A Brief History of Writing

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The history of writing instruments , which humans have used to record and convey thoughts, feelings , and grocery lists is, in some ways, the history of civilization itself. It is through the drawings, signs, and words we've recorded that we've come to understand the story of our species. 

Some of the first tools used by early humans were the hunting club and the handy sharpened-stone . The latter, initially used as an all-purpose skinning and killing tool, was later adapted into the first writing instrument. Cavemen scratched pictures with the sharpened-stone tool onto the walls of cave dwellings. These drawings represented events in daily life such as the planting of crops or hunting victories.

From Pictographs to Alphabets

With time, the record-keepers developed systematized symbols from their drawings. These symbols represented words and sentences but were easier and faster to draw. Over time, these symbols became shared and universalized among small, groups and later, across different groups and tribes as well.

It was the discovery of clay that made portable records possible. Early merchants used clay tokens with pictographs to record the quantities of materials traded or shipped. These tokens date back to about 8500 BCE. With the high volume of and the repetition inherent in record keeping, pictographs evolved and slowly lost their detail. They became abstract-figures representing sounds in spoken communication.

Around 400 BCE, the Greek alphabet was developed and began to replace pictographs as the most commonly used form of visual communication. Greek was the first script written from left to right. From Greek followed the Byzantine and then the Roman writings. In the beginning, all writing systems had only uppercase letters, but when the writing instruments were refined enough for detailed faces, lowercase was used as well (around 600 CE.)

The Greeks employed a writing stylus made of metal, bone or ivory to place marks upon wax-coated tablets. The tablets were made in hinged pairs and closed to protect the scribe's notes. The first examples of handwriting also originated in Greece and it was the Grecian scholar Cadmus who invented the written alphabet .

Development of Ink, Paper, and Writing Implements

Across the globe, writing was developing beyond chiseling pictures into stone or wedging pictographs into wet clay. The Chinese invented and perfected 'Indian Ink'. Originally designed for blacking the surfaces of raised stone-carved hieroglyphics, the ink was a mixture of soot from pine smoke and lamp oil mixed with the gelatin of donkey skin and musk.

By 1200 BCE, the ink invented by the Chinese philosopher, Tien-Lcheu (2697 BCE), became common. Other cultures developed inks using natural dyes and colors derived from berries, plants, and minerals. In early writings, different colored inks had ritual meanings attached to each color.

The invention of ink paralleled that of paper . The early Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, and Hebrews used papyrus and parchment papers began using parchment paper around 2000 BCE, when the earliest piece of writing on Papyrus known to us today, the Egyptian "Prisse Papyrus" was created. 

The Romans created a reed-pen perfect for parchment and ink from the hollow tubular-stems of marsh grasses, especially from the jointed bamboo plant. They converted bamboo stems into a primitive form of fountain pen and cut one end into the form of a pen nib or point. A writing fluid or ink filled the stem and squeezing the reed forced fluid to the nib.

By the year 400, a stable form of ink developed, a composite of iron-salts, nutgalls, and gum. This became the basic formula for centuries. Its color when first applied to paper was a bluish-black, rapidly turning into a darker black before fading to the familiar dull brown color commonly seen in old documents. Wood-fiber paper was invented in China in the year 105 but was not widely used throughout Europe until paper mills were built in the late 14th century.

The writing instrument that dominated for the longest period in history (over one-thousand years) was the quill pen. Introduced around the year 700, the quill is a pen made from a bird feather. The strongest quills were those taken from living birds in the spring from the five outer left wing feathers. The left wing was favored because the feathers curved outward and away when used by a right-handed writer.

Quill pens lasted for only a week before it was necessary to replace them. There were other disadvantages associated with their use, including lengthy preparation time. Early European writing parchments made from animal skins required careful scraping and cleaning. To sharpen the quill, the writer needed a special knife. Beneath the writer's high-top desk was a coal stove, used to dry the ink as quickly as possible.

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Writing History: An Introductory Guide to How History Is Produced

What is history.

Most people believe that history is a "collection of facts about the past." This is reinforced through the use of textbooks used in teaching history. They are written as though they are collections of information. In fact, history is NOT a "collection of facts about the past." History consists of making arguments about what happened in the past on the basis of what people recorded (in written documents, cultural artifacts, or oral traditions) at the time. Historians often disagree over what "the facts" are as well as over how they should be interpreted. The problem is complicated for major events that produce "winners" and "losers," since we are more likely to have sources written by the "winners," designed to show why they were heroic in their victories.

