The emergence of writing, or how people invented writing. The most ancient writing

People have always sought to record and pass on to their offspring information about the experience accumulated in various spheres of life. This is clearly demonstrated in almost all countries of the world.

The simplest and most visual type of recording is a drawing. Ancient artists depicted real objects. Scientists believe that the cave paintings in the Lascaux cave indicate a religious ritual.

Gradually the images became more conventional and symbolic. The drawing turned into a sign, which gave impetus to the emergence of writing.

We bring to your attention a brief history of writing.

Coptic alphabet

Rapidly developing trade and crafts requiring accounting led to the creation of writing. The oldest type of writing is considered pictographic.

A pictogram is a schematic drawing that depicts the things, events and phenomena in question. This letter was very visual and was quite suitable for conveying small messages.

But when the need arose to convey some abstract thought or concept, conventional icons began to be included in the number of pictograms. For example, it began to be depicted as a circle inside another circle, and water as a wavy line.

The history of writing begins around 3200 BC, when people first began to think about the transmission and preservation of information. At first they used pictograms to represent words.

Initially, Egyptian writing was pictographic: each sign depicted an object. Later, the drawing was no longer associated with the meaning of the word, but with the sound. For example, the drawing of a mouth represented the letter "r".

Gradually, the icons looked less and less like drawings, and standard symbols appeared. Mesopotamian scribes wrote on tiles made of raw clay, since there was a lot of it in Mesopotamia.

Signs were made with styluses - reed pens with a triangular end, which is why Sumerian writing came to be called cuneiform. After the tiles were dried in the sun or fired in a kiln, they became durable and could be stored for thousands of years.

Cuneiform was the writing system of the Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians. It was adopted and used for two thousand years by the ancient Persians.

Number systems

The Babylonian number system is based on the number 60, so in Ancient Babylon the number 87 is 60+27. Over time, the decimal number system prevailed in the world: the number 87 is 8 tens and 7 units. However, 87 minutes for our contemporaries are equal to 1 hour 27 minutes, that is, the same as for the ancient Babylonians. And this is not a coincidence. To measure time, as well as angles, we use the sexagesimal number system of the ancient Babylonians.

Egyptian writing

At the next stage of development of writing, a sign (symbol) began to denote not only a specific object, but also a sound.

The type of writing in which an image denoted a sound was called hieroglyphic.

History claims that hieroglyphic writing was created in 3100 BC and did not change for 3 thousand years. The scribes of Ancient Egypt used a reed pen to write their inscriptions on papyrus.

Later, hieroglyphic writing became widespread in the Far East - in China and Korea. Hieroglyphs appeared in China around 1700 BC. Their designs became more conventional during the Zhou Dynasty (1122-256 BC).

With the help of hieroglyphs it was possible to reflect any, even the most abstract thought.

However, everyone who wanted to learn to write had to memorize several thousand symbols, so few people knew how to write and read in ancient times.

Ancient Egyptian scribes kept their writing materials - ink and reed styles with the end cut at an angle - in wooden pencil cases that were convenient to carry with them.

The first true alphabet (Proto-Canaanite) appeared in the Middle East around 1700 BC. It consisted of 30 symbols, each of which denoted a specific sound.

At the end of the 2nd millennium BC. e. The ancient Phoenicians invented the letter-sound alphabet, which served as a model for the Hebrew, Arabic, Latin and ancient Greek alphabets.

How the numbers were written

The history of writing is also fascinating because they tried to learn how to write numbers to indicate quantities.

A wolf bone was found on the territory of the Czech Republic, on which approximately 32 thousand years ago an ancient man scratched 55 marks (5 groups of 11 marks each)

An ancient man calculated something in this way. But what? We will never know. Historians suggest that he counted the animals that he managed to kill while hunting.

Symbols for numbers greater than 10 appeared in Egypt in 3400, and in Mesopotamia in 3000 BC. e.

In Mesopotamia they wrote with reed sticks on tablets made of wet clay. Under pressure, the trace turned out wider and deeper, and where the style was removed, it became thinner. This cuneiform tablet dates from 1900-1700. BC e. The teacher wrote a proverb on it, which the student had to copy on the back.

