The history of writing traces the development of writing systems and how their use transformed and was transformed by different societies. The use of writing prefigures various social and psychological … 展开

Before the 20th century, most scholarly theories of the origins of writing involved some form of monogenesis, the assumption that writing … 展开

The Phoenician alphabet is the continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet into the Iron Age; it in turn gave rise to the Aramaic and Greek alphabets. To date, most of the writing systems used throughout Afro-Eurasia descend from either Aramaic or Greek. … 展开

The mediums, materials, and technologies used by literate societies for writing help determine how writing systems work, what writing is used for, and … 展开

Writing systems typically satisfy three criteria. Firstly, the writing must have some purpose or meaning to it, and a point must be communicated by the text. Secondly, writing systems make use of specific symbols which may be recorded on some writing medium 展开

Cuneiform
Sumerian writing evolved from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millennium BCE, this had … 展开

With the collapse of the Western Roman state, literary development became largely confined to the Byzantine Empire and the Sassanid Empire, where the primary literary languages were Greek and Persian, though other languages such as Syriac and 展开