Although the history of humanity and the evolution of nature are shrouded in mystery and to some extent incomprehensible, we are connected to them and continue them through many links.
There are countless traces left by the past of humanity, which stand before us today and speak to us about their lives, experiences, dreams, and aspirations. Understanding these traces is important for a person who seeks a vision of the future, just as a sailor needs a map for a new journey. Although it is incomplete and cannot predict all the dangers of the journey, every lighthouse, reef, coast, or harbor marked on it will be valuable and vital during the journey. One part of this map, the trace that has been passed down to us, is letters. Through them, we recognize the universal need of humans to transmit and preserve experiences.
The map for this journey through letters is quite damaged and torn by the winds of history, so even if we cannot fully reconstruct it, its parts can serve us. ens the monument of an insatiable, yet highly effective pursuit of truth.
Pictographic or image writing
Pictographic or image writing is one of the oldest forms of systematic recording of thoughts and events. It consists of a series of simplified pictures, where each individual sign or image evokes certain events and objects in the reader’s consciousness that they associate with that sign. By arranging and grouping signs or images, it is possible to depict an event or capture a thought. What is characteristic of pictographic writing is that it doesn’t require special learning, it doesn’t have a precise and final number of signs, nor do the signs have a precise shape or meaning. On one hand, this is an advantage of pictography because such writing transcends language barriers and is more or less understandable to people who do not speak the same language. On the other hand, only those who know their meaning can read such signs. It is precisely this immediacy of pictographic writing that prevents us from fully understanding it without proper knowledge. Let’s find out more about the language of the people who created it.
The most famous pictographic script is undoubtedly Egyptian hieroglyphics. Although the Greeks initially used the word hieroglyphs to refer to ancient Egyptian script, since the 19th century the term has been used to refer to all pictographic scripts of ancient civilizations.
We still use pictographic scripts in some form today. Arrows indicating directions, most traffic signs, and other basic forms of pictographs are used in our everyday lives.
Ideographic script
The ideographic script emerged from the need to represent words that couldn’t be easily depicted through simple images, and in that sense, it represents a higher stage of development of pictography. Ideograms do not represent events with schematic drawings of complete figures or objects, but rather with drawings reduced to their basic, characteristic elements. For example, this means that all the parts of a human body are no longer depicted when representing the concept of a human. his body, but only one, and that is the most characteristic one that becomes a sign – a symbol of him as a whole.
The foundations for the development of true phonetic writing were created at the moment when, instead of inventing new ideograms to express linguistic details, some existing ones began to be used for words that are pronounced similarly or the same. The phonetic use of ideograms was also favored by the nature of some languages, such as Ancient Egyptian and Chinese. Ultimately, a syllabic and phonetic script developed from a mixed ideogrammatic-phonetic script.
The only systematic ideographic scripts that are in use today are those of China and Japan, although examples of ideogram use can also be found in our everyday lives. These include Roman and Arabic numerals, punctuation marks, mathematical, astrological, meteorological signs, and many others.
Egypt
The script of the ancient Egyptians was hieroglyphs. The Egyptians created and developed them and it is assumed that they used them for gr The original meaning of the text is as follows:
The hieroglyphic script was exclusively used for the Egyptian language. Along with its derivative – demotic script – it remained in use until around the middle of the 6th century, which is the time when the last inscription written in hieroglyphs from the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I was found.
The Egyptians referred to their script as m-d-r n-t-r, which means engraved signs. The word used today to designate this ancient Egyptian script is actually of Greek origin, consisting of the words hieros, meaning sacred, and glyfo, meaning to carve. Hieroglyphs were originally carved into stone and inscribed into clay, and they were intended for writing sacred texts in pyramids, temples, and tombs. Great attention was given to inscriptions, not only because of their content, but also because they were meant to last not just for centuries, but for eternity, not for individuals, but for future generations.
In an earlier stage of development, hieroglyphs were a symbolic script, with each concept, concrete or abstract, represented by a symbol. Back then, there was an appropriate pictorial sign. Each individual picture represented a letter, the sound with which the word describing the depicted object began. In the later developmental stage, the Egyptians chose twenty-four, and after that thirty hieroglyphs which they used for an equal number of sounds in their language. In the oldest inscriptions, hieroglyphs were written in a top-to-bottom arrangement, in later ones from left to right, and only occasionally in reverse.
The increasing use of papyrus led to the simplification and abbreviation of hieroglyphic signs, resulting in the development of Demotic script, which emerged as a need for a faster way of writing, characterized by the merging of multiple hieroglyphic signs into one. It was mainly used for secular purposes, for writing literary works, in administration, the military, and trade.
The Hittite Empire
The Cappadocian plateau in the interior of Asia Minor was the homeland of a lost civilization. The Hittites (1500 – 600 BC). Exceptional warrior skills, discipline, high morality, and cultural refinement, which we infer from the preserved material remains, indicate a highly developed civilization that possessed profound knowledge of nature and humanity.