In the ancient Egyptian number system and in cuneiform for numbers 1; 10; 100; 1000; 10,000; 100,000 and 1,000,000 different symbols were used, and in order to indicate a large number, the numbers were repeated.

This was the case among, and then among the ancient Romans: X stood for 10, XX for 20, XXX for 30, C for 100, CCC for 300, etc. But not a single number system had a zero symbol, but history his appearance is a separate fascinating story.

Among the cuneiform tablets discovered by archaeologists, “school notebooks” were preserved, so it is known that in Mesopotamia they knew the multiplication table.

Egyptian students only knew addition, multiplication, and division by two. To multiply by, say, four, they multiplied the number by two and added (doubled) the resulting answer.

Key dates

The history of writing is the story of the amazing development of human thought from the simplest forms to extremely complex abstract languages.

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Lecture No. 1. History of the emergence of writing

Writing, like sound speech, is a means of communication between people, and serves to transmit thoughts at a distance and consolidate them in time. Writing is part of the general culture of a given people, and therefore part of world culture. The history of world writing knows the following main types of writing:

pictographic,

ideographic,

syllabic,

letter-sound.

Pictographic(pictorial) - the most ancient letter in the form of rock paintings of primitive people;

Ideographic (hieroglyphic) – writing from the era of early statehood and the emergence of trade (Egypt, China). IN IV-III millennia BC. e. in Ancient Sumer (Forward Asia), in Ancient Egypt, and then, in II, and in Ancient China A different way of writing arose: each word was conveyed by a picture, sometimes concrete, sometimes conventional. For example, when talking about a hand, a hand was drawn, and water was depicted as a wavy line. A certain symbol also denoted a house, a city, a boat... The Greeks called such Egyptian drawings hieroglyphs: “hiero” - “sacred”, “glyphs” - “carved on stone”. The text, composed in hieroglyphs, looks like a series of drawings. This letter can be called: “I’m writing a concept” or “I’m writing an idea” (hence the scientific name for such writing - “ideographic”).

An extraordinary achievement of human civilization was the so-called syllabary, the invention of which took place throughout III-II millennia BC. e. Each stage in the development of writing recorded a certain result in the advancement of humanity along the path of logical abstract thinking. First is the division of the phrase into words, then the free use of pictures-words, the next step is the division of the word into syllables. We speak in syllables, and children are taught to read in syllables. It would seem that it could be more natural to organize the recording by syllables! And there are many fewer syllables than the words composed with their help. But it took many centuries to come to such a decision. Syllabic writing was already used in III-II millennia BC. e. in the Eastern Mediterranean. For example, the famous cuneiform.(They still write in syllabic form in India and Ethiopia.)

letter-sound(phonemic) writing expressing the phonemic composition of a language. Phonemes represent individual speech sounds and can vary depending on pronunciation. Our writing cannot convey all the sound nuances of the language and is intended only to differentiate (distinguish) words.

The Russian alphabet has 33 characters, while the phonemic structure of the language consists of 39 phonemes.

Letter-sound writing system- the basis of the writing of many peoples of the world, the linguistic specificity of which is reflected in the phonographic composition of their alphabets. So in the Latin alphabet - 23 characters, in Italian – 21 , Czech – 38, Armenian – 39 .etc.

The characters of the alphabet are graphically different from each other and in their simplest form represent graphemes(the unchanging form of the letters included in the alphabet, without taking into account style, typeface and other forms).

The graphematic composition of the alphabet has evolved over many centuries based on the requirements of a particular language, the requirements for ease of writing and reading.

First letter alphabet appeared around 16 in. BC. It is known that the Semitic tribes who lived on Sinai Peninsula, adopted a whole series of ideogram signs from Egyptian writing, denoting with them the first sounds of the names of certain objects. This is how the original alphabetic letter arose.

Phoenicians, having adopted and improved it, they in turn served as intermediaries in the movement of letter-sound writing from the South-Eastern Mediterranean to the Greeks.

