Second Discovery of Fire (Reflection#6)

The invention of writing was crucial for the establishment and development of the world's greatest ancient civilizations. Before writing, men used pictographs which were pictures that represent the objects just like they were. However, with the emergence of agriculture and the establishment of population in certain areas, counting people's property became necessary. In ancient Sumeria, this was the reason for the appearance of tokens. These counting tokens had pictographs on them that represented the possessions of their owner like grain, terrain, or cattle. Counting tokens are among the first tries of men to transfer information to other people. Soon, the pictures were not only about objects and physical elements, but they express an idea. The pictures representing ideas were ideographs. It is pretty obvious that men wanted to express through a medium other than spoken language which was ephemeral like the wind and could be forgotten. Soon, the ideographs and the pictographs were combined to represent not an established idea or object but sounds. What moved these men to try to represent sounds? Well, I think that language became complicated, and what was simple to express before when they did not talk that much, it was not simple anymore. New words appeared, and the language became vast like the sand on the beach. Verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and others were not tangible, so men had to come out with the idea of representing words through the connection of several images to form the word. The images were organized by order, and each image had a corresponding sound with the syllable of the word that they wanted to express. The images were stylized, and the Cuneiform writing style was born. This process of development of writing is relative to the Sumerian culture, but this was not the birth place of writing. Actually, it is said that writing was invented in two or more places. For example, researchers think that it was also invented in Mexico by the precursor of the Maya people, the Olmecs, and China is considered one of the birth places of writing as well. Other civilizations took advantage of this powerful innovation, and introduce writing into their own culture adapting it to the nation's language. For example, the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek symbols all came from one source, Phoenician scripts. The greatest merit of the Greek alphabet is that it was the first one to represent the vowels. Now that I know about the history of writing, I asked myself, Why was writing so important for these first and greatest civilizations? First of all, I think that most of the information that we have today about these civilizations is thanks to the written word. If it was not because of writing, we would not have any knowledge about the way they lived, their social organization, their battles, and their history. The member of these civilizations knew that writing was a great opportunity to preserve and pass their knowledge, costumes, and culture through time. Writing became an excellent way to show future generations about their ancestors and historical roots. Writing also served to mark social classes and to justify superiority of the religious and wealth people over commoners and slaves. So, writing was also an important factor in the definition of social classes. Besides, writing was seen in most of these cultures as something divine coming from the Gods. So, whoever knew how to write must be respected and honored. I suppose that writing was also important in the military field because in that time, the best way to communicate among troops were through messengers carrying important and sometimes confidential messages. Writing also allowed men from different cultures to show their words, thoughts, feelings, and point of views among themselves. Writing was like a second discovery of fire because it brought new light to the human existence and took the illiterate civilizations out of the darkness of ignorance.