History in Your Textbook

Many textbooks acknowledge this in lots of places. For example, in one book, the authors write, "The stories of the conquests of Mexico and Peru are epic tales told by the victors. Glorified by the chronicles of their companions, the conquistadors, or conquerors, especially Hernán Cortés (1485-1547), emerged as heroes larger than life." The authors then continue to describe Cortés ’s actions that ultimately led to the capture of Cuauhtómoc, who ruled the Mexicas after Moctezuma died. From the authors’ perspective, there is no question that Moctezuma died when he was hit by a rock thrown by one of his own subjects. When you read accounts of the incident, however, the situation was so unstable, that it is not clear how Moctezuma died. Note: there is little analysis in this passage. The authors are simply telling the story based upon Spanish versions of what happened. There is no interpretation. There is no explanation of why the Mexicas lost.   Many individuals believe that history is about telling stories, but most historians also want answers to questions like why did the Mexicas lose?

What Are Primary Sources?

To answer these questions, historians turn to primary sources, sources that were written at the time of the event, in this case written from 1519-1521 in Mexico. These would be firsthand accounts. Unfortunately, in the case of the conquest of Mexico, there is only one genuine primary source written from 1519-1521. This primary source consists of the letters Cortés wrote and sent to Spain. Other sources are conventionally used as primary sources, although they were written long after the conquest. One example consists of the account written by Cortés ’s companion, Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Other accounts consist of Mexica and other Nahua stories and traditions about the conquest of Mexico from their point of view.

Making Arguments in the Textbook

Historians then use these sources to make arguments, which could possibly be refuted by different interpretations of the same evidence or the discovery of new sources.  For example, the Bentley and Ziegler textbook make several arguments on page 597 about why the Spaniards won:

"Steel swords, muskets, cannons, and horses offered Cortés and his men some advantage over the forces they met and help to account for the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire".

"Quite apart from military technology, Cortés' expedition benefited from divisions among the indigenous peoples of Mexico."

"With the aid of Doña Marina, the conquistadors forged alliances with peoples who resented domination by the Mexicas, the leaders of the Aztec empire...."

Ideally, under each of these "thesis statements," that is, each of these arguments about why the Mexicas were defeated, the authors will give some examples of information that backs up their "thesis." To write effective history and history essays, in fact to write successfully in any area, you should begin your essay with the "thesis" or argument you want to prove with concrete examples that support your thesis.  Since the Bentley and Ziegler book does not provide any evidence to back up their main arguments, you can easily use the material available here to provide evidence to support your claim that any one of the above arguments is better than the others.  You could also use the evidence to introduce other possibilities:  Mocteuzuma's poor leadership, Cortés' craftiness, or disease.

Become a Critical Reader

To become a critical reader, to empower yourself to "own your own history," you should think carefully about whether the evidence the authors provide does in fact support their theses.  Since the Bentley and Ziegler book provides only conclusions and not much evidence to back up their main points, you may want to explore your class notes on the topic and then examine the primary sources included on the Conquest of Mexico on this web site.

Your Assignment for Writing History with Primary Sources

There are several ways to make this a successful assignment. First, you might take any of the theses presented in the book and use information from primary sources to disprove it—the "trash the book" approach. Or, if your professor has said something in class that you are not sure about, find material to disprove it—the "trash the prof" approach (and, yes, it is really okay if you have the evidence ). Another approach is to include new information that the authors ignored . For example, the authors say nothing about omens. If one analyzes omens in the conquest, will it change the theses or interpretations presented in the textbook? Or, can one really present a Spanish or Mexica perspective?  Another approach is to make your own thesis, i.e., one of the biggest reasons for the conquest was that Moctezuma fundamentally misunderstood Cortés.