The earliest Greek letters appeared in 8th century BC, but only to 4th century before ours eras have acquired relative completeness, graphic simplicity and clarity.

IN 3rd century BC exists and Latin alphabet. The Latins (residents of Rome and its environs, hence the name Latin) borrowed the Etruscan alphabet, which was based on the Greek. At the turn of the new era, writing was located between two rulers, was continuous, there were no intervals between words, and the geometric shapes of letters made writing difficult.

The creation of the alphabet of the Slavic-Russian writing system - “Cyrillic” refers to by the end of 9th beginning of 10th century. The creators of the Slavic alphabet based on the Byzantine script were brothers Kirill(Konstantin the Philosopher, he took the name Kirill not long before his death) and Methodius, natives of Thessaloniki (Thessaloniki) in Macedonia. Slavic was their native language, and they received Greek upbringing and education.

Along with the Cyrillic alphabet, there was another alphabet - Glagolitic.

In Rus', the Glagolitic alphabet did not last long and was completely replaced by the Cyrillic letter. From the history of the Old Russian font, the main calligraphic variants of the Cyrillic alphabet stand out:

from the 11th century - charter letter(according to the oldest Russian manuscripts that have come down to us);

from the 14th century – half-tired, which served as a model for the first printed font in the middle 16th century;

at first 15th century various types are becoming widespread cursive writing

Charter– an early calligraphic form of the Cyrillic alphabet. The letters of the charter had almost square proportions and were distinguished by straightness and angularity of shape. They were placed freely in the line; there were no spaces between words.

An example of a classic charter letter is "Ostromir Gospel", written in 1056-1057 Deacon Gregory by order of the Novgorod mayor Ostromir. A charter letter is quite labor-intensive to write. The drawing of the letters of the charter required frequent changes in the position of the writing instrument. The letters were drawn with a pen rather than written.

Half-charter- a type of calligraphic version of the Cyrillic letter. The text, written half-written, has a lighter overall picture. The letters are rounder and smaller, words and sentences are separated by clear spaces, the style is simpler, more flexible and faster than in a statutory letter. Stroke contrast is less; the pen is sharpened sharper. Many abbreviations appear under the titles, as well as many different superscripts, accents (strengths) and a whole system of punctuation marks. The letter takes on a noticeable slant. The semi-statut existed as long as the handwritten book lived. It also served as the basis for the fonts of early printed books. The first printed book in Rus', “The Apostle,” was produced by the printer Ivan Fedorov in 1564.

Russian ligature- a special decorative letter used with 15th century mainly for highlighting titles. There are two types of ligature: round and angular(stamped). One of the main techniques of ligature is the mast ligature, in which two adjacent strokes (stamps) of two letters were turned into one. The voids formed in this case were filled with reduced oval or almond-shaped letters, as well as half-masts (half-bombers) of neighboring letters. Inscriptions made in gold or cinnabar carried a special artistic and decorative meaning in various written monuments.

Almost simultaneously with the formation of a semi-charter in a business letter, cursive, which quickly penetrates into books. Cursive 14th century very close to half-staff.

In the 15th century it becomes freer and becomes more widespread; Various charters, acts, and books are written with it. It turned out to be one of the most flexible types of Cyrillic writing.

In the 17th century cursive writing, distinguished by its special calligraphy and grace, has turned into an independent type of writing.

In the 17th century semi-charter, having passed from church books to office work, is transformed into civil letter. At this time, books of writing samples appeared - “The ABC of the Slavic Language...” (1653), primers by Karion Istomin (1694-1696) with magnificent samples of letters of various styles: from luxurious initials to simple cursive letters.

Alphabet and font reform carried out Peter I at the beginning of the 18th century. contributed to the spread of literacy and education. In shape, proportions and style, the civil font was close to the ancient serif. All secular literature, scientific and government publications began to be printed in the new font. The first books of the new type were published in Moscow in 1708

People have always felt the need to communicate with each other and describe the world around them. Different cultures had their own special ways of communicating. Since time immemorial, people have accumulated knowledge in memory and transmitted it orally and with the help of certain symbols. The invention of writing was the greatest discovery in the history of civilizations, since it was then that the line between prehistoric times and, in fact, history was clearly defined.

