Page 14 - All About History 55 - 2017 UK

The WriTTen Word

The Evolution of Script

THE PRECURSORS
Only four civilisations are known to
have evolved writing systems entirely OF WRITING?
As agriculture developed in
independently: Mesopotamia, Egypt, modern-day Iraq, simple clay
tokens are made in different
China and Central America. Many shapes to symbolise crops
and animals, as a means
scripts evolved from pictures or signs of recording and sharing
for syllables, but most of today’s are information. After some 4,000
years, tokens are inscribed
based on individual letters with lines and dots to record
more complex concepts.

C.7500 BCE

ROMAN WRITING RECORDING LEGENDS THE SEA TRADERS’ SCRIPT

The Romans borrow the local Etruscan script The Greeks inherit and develop the The Phoenicians, seafarers dominating the
that originally comes from the Greeks. The alphabet from Phoenicians. Essentially the Levant, become the
Romans turn it into letters passed on to later same as today’s written Greek, it is used first people known
European cultures and many others worldwide. by Homer in his Odyssey and Iliad. to have used a
complete alphabetical
system – seen here
on a 5th century BCE
sarcophagus.

The
alphabet
was only invented
once. The idea then
inspired all other
letter-based
scripts

C.650 BCE C.800 BCE C.1200 BCE

In
SACRED ARABIC: THE WRITING Khan authorised a
1270, Kublai
SIGNS FOR OF THE QURAN universal script. It is
still on Mongolian
CENTRAL The first recorded example of Arabic banknotes
today
script is a 22-letter abugida, so called
AMERICA after its first
three letters.
Mayan priests develop
It has evolved
a system of signs, or
from Nabataean
glyphs, representing
Aramaic over the
words and syllables.
previous 400
It remains in use for
years and will be
almost 2,000 years
used a century
until the Spanish
later to record
conquest in the
the Quran.
16th century.
C.250 BCE 512
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