Tiffi starts working on her project

_Elsa_

Tiffi is so excited about working on a project. She has to do some googling to see what prehistoric age she would like to visit. When she gets home she opens up her lap top and gets a snack and a drink.

“What age should I look for?” Tiffi asks herself. “I don’t even know where to begin. Maybe I should look for the beginning of human civilization.”

She finally comes across an article about the earliest writing. Hmmmmm ……….. She begins to read it.

‘THE EARLIEST WRITING - The earliest written records are tablets from the city of Uruk (an ancient city of Sumer and later Babylonia, situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates river.) They apparently list commodities by pictographic drawings of objects accompanied by numerals and personal names inscribed in orderly columns. An abundance of clay in Sumer made it the logical material for record keeping, and a reed stylus sharpened to a point was used to draw the fine, curved lines of the early pictographs. The clay mud tablet was held in the left hand, and pictographs were scratched in the surface with the wooden stylus. Beginning in the top right corner of the tablet, the lines were written in careful vertical columns. The inscribed tablet was then dried in the hot sun or baked rock-hard in a kiln.      

This writing system underwent an evolution over several centuries. Writing was structured on a grid of horizontal and vertical spatial divisions. Sometimes the scribe would smear the writing as his hand moved across the tablet. Around 2800 B.C. scribes turned the pictographs on their sides and began to write in horizontal rows, from left to right and top to bottom. This made writing easier, and it made the pictographs less literal. About three hundred years later, writing speed was increased by replacing the sharp-pointed stylus with a triangular-tipped one. This stylus was pushed into the clay instead of being dragged through it. The characters were now composed of a series of wedge-shaped strokes rather than a continuous line drawing. This innovation radically altered the nature of writing; pictographs evolved into an abstract sign writing called cuneiform (from the Latin for “wedge-shaped”). 

While the graphic form of Sumerian writing was evolving, its ability to record information was expanding. From the first stage, when picture-symbols represented animate and inanimate objects, signs became ideographs and began to represent abstract ideas. The symbol for sun, for example, began to represent ideas such as “day” and “light.” As early scribes developed their written language to function in the same way as their speech, the need to represent spoken sounds not easily depicted arose. Adverbs, prepositions, and personal names often could not be adapted to pictographic representation. Picture symbols began to represent the sounds of the objects depicted instead of the objects themselves. Cuneiform became rebus writing, which is pictures and/or pictographs representing words and syllables with the same or similar sound as the object depicted. Pictures were used as phonograms, or graphic symbols for sounds. The highest development of cuneiform was its use of abstract signs to represent syllables, which are sounds made by combining more elementary sounds.

Cuneiform was a difficult writing system to master, even after the Assyrians simplified it into only 560 signs. Youngsters selected to become scribes began their schooling at the edubba, the writing school or “tablet house,” before the age of ten and worked from sunrise to sunset every day, with only six days off per month. Professional opportunities in the priesthood, estate management, accounting, medicine, and government were reserved for these select few. Writing took on important magical and ceremonial qualities. The general public held those who could write in awe, and it was believed that death occurred when a divine scribe etched one’s name in a mythical Book of Fate.’ (Source)

“Now that might be a good project!” exclaims Tiffi to herself. “Maybe there is a video to get a better idea of this.”

Let’s continue - Tiffi finishes her project

Start at the beginning – Tiffi goes back to school to learn about the prehistoric ages