Writing has allowed humanity to comprehend past experiences from the heights of the present. Thanks to written monuments that have come down to us from time immemorial, we have learned much more about ancient civilizations than from archaeological finds. Today, written information sources have become an integral part of our lives, and newspapers, magazines and the Internet are the main carriers of the written word.

Legislative acts, literary works and scientific works are all preserved in written form. Written information is thrown at us in a torrent every single day, and a striking example of this is road signs, a kind of hieroglyphic symbols, but much simpler and understandable than the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. However, writing was not invented by the Egyptians, but by a completely different people who lived, however, not far from the Nile Valley.

The oldest form of writing was the so-called Sumerian letter, and it appeared 5,100 years ago. The Sumerian civilization arose in Mesopotamia, in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, on the territory of modern Iran and Iraq. This was a thriving civilization of farmers and herders, and the Sumerians needed writing to keep records of livestock and crops.

The first examples of writing were the so-called “accounting chips.” Little by little, the Sumerians discovered that by connecting several pictograms, they could express a certain thought. Over time, the images were simplified to the most common signs or symbols. They were carved on clay tablets with sharpened reeds, which gave The signs have a pointed shape, hence the name of the letter - cuneiform.

The English orientalist Henry Rawlinson managed to decipher it; he compared the same text carved on the rock in three different languages. Only several centuries later did writing finally come to Egypt and other ancient states. Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is perhaps the most beautiful, and it was deciphered by the French scientist, founder of Egyptology, Charles Champollion.

In the town of Rosetta, he discovered a stone with three types of hieroglyphs, it was an example of an extremely complex language that combined individual letter symbols, syllables, and sometimes entire words. Thanks to writing, the ancient Egyptians left us visual evidence of their history, customs and beliefs, and their writing can be spoken in all spoken languages.

The Egyptians also invented a writing medium - papyrus, something like paper or parchment scrolls. They made them from reeds that grew on the marshy banks of the valley and the Nile Delta. All kinds of household utensils were also made from papyrus. The Egyptians cut the stems of papyrus and then dried them. Then they cut them into thin strips and wove a kind of soft fabric on which they could write, but only on one side. At one time, the Egyptians even simplified hieroglyphic writing for everyday needs, replacing it with the so-called thematic writing or cursive writing. About 4 thousand years ago, Chinese writing arose. And here the first signs were depicted in the form of symbols - pictograms, which have remained virtually unchanged since then.

Mastering all forms of writing was not an easy task, since it required giving each character its own image, and with the help of the alphabet, the number of characters was reduced to approximately 30. As is known, the Phoenicians became the owners of the first alphabet. These great wanderers spread it throughout the Mediterranean.

The Phoenician alphabet consisted of only consonants, while the Arabic alphabet, for example, consisted only of vowels. The Phoenician alphabet was taken as a basis by the Greeks, although they had already been using vowels for a good 2.5 thousand years, since then the writing has remained virtually unchanged. The Greek alphabet consists of 24 consonant and vowel letters, lowercase and uppercase. Greek writing gave rise to the development of the Latin alphabet; it arose approximately 300 years before the birth of Christ, and spread throughout Europe.

In the Middle Ages, monks were the guardians of writing. No, they didn’t bring anything new to it; they simply rewrote ancient texts one after another. However, medieval monks developed a special alphabetic writing system, which was adopted by aristocrats and clergy.

In 1445, Johannes Gutenberg invented the first printing press with replaceable metal type. Special paint was applied to them, applied to paper, and pressed with a hand press. Paper, the oldest invention of the Chinese, was brought to Europe by the Arabs, through Spain. The first prints were made from abstruse church manuscripts.

The first full-length book Gutenberg printed was the Bible. Modern high-speed printing devices use paper rolls, such as newspapers and magazines. Modern technologies greatly facilitate the process of typing and printing.

