Origins of two ancient writing systems- a speech (given at a public speaking event)
Ancient writing systems — Google Slides
One day Simba, the lion king, asked his buddy Timon to write a letter to his uncle Scar, to get rid of his evil ways for good. But poor Timon couldn’t write-in fact nobody in the jungle could read or write. Hence, the letter was never written, and eventually, evil scar was banished from Pride lands.
Fellow members and most welcome Guests, Assalam O Alaikum.
We, the humans, are the only species that can not only speak, but also read and write. This is one of the reasons we are superior to animals from the beginning — don’t ever believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution eh!!
The one language that Adam and Eve spoke, evolved and reached over 6,500 languages being spoken today — majority of them having written form as well. Hence, life without language is unimaginable. If there were no languages then…what do you think we would be doing right now? Mmm then perhaps we would communicate the way Dori from finding Nemo tried to talk to the whales.
In scientific terms, the origin of spoken language is still under debate, but we can trace 6000 years old writings. Hence, the origin of written language can still be found, and this is what we will be mainly talking about today, that how two of the most prominent ancient writing systems came into being: the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing and the Chinese kanji system.
Hieroglyphics represent the official language of Pharaonic civilization, the first civilization known to man on the banks of the Nile Valley in Egypt. The Egyptians used images of pharaohs, tombs, snakes and vases in their script. Like shown in the image below.
Now , all of this -despite being very pretty- is incomprehensible. Or at least it was until the Rosetta Stone was discovered by the French, when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798. Known for his enlightened views regarding education and culture, he told a group of scholars to seize all cultural artifacts and in doing so they discovered the Rosetta stone.
Merci Monsieur Napoleon
As you can see here, Rosetta Stone, ancient irregularly shaped stone of black granite. It’s inscribed in two languages, Egyptian and Greek. This picture breaks down the three scripts, top two being Egyptian, and the third is Greek.
Now, a point to note is that people couldn’t read Egyptian, but they could read and understand Greek. Based on the stone’s own declaration, in the Greek portion that all three texts, despite being in different scripts actually have the same meaning . This proved to be the key to translate not only the Egyptian that was written on this stone, but the future translation of all Egyptian hieroglyphic texts.
Above are the hieroglyphs on the Temple of Kom Ombo, Egypt
Now, moving on to Chinese.
The defining aspect of China is the pictographic origin of their characters. Each and every single one of the many thousands of kanji can be broken apart, and are derived from simple engravings made on oracle bones during the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 BC). What do I mean by that?
Well they used to perform rituals in the name of God, so what they’d usually do is they’d take an animal bone, and they’d set it on fire and go Avarrah Katawerrah, and some time later they’d study the cracks on the bones caused by the heat to decipher (what they claimed) was the ancient spirits message, sort of like fortune telling. So, these were copied down and overtime evolved to be written words.
Now, another way they came up with the kanji writing system is by being inspired by their surroundings. Like the Egyptians did.
As you can see here, tree has been broken down into line formation, and is now a kanji.
All in all, the way humans came up with languages is always fascinating, and more so, the way they have been inspired by their surroundings to create unique writing systems.
In fact, when I was researching this topic I found out on BBCs website that Google has actually created a translator on Hieroglyphs, the feature has been added to its Arts & Culture app. So if you wanna have a fun activity you can translate a sentence in Hieroglyphs and see how the Egyptians would have written it. As I have a strong dislike for mathematics, I translated the sentence “I hate numbers”, which I admit is a bad sentence choice considering we have lots of accountants here, but I did it anyway and here is the result:
So this is how Egyptians who got bad grades at maths, and got whacked by their moms because of it, would have expressed themselves. Well, it’s time to come back to the present from ancient Egypt and Shang Dynasty China, which means its time to wrap up this speech. A side note, if you want to look into this further on your own, you can find pretty good info on Britannica, which is actually a more reliable source than Wikipedia, and I sincerely hope you enjoyed listening to my speech as much as I enjoyed researching it.
