World Literature Studies for the CSET English Part 1

Mar
04

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Excerpt from the CSET English course

In this four part series, we will examine some key points in World Literature studies for the CSET.

Mesopotamian Cuneiform

The earliest writing systems evolved independently and at roughly the same time in Egypt (hieroglyphs) and Mesopotamia (cuneiform), although some scholars now think that Mesopotamian writing may have developed a little before Egyptian writing.

That writing system, invented by the Sumerians, emerged in Mesopotamia (Tigris and Euphrates valleys) around 3,500 B.C. At first, this writing was representational: a bull might be represented by a picture of a bull, and a pictograph of barley signified the word barley. Though writing began as pictures, this system was inconvenient for conveying anything other than simple nouns, and it became increasingly abstract as it evolved to encompass more abstract concepts, eventually taking form in the world’s earliest writing: cuneiform. An increasingly complex civilization encouraged the development of an increasingly sophisticated form of writing. Cuneiform came to function both phonetically (representing a sound) and semantically (representing a meaning such as an object or concept) rather than only representing objects directly as a picture.

Egyptian Hieroglyphs

The ancient Egyptians created a form of picture-writing known as hieroglyphs around 3,100 B.C. Each picture was a symbol representing something they observed in their surroundings. A simple drawing of the sun represented the sun, a drawing of a vulture signified a vulture, a drawing of a rope indicated a rope, and so on. But certain objects, and more particularly ideas, were difficult to represent with a single drawing.

Hieroglyphs were written vertically (top to bottom) or horizontally (left to right or right to left). To read a horizontal line, one moved toward the faces of the animal symbols. (They all faced in the same direction.) There was no punctuation, and to save space, two small symbols often occupied the space of one larger one. The names of royalty were surrounded with an oval, known as a cartouche. Although there are thousands of symbols, the most commonly occurring are a set of 24, which modern archaeologists use as a working alphabet.

The History of the Alphabet

We can trace the development of our alphabet for about the last 3,000 years as far back as to the Phoenician Colonies.

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