The History of Writing: An Overview

"Letters are the marks of words, as words themselves are the marks of thoughts." -Aristotle
 
Last week I found a book on the library's system that looked like it would be a great resource. The problem was...it was in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections. So on Saturday, I made my way down there and was able to read part of the book The History of Writing, part of the collection of Victorian books. It was amazing to be able to handle a book from the mid 1800s. The cover was decorated in what seemed to be iron on top of painted paper, which was pretty beautiful. As I was reading it, I felt like I wanted to drink of the knowledge from it more deeply because it was a precious book.

In order to not make this post too lengthy, I'll give a general overview of it this week and then focus on some of the things it said about a specific culture next time. First off, here's a quote I found that I felt summed up all we have been learning both individually and in class.

"Writing...is the light which photographs, as it were, every step of human progress, in signs remaining visible and intelligible to all future generations; preserving and extending every branch of knowledge, and daily carrying the thoughts of the wisest into regions where knowledge had never penetrated."

Writing: the pathway to communication

 The point of the author, Henry Humphreys, is to show how writing has progressed over the years, and he does this at first by showing the progression towards a phonetic system. He says that the importance of the written language is the "eventual but gradual development of a perfect phonetic alphabet, by means of which every word of every language, every inflexion of which the human voice is capable, may be noted down with the same accuracy and facility as the seven musical tones of the diatomic scale of music."

Wow, I've never thought of sheet music as a written language!

In the first chapter of this book, Humphreys tells us that man's progression in writing goes from simple pictures or objects that represent words to pictorial characters and ideographs that represent complex ideas and sentiments to, finally, the representation of a sound through symbols.

Humphreys then gives an example of each of these through a certain culture.

1. For simple pictures, he gives the example of the early peoples of Mexico who never advanced past this stage because the Spanish destroyed their civilization while they were still in this stage.
2. As an example of pictorial characters and ideographs, he gives the example of the Chinese who also had progression from pictorial characters to ones more easily and quickly written and included some representation of sound. 
3. Finally, Egyptian is demonstrated as the earliest example of representation of sound in a language. This is supposedly the first time in which characters "similar in value to separate letters of the alphabets was adopted." 

Aztec symbols (simple pictures)

Chinese ideographs (sentiments)

Egyptian phonographs (beginning of sound representation)

One of the things I found very interesting was that Humphreys believes that Egyptian was borrowed by the Assyrians and Babylonians who took out many of the ideographic parts of the language, developing a type of cuneiform. This cuneiform was then adopted by the Persians, who reduced it to even closer to a purely phonetic system. I thought this was pretty sweet because, in my Book of Mormon class, we have been studying the writings of Isaiah in 2 Nephi and how the control of Jerusalem went from Egypt to Assyria to Babylon and, finally, to Persia.

Information from:
Humphreys, Henry N. The History of Writing. London: Day and Son, 1855. Print. Collection of Victorian books, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library.