The Story of Writing

Man immortalized his thoughts when he first wrote them down. It was not easy process. He had to devise symbols to fit the sounds that he uttered and then join the symbols together to were words. His first writings were very uncompleted – tallies of sheep, taxes due, and so forth: record devised by the palace scribes of Mesopotamia who dared not to trust their memories. They were not very far removed from scratches in the dust or from the rough picture that little children make when they first learn to hold a pen.

Indian alphabet, the Roman alphabet, comes from the classical world. The world is formed from the first two syllables of Greek alpha and beta. It was long leap to the Greek alphabet from the grooves in the clay beside the river of Mesopotamia, and even longer one to the alphabets of the modern world. For instance, who discovered what the hieroglyphics of Egypt really said? The world would never have known if the archaeologists accompanying Napoleon to Egypt had not discovered the Rosetta stone in the nineteenth century.

The cuneiform writings of Mesopotamia would certainly not have been deciphered if had not been for the discovery of the stale of King Hammurabi bearing both picture symbols and words. Again, this discovery was not made till the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Flinders Petrie and Leonard Woolley went digging in Ur of the Chaldees.

In India, Among the first writing to be deciphered were the inscriptions of Asoka’ s pillars. Until 1837, no one really knew what they stood for. Effort of men such as Prinsep and Cunningham led to their translation, and opened up a fascinating world of history. The Indus valley civilization was discovered even later, In the 1920s; this script has yet to be deciphered. The Arabic and Chinese script are different from the rest since they do not belong to dead civilization. Therefore, unlike the other script, they can not be said to have been discovered. Their history is one of continual modification from the earliest form, as succeeding generation sought newer and more beautiful ways of writing the script. These modifications are fascinating, and the script hauntingly beautiful.

Until the discovery of printing in the fifteenth century, literature in Europe was handwritten by scribes in monasteries, the language used first was Latin, and then much later, French and English. The scripts used by these scribe were different in their forms. The earliest were very difficult to read. Later, during the reign of Emperor Charlemagne, a new and more legible form was involved which carried his name. Well might one marvel at the beauty that can lie in so simple a thing as a page of writing.

Friday, June 23- 2006
Christine Krishnasami
Deccan and Herald
Bangalore – India.