The History of Writing :: Literature Language Essays

The History of Writing Language existed long before writing, rising probably simultaneously with sapience, abstract thought and the Genus Homo. In my opinion, the signature event that separated the emergence of palaeohumans from their anthropoid progenitors was not tool-making but a rudimentary spoken communication that replaced the hoots and gestures still used by lower primates. The transfer of more than complex information, ideas and concepts from one individual to another, or to a group, was the single most beneficial evolutionary adaptation for species preservation. As long ago as 25,000-30,000 years BP, humans were painting pictures on cave walls. Whether these pictures were telling a story or represented some type of spirit house or ritual exercise is not known. The advent of a writing system, however, believems to coincide with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to more permanent agrarian encampments when it became nece ssary to count ones property, whether it be parcels of land, animals or measures of grain or to transfer that property to another individual or another settlement. We see the first evidence for this with incised counting tokens about 9,000 years ago in the neolithic fertile crescent. Around 4100-3800 BCE, the tokens began to be symbols that could be impressed or inscribed in clay to represent a record of land, grain or cattle and a written language was beginning to develop. One of the early examples was found in the excavations of Uruk in Mesopotamia at a level representing the time of the crystallization of the Sumerian culture.