discuss the role of writing in the earliest world civilizations, what does writi
ID: 3195358 • Letter: D
Question
discuss the role of writing in the earliest world civilizations, what does writing allow people to do that they could not do before writing? how can writing be used and how can it be abused discuss the role of writing in the earliest world civilizations, what does writing allow people to do that they could not do before writing? how can writing be used and how can it be abused discuss the role of writing in the earliest world civilizations, what does writing allow people to do that they could not do before writing? how can writing be used and how can it be abused discuss the role of writing in the earliest world civilizations, what does writing allow people to do that they could not do before writing? how can writing be used and how can it be abusedExplanation / Answer
Definition
Writing is a physical manifestation of thoughts and the language which we speak.
History
Communication through paintings started way back as 35000 BC, but written language, however, does not emerge until its invention in Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, c. 3500 -3000 BC. This early writing was called cuneiform and consisted of making specific marks in wet clay with a reed implement.
Humans had been speaking for a couple hundred thousand years before they got the inspiration to jot down their ideas for posterity.
But when a Mesopotamian people finally did scratch out a few bookkeeping symbols on clay tablets 5,000 years ago, they unknowingly started a whole new era in history we call history.
Role
The presence of written sources denotes the technical dividing line between what scholars classify as prehistory versus what they call history, which starts at different times depending on what part of the world you're studying.When ancient Mesopotamians started settling down onto farms surrounding the first cities, life became a bit more complicated. Agriculture required expertise and detailed recordkeeping, two elements that led directly to the invention of writing, historians say.
The first examples of writing were pictograms used by temple officials to keep track of the inflows and outflows of the city's grain and animal stores which, in the bigger Sumerian urban centers such as Ur, were big enough to make counting by memory unreliable.
Officials began using standardized symbols — rather than, say, an actual picture of a goat — to represent commodities, scratched into soft clay tablets with a pointed reed that had been cut into a wedge shape. Archaeologists call this first writing "cuneiform," from the Latin "cuneus," meaning wedge.
The system developed quickly to incorporate signs that represented sounds, and soon all of Mesopotamia was taking notes.
Egyptian writing — the famous hieroglyphics — developed independently not long thereafter, under similar circumstances, historians think.
A few thousand years later, as variations on the two systems spread throughout the region, the entire ancient world had writing schemes that vastly improved the efficiency of economies, the accountability of governments and, maybe most importantly to us, our understanding of the past.
USES-
1) Store information
2) have permanent record
3) Communication
4) Introduction of the concept of literacy
5) Psychological benefits of writing regularly
Abuses
There is not much to say about abuses of writing but everything having pros has cons too, which in this case is the breach of personal information is easy from written documents, which doesn't account to much, when compared with its benefits.
Related Questions
Navigate
Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.