The Evolution of Writing

Paper Summary:

A history of the written word, examining writing from its Sumerian origins through the development of the Greek alphabet. The focus is the shift from pictographic characters to a phonetic alphabet. This paper discusses the Old Canaanite, Phoenician, Egyptian, Hebrew, and Aramaic scripts as well.

From the Paper:

"The calling and constant challenge of the poet has been to express, in writing, the highly dynamic and abstractly imaginal feeling of the human condition. Similarly, individuals have long attempted to preserve facets of life for convenience, future reference, or posterity. Writing, now a virtual necessity, was not used until the advent of civilizations, when life became complex enough that memory could not keep track of all of those things one needed to remember. It is a much younger art than that of the spoken language "which has existed for tens of thousands of years" but has come far from the early days of writing to today. The first forms of writing are results of the ancient Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations."

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