, plants and minerals. In early writings, different colored inks had ritual meaning attached to each color.

 

Back to Top