Along with other elements of Babylonian culture, the Hittites adopted cuneiform script, which they used exclusively for secular purposes, in state and trade affairs.
For religious purposes and on artistic objects made of stone and metal (bronze, lead, silver), they used pictorial script, or hieroglyphic script, which, despite its great similarity to Egyptian hieroglyphs, remains undeciphered to this day due to the unknown language they spoke.
Mohenjo Daro
The Indus River Valley and its four tributaries, known collectively as Punjab (the land of five rivers), was a crossroads of highly developed cultures.
In the present-day territory of Pakistan, ruins were excavated in 1922, beneath millennia-old silt. The cities of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa are the remains of a lost and forgotten civilization of highly developed culture. In addition to the magnificent architectural ruins, around two and a half thousand amulets were found at the site, mostly square in shape, although there are also triangular, quadrilateral, and multilateral prisms. They were mostly made of soapstone or clay, but also of clay and ivory. They resemble seals, although they could also be worn around the neck as talismans or emblems. The reliefs and inscriptions on them are written in an unknown pictorial type of script and depict various mythological scenes created in a very high artistic style. They depict deities, most likely protectors of those who wore them.
Easter Island
In the middle of the vast Pacific, this lonely island of volcanic origin is one of the greatest cultural and historical mysteries of the last centuries. Its giant stone statues that stand along the coast on terraces carved out as if… Expecting passengers, always imposing the same questions on them: who, when, how, and for what purpose were they asked by? With the disappearance of the indigenous people, a highly developed prehistoric culture vanished, along with the memory of the script found on about two hundred wooden tablets. They were called kohau-rongo-rongo, or the talking wood. The script appearing on these tablets is mostly pictographic in nature. It could only be read by someone who knew the text by heart, with the human, animal, fish, and similar figures serving as mere reminders on which the story developed. The content of these tablets has not been discovered to this day, as it is practically impossible to decipher the meaning of the script without knowledge of the language. There were two forms of this script: the old script known only to selected individuals, rulers, and high priests, which served for conveying the deepest knowledge, and the other form of this script was used for writing chronicles. Science has not yet been able to determine the origin of the script from Easter Island. oka, but there was a striking resemblance found with the script of the Mohenjo Daro culture. There are a very large number of similar characters, although some are completely identical. Despite the fact that these cultures are spatially separated by about twenty thousand kilometers and temporally separated by about five thousand years, there are even around one hundred and sixty matching characters.
Cretan scripts
On Crete, the largest island in the Aegean Sea and a place where the cultures of three continents of the ancient world met, a high civilization of the Bronze Age developed – the Minoan or Aegean civilization. Based on numerous archaeological remains, this civilization was exceptionally rich and powerful. As for the written finds, the Minoan civilization posed an unsolved enigma for scientists in terms of writing and language. It is currently known that they used two pictographic and two linear scripts (Linear A and Linear B), and that the Phoenician script, a precursor to Greek and later many famous European scripts, evolved from one of them.
By analyzing Yesterday, based on the very rich legacy from the mythology of ancient peoples and the symbolism of numbers, as well as the order of the individual letters in the alphabet, German philosopher and culturologist Thomas Schneider came to the conclusion that the alphabet is not a random set of letters, but a graphically condensed myth about a dying and resurrecting God, similar to the myths of Osiris, Tammuz, Dionysus, Balder, and countless other deities of living and dead religions. The alphabet, according to Schneider, begins with the symbol of life and ends with the symbol of death.
Based on the alphabet characters, Schneider reconstructed the myth about a deity that had the symbolic form of a bull and was worshiped as the Sun god, carrying a double-headed axe (labrys) as a sacred weapon. He was a god-king and judge, creator of the heavens and the earth, warrior and victor.
In Western Europe – Ogham script
This most exotic script in Europe, most commonly found in Ireland and Wales, is called by the Gaulic word Ogham, and it is believed to be believed to have been created by the Celtic god of the same name. There are theories suggesting that the name of this script is derived from the Greek word “agma,” as well as the idea that it was created based on a stone with the same characters found in Celtic graves.
The origin of the script itself is also unclear. It is most commonly found on wooden plaques, shields, and similar objects, as well as on tombstones.
Ogham is believed to have been a magical script used by druids, characterized by its simplicity. It consisted of twenty letters divided into four groups, each containing five letters. These groups represented combinations of one to five vertical or diagonal strokes branching out from one or both sides of a thick baseline.
Each individual letter was named after a plant, and the entire alphabet was called bethe-luis-nim, which translates to birch-ash-yew. Each consonant represented the name of one of the thirteen months, which lasted for twenty-eight days. Each vowel symbolically represented a different aspect of nature, such as a tree or a bird.