The Development Of Ancient Systems Of Writing In Iraq And Egypt

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they wouldn't be misplaced or
lost. To secure them, they were placed in opaque clay envelopes. To indicate
what was inside the envelope markings were made on it, eventually someone
realized that all you had to do was mark on the clay what was in the envelope
and you discard the tokens altogether. With this major development we get the
first writing on clay tablets.
In Ancient Mesopotamia the most readily available material for writing on
was clay. When writing on clay first arose, the scribe would try to make an
artistic representation of what he was referring to. This is a logical first
step in writing as if you wanted to record that you had three sheep, you would
draw a picture of a sheep and then add to the picture some marking to indicate
that you had three of them. Thus the earliest stage in writing arose, pictograms.

Pictograms, although not really writing in the modern sense of the term, do
represent a method of communicating an event or message. They also "led to ...

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for
plow meant the tool, if there was a symbol of a man in front, the symbol for
plow would be interpreted as plowman.
The most advanced stage of development was the phonetogram. A phonetogram
is a symbol that represented the pronunciation of part of a word. Phonetograms
developed from symbols for words that sounded like the syllables of other words.
For example you could have the symbol "4" and "C" in modern writing go together
to make the symbol 4C, which would represent four seas, but if you added the
determinative ' to make it 4'C' it could be read as the word "foresee". Thus a
transition from pictographic to phonetographic. With this, you could adapt a
script to write the ...

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