Using a computer, you can not only change the font, but also layout the pages in different ways. And writing instruments have improved significantly; the antediluvian brushes and quills have been replaced by ballpoint pens and felt-tip pens. And the seal itself has changed beyond recognition, not only in terms of lettering, but also in size, i.e. print media format.

Every year, about a million different printed publications are published around the world, not to mention electronic Internet publications. Thanks to the written word, we can read the thoughts of the greatest thinkers of the past and the most amazing stories the human mind has ever produced.

The article was prepared specifically for the site "Family Surname".

Writing plays an extremely important role in human society; it is the engine of human culture. Thanks to writing, people can use the huge store of knowledge accumulated by humanity in all spheres of activity and further develop the process of cognition.

The history of writing begins from the moment when man began to use graphic images to convey information. Although even before that, people communicated in a variety of ways and means. For example, a “letter” from the Scythians to the Persians was known, consisting of a bird, a mouse, a frog and a bunch of arrows. The Persian sages deciphered his “ultimatum”: “If you Persians do not learn to fly like birds, jump through swamps like frogs, hide in holes like mice, you will be showered with our arrows as soon as you set foot on our land.”

The next stage was the use of conditional signaling, in which objects themselves do not express anything, but act as conventional signs. This presupposes a preliminary agreement between the communicants as to what exactly this or that object should mean. Examples of conditional signaling include the Inca letter “kipu”, the Iroquois letter “wampum”, and notches on wooden tablets called “tags”.

“Khipu” is a system of cords made of wool of various colors with knots tied, each of which has a specific meaning.

“Wampum” - threads with circles of shells of different colors and sizes strung on them, sewn onto a belt. With its help it was possible to convey a rather complex message. Using the wampum system, American Indians drew up peace treaties and entered into alliances. They had entire archives of such documents.

“Tags” with notches were used to count and secure various transactions. Sometimes the tags split into two halves. One of them remained with the debtor, the other with the creditor.

Writing itself is a system of graphic signs (pictures, letters, numbers) for recording and transmitting sound language. Historically, several types have changed in the development of descriptive writing. Each of them was determined by which elements of the sound language (entire messages, individual words, syllables or sounds) served as a unit of written designation.

The initial stage in the development of writing was pictorial, or pictographic, writing (from Lat. pictus“drawn” and Greek. grapho writing). It is an image on stone, wood, clay of objects, actions, events for the purpose of communication.

But this type of writing did not allow conveying information that could not be depicted graphically, as well as abstract concepts. Therefore, with the development of human society, a more advanced one, ideographic, arose on the basis of pictographic writing.

Its appearance is associated with the development of human thinking and, as a consequence, language. Man began to think more abstractly and learned to decompose speech into its component elements - words. The term “ideography” itself (from the Greek. idea concept and grapho I write) indicates the ability of this type of writing to convey abstract concepts embodied in words.

Unlike pictography, ideographic writing captures the message verbatim and conveys, in addition to the verbal composition, also the word order. The signs here are not reinvented, but taken from a ready-made set.

Hieroglyphic writing is the highest stage in the development of ideography. It originated in Egypt around the 4th millennium BC. e. and existed until the second half of the 3rd century. BC e.

Egyptian hieroglyphs were used for monumental inscriptions on the walls of temples, statues of gods, and pyramids. They are also called monumental writing. Each sign was carved independently, without connection with other signs. The direction of the letter was not established either. Typically, the Egyptians wrote in columns from top to bottom and from right to left. Sometimes there were inscriptions in columns from left to right and from right to left in a horizontal line. The directions of the line were indicated by the figures depicted. Their faces, arms and legs looked towards the beginning of the line.

The evolution of writing led to the fact that the language of the masses began to be transmitted exclusively in hieratic writing, from which a more fluent and laconic form, called demotic writing, later emerged.

Deciphering the inscriptions made in the ancient Egyptian language made it possible to establish that the Egyptian letter consisted of three types of signs - ideographic, denoting words, phonetic (sound) and determinatives, for which ideographic signs were used. So, for example, the drawing “beetle” meant a beetle, the action “walk” was conveyed by the image of walking legs, the image of a man with a staff symbolized old age.

