The History of the Alphabet
Humans have always expressed themselves through various forms, starting with pictograms, such as handprints, cave art and pictures that represented animals or plants that they saw around them. How did we get from there, to the plethora of languages, scripts and alphabets that we see around us? Here is the story.
Thousands of years of expression on cave walls, on stones and on shells were followed by word-based writing systems and sound-based syllabic writing systems, which are written symbols that represent syllables that make up words. A symbol typically represents a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound, or just a vowel alone.
To our knowledge, based on archaeological artifacts, full writing-systems seem to be invented at least four times in history — all of them independently. The first indication of writing we have is from Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). Here, people known as the Sumerians developed a complex writing system known as cuneiform representing the sounds of their language Sumerian — between 3400 and 3300 BC. From around 2900 BC, they used reed styli to emboss marks on clay tablets. They used this for long distance communication, for trade and for keeping accounts. Over the years the process was standardised and simplified, the symbols which were read from top to bottom initially, started to be read from left to right. Originally, the wedge-shaped…