No less ancient than Egyptian hieroglyphs, a type of ideographic writing is cuneiform. This writing system arose between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and later spread throughout Western Asia. The material for it was wet clay tiles, on which the necessary graphic signs were extruded using a cutter. The resulting depressions were thickened at the top, at the point of pressure, and became thinner along the course of the cutter. They resembled wedges, hence the name of this writing system - cuneiform.

The Sumerians were the first to use cuneiform.

Along with Egyptian and Sumerian, Chinese is considered one of the oldest writing systems. The oldest surviving monuments of Chinese writing are inscriptions on tortoise shells, ceramic and bronze vessels. They were discovered at the end of the 19th century in the Yellow River basin. In writing, each individual sign corresponds to a separate concept.

Chinese writing developed from picture writing.

Chinese characters were usually written in vertical columns from top to bottom and from right to left, although horizontal writing is now used for convenience.

The disadvantage of the Chinese hieroglyphic system is that it requires memorizing a large number of hieroglyphs to master it. In addition, the outline of hieroglyphs is very complex - the most common of them consist of an average of 11 strokes each.

The disadvantage of ideographic systems is their cumbersomeness and difficulty in conveying the grammatical form of a word. Therefore, with the further development of human society and the expansion of the areas of application of writing, there was a transition to syllabic and letter-sound systems.

In syllabic, or syllabic (from Greek. syllabe) in writing, each graphic sign denotes a unit of language such as a syllable. The appearance of the first syllabic systems dates back to the 2nd–1st millennia BC.

The formation of syllabic writing followed different paths. Some syllabic systems arose on the basis of ideographic writing (Sumerian, Assyro-Babylonian, Cretan, Maya). But they are not purely syllabic.

Others, such as Ethiopian, Indian - Kharoshta and Brahmi, appeared on the basis of sound writing, in which only consonant sounds were designated by signs (the so-called consonantal sound writing) by adding signs indicating vowel sounds.

The Indian Brahmi script consisted of 35 characters. It laid the foundation for many Indian scripts, as well as the syllabic systems of Burma, Thailand, Central Asia and the Pacific Islands (Philippines, Borneo, Sumatra, Java). Based on it, in the 11th–13th centuries. n. e. The modern syllabary of India, Devanagari, arose. It was initially used to convey Sanskrit, and then to convey a number of modern Indian languages ​​(Hindi, Marathi, Nepali). Currently, Devanagari is the national Indian language. It has 33 syllabic signs. Devanagari is written from left to right, covering letters and words with a horizontal line.

The third group consists of syllabic systems, which originally arose as an addition to ideographic ones to indicate grammatical affixes. They arose at the end of the 1st - beginning of the 2nd millennium AD. These include the Japanese kana syllabary.

Japanese kana was formed in the 8th century AD. e. based on Chinese ideographic writing.

Most modern letter-sound alphabets are based on the Phoenician letter. It consisted of 22 characters arranged in strict sequence.

The next step in the development of letter-sound writing was made by the Greeks. Based on Phoenician, they created an alphabet, adding signs for vowel sounds, as well as signs for some consonants that were not in the Phoenician alphabet. Even the names of Greek letters come from Phoenician ones: alpha from aleph, beta from bet. In Greek writing, the direction of the line changed several times. Initially, they wrote from right to left, then the “boustrophedon” method became widespread, in which, having finished writing a line, they began to write the next one in the opposite direction. Later, the modern direction was adopted - from right to left.

The most widespread Latin alphabet in the modern world goes back to the alphabet of the Etruscans, a people who lived in Italy before the arrival of the Romans. That, in turn, arose on the basis of Western Greek writing, the writing of Greek colonists. At first, the Latin alphabet consisted of 21 letters. As the Roman state expanded, it adapted to the peculiarities of oral Latin speech and consisted of 23 letters. The remaining three were added during the Middle Ages. Despite the use of the Latin alphabet in most European countries, it is poorly suited to convey the sound composition of their languages ​​in writing. Therefore, every language has signs to designate specific sounds that are not in the Latin alphabet, in particular hissing sounds.

The emergence of writing, the appearance of a document

1. The emergence of writing

1.1 The main stages of writing development

Writing has come a long way in development, spanning a period of several thousand years. Representing, in addition to sound language, a means of communication between people, arising on the basis of language and serving to transmit speech over long distances and consolidate it in time with the help of descriptive signs or images, writing appeared at a relatively late stage of human development. The history of writing is closely connected with the development of language, the history of the people and their culture.

The appearance of writing was caused by the practical need to expand connections between people when communicating over long distances and the need to store and transmit knowledge to future generations.

The actual letter, i.e. descriptive writing is writing associated with the use of graphic signs (pictures, letters, numbers) to record and convey sound language.

In the development of descriptive writing, several types have historically changed. Each of these stages was determined by which elements of the sound language (entire messages, individual words, syllables or phonemes) served as the unit of written designation.

Typically, four types of letters are installed in sequence:

· pictographic;

· ideographic;

· syllabic;

· letter-sound.

This division is to a certain extent arbitrary, since none of the indicated types appears in a “pure” form. Each of them includes elements of a different type of writing. For example, pictography already contains the rudiments of ideography, and ideographic writing reveals numerous elements of syllabic and letter-sound writing. In turn, alphabetic writing often combines ideographic signs in texts - numbers, mathematical, physical and chemical formulas, etc. But such a division makes it possible to see the sequence of main stages in the history of writing, to identify the uniqueness of the formation of its main types and thereby imagine the overall picture of the formation and development of descriptive writing.

There are other classifications of writing types. According to one of them, five varieties are established:

· Phrasography- the most ancient type of writing, conveying the content of entire messages in symbolic and descriptive signs without graphically dividing them into individual words;

· Logography– the next type of writing, the graphic signs of which convey individual words;

· Morphemography- a type of writing that arose on the basis of logographic to convey the smallest significant parts of a word - morphemes - by graphic signs;

· Syllabography, or syllabic writing, the signs of which indicate individual syllables;

· Phonography, or sound writing, the graphic signs of which usually designate phonemes as typical sounds.

In accordance with another classification, the evolution of writing is presented in the following diagram:

1. pre-writing: semasiography, including the most ancient conventional signs, pictography and primitive ideography;

2. writing itself: phonography, which appears in the following varieties:

· verbal-syllabic writing;

· syllabic writing;

· alphabetic letter.

However, these classifications have not yet become widespread in the educational literature, where the traditionally established classification is more often used.

From the fact that four main stages are consistently established in the history of writing, it does not at all follow that every people, having entered the path of civilization, had to necessarily go through all these stages in the development of writing. The situation here was much more complicated than it seems at first glance. This or that people, for various reasons related both to the peculiarities of the grammatical structure of its language and to historical circumstances, could stop at any of these stages. This, for example, happened with the Chinese, who settled on using ideographic writing, or with the Japanese and Koreans, who, along with ideography, used the national syllabary systems kana in Japan and kunmun in Korea. On the other hand, many peoples were able to step directly from a lower stage in the development of writing to a higher one, for example, from pictography directly to alphabetic writing, bypassing the ideographic and syllabic stages. We are talking about the Chukchi, Eskimos, Evenks, Nenets and other peoples of the Far North, who had the opportunity to make such a leap after the October Revolution.

1.1.2 Pictographic writing

The oldest, most original type of writing is pictographic writing (from Latin pictus “picture, drawn” and Greek grapho “writing”). The main means of this writing were more or less complex drawings of a plot, narrative nature, or a series of drawings. It is a deliberate image on stone, wood, clay of objects, actions, events, etc. for the purpose of communication. With the help of such drawings, various messages were transmitted over a distance (for example, military, hunting) or any memorable events were fixed in time, for example, the terms of a trade exchange or messages about military campaigns (on the tombstones of leaders).

Pictographic writing through a drawing, which is called a pictogram, conveys the statement as a whole, without dividing it into individual words by the graphic elements of the pictogram. In accordance with this, the individual elements of the pictogram act as parts of a single whole and can only be correctly understood in connection with each other. Sometimes this letter also used the simplest conventional signs, for example, dashes indicating the number of items in question, symbols of tribal property, calendar designations of months, etc.

The pictogram was a schematic drawing, the artistic merit of which was not significant. Here it was only important that the drawing communicated something, and that what was drawn was correctly recognized by those to whom it was addressed.

The pictography conveyed only the content of the statement, without reflecting the linguistic features of the transmitted message (the sound of words, their grammatical forms, the sequence of words, etc.).

The appearance of pictographic writing is associated with the period when primitive drawings began to be used not only for aesthetic and religious-cult needs, but also as a means of communication, i.e. as a means of conveying messages to complement oral storytelling and to cement messages in the memory of the storyteller or listener. This is believed to date back to the Neolithic era, which began for most peoples from the 8th to 6th millennium BC.

Judging by the information that has reached us from distant eras, as well as taking into account the data from the ethnography of most peoples, we can conclude that pictographic writing performed a wide variety of functions.

The following types of pictograms are known:

1. various records of the conditions for the exchange of hunting, fishing, etc. items;

2. messages about military campaigns, skirmishes, hunting;

3. various letters, including love letters;

4. tribal chronicles;

5. gravestone memorial inscriptions;

6. records of magical and spell formulas, legends, customs, commandments.

The first stage in the history of pictography is represented by the simplest drawings depicting events, things, and phenomena.

The fact that pictography was usually visual and accessible to everyone was a positive factor. However, pictographic writing also had significant disadvantages. Being an imperfect and disordered writing, pictography allowed for different interpretations of messages and did not make it possible to convey complex messages containing abstract concepts. Pictography was not adapted to convey what cannot be depicted in pictures and is abstract (vigor, courage, vigilance, etc.). For this reason, pictographic writing at a certain stage of development of human society ceased to satisfy the needs of written communication. And then, on its basis, another type of writing arises, more perfect - ideographic writing.

1.1.3 Ideographic and mixed ideographic writing

The appearance of ideographic writing is historically connected with the further development of human thinking and, consequently, language, with their acquired ability for greater abstractions, with the ability of man to decompose speech into elements - words. The most ancient logographic writing systems - Egyptian, Sumerian, Cretan, Chinese, etc. usually arose in connection with the formation of the first slave states (IV - early 2nd millennium BC). The emergence of these writing systems was due to the need of the first states for more orderly and accurate writing: this need could no longer be satisfied by primitive pictography. In turn, the need for orderly and accurate writing arose in connection with the need for complex economic accounting, characteristic of slave states, in connection with developing trade, for recording major historical events, religious rites, dedications to the gods, etc. (see Fig1)

The very term “ideography” (from the Greek idea “concept” and graphō “I write”) indicates the ability of this writing to convey abstract concepts embodied in words. Recently, this term is increasingly being replaced by another term “logography” (from the Greek logos “speech”, graphō “I write”) on the grounds that graphic signs are associated directly with the linguistic unit - the word. But the fact is that these signs are associated not with words as such, in their grammatical and phonetic design, but with the content, the meaning of words pronounced differently in different languages. It is no coincidence that ideographic writing can be understood in the same way by speakers of different dialects of the same language, or even different languages.

Unlike pictography, ideographic writing records the message verbatim and conveys, in addition to the verbal composition, also the word order. It already has strictly established and stable outlines of graphic characters. Here the writer does not invent signs, as was the case in pictography, but takes them from a ready-made set. In ideographic writing, even ideograms appear, denoting significant parts of a word (morphemes).

Ideographic writing arose on the basis of pictography. The evolution of pictographic writing went in the direction that each figurative sign of a pictogram became more and more isolated and began to be associated with a specific word, denoting it. Gradually, this process developed and expanded that primitive pictograms, having lost their former clarity, began to act as conventional signs when denoting not only words with an abstract meaning, but also words naming specific objects, things that have clarity. This process did not occur immediately, but apparently took several millennia. Therefore, it is difficult to indicate the line where pictographic writing ends and ideographic writing begins. documentation in Ancient Rus' there were...