When Sources Disagree

If you do work with the Mexican materials, you will encounter the harsh reality of historical research: the sources do not always agree on what happened in a given event. It is up to you, then, to decide who to believe. Most historians would probably believe Cortés’ letters were the most likely to be accurate, but is this statement justified? Cortés was in the heat of battle and while it looked like he might win easy victory in 1519, he did not complete his mission until 1521.  The Cuban Governor, Diego Velázquez wanted his men to capture Cortés and bring him back to Cuba on charges of insubordination.  Was he painting an unusually rosy picture of his situation so that the Spanish King would continue to support him? It is up to you to decide. Have the courage to own your own history! Díaz Del Castillo wrote his account later in his life, when the Spaniards were being attacked for the harsh policies they implemented in Mexico after the conquest.  He also was upset that Cortés' personal secretary published a book that made it appear that only Cortés was responsible for the conquest. There is no question that the idea of the heroic nature of the Spanish actions is clearest in his account. But does this mean he was wrong about what he said happened and why? It is up to you to decide. The Mexica accounts are the most complex since they were originally oral histories told in Nahuatl that were then written down in a newly rendered alphabetic Nahuatl. They include additional Mexica illustrations of their version of what happened, for painting was a traditional way in which the Mexicas wrote history. Think about what the pictures tell us. In fact, a good paper might support a thesis that uses a picture as evidence. Again, how reliable is this material? It is up to you to decide.

One way to think about the primary sources is to ask the questions: (1) when was the source written, (2) who is the intended audience of the source, (3) what are the similarities between the accounts, (4) what are the differences between the accounts, (5) what pieces of information in the accounts will support your thesis, and (6) what information in the sources are totally irrelevant to the thesis or argument you want to make.

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A Pocket Guide to Writing in History

A Pocket Guide to Writing in History by Mary Rampolla - Tenth Edition, 2021 from Macmillan Student Store

Psychology in Everyday Life

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The trusted guide for writing and research skills in history courses.

A Pocket Guide to Writing in History is the concise, trusted, and easy-to-use guide for the writing and research skills needed in undergraduate history courses. Thoroughly updated to include strategies for making useful outlines and organizing a paper, the tenth edition ensures that students have the most up-to-date advice and ample instruction for writing a research paper for their history class.

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"In a concise number of pages Rampolla thoroughly discusses the fundamental writing skills that undergrads need to know before embarking on writing history papers. What sets Rampolla’s work apart is that her slim volume presents this material in a readable, engaging and entertaining way." – Linda Thorne, Columbia College of Missouri "Rampolla’s Pocket Guide is an accessible, well-organized book that demystifies the field of history and how students can develop their historical research, writing, and thinking skills. The book is invaluable for first year students looking to succeed at history in university" – Rhonda Hinther, Brandon University "This is a short book but it provides an excellent and fairly comprehensive overview of how to be a successful history student. The writing is lively, the examples are on point, and the information is up to date. My students prefer it over others because of its length and cost. It’s small but it packs a big punch!" – Jeffrey Hardy, Brigham Young University

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Table of Contents

writing in history

Mary Lynn Rampolla

Mary Lynn Rampolla (PhD, University of Toronto) is associate professor of history at Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C.. Her scholarly work focuses on medieval and early modern Europe. She is active in the fields of history and composition and frequently presents papers at the annual International Medieval Congress at the University of Western Michigan.

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Denise Schmandt-Besserat

The evolution of writing.

The Evolution of Writing

Published in James Wright, ed., INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Elsevier, 2014

Writing – a system of graphic marks representing the units of a specific language – has been invented independently in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica. The cuneiform script, created in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, ca. 3200 BC, was first. It is also the only writing system which can be traced to its earliest prehistoric origin. This antecedent of the cuneiform script was a system of counting and recording goods with clay tokens. The evolution of writing from tokens to pictography, syllabary and alphabet illustrates the development of information processing to deal with larger amounts of data in ever greater abstraction.

Introduction

The three writing systems that developed independently in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica, shared a remarkable stability. Each preserved over millennia features characteristic of their original prototypes. The Mesopotamian cuneiform script can be traced furthest back into prehistory to an eighth millennium BC counting system using clay tokens of multiple shapes. The development from tokens to script reveals that writing emerged from counting and accounting. Writing was used exclusively for accounting until the third millennium BC, when the Sumerian concern for the afterlife paved the way to literature by using writing for funerary inscriptions. The evolution from tokens to script also documents a steady progression in abstracting data, from one-to-one correspondence with three-dimensional tangible tokens, to two-dimensional pictures, the invention of abstract numbers and phonetic syllabic signs and finally, in the second millennium BC, the ultimate abstraction of sound and meaning with the representation of phonemes by the letters of the alphabet.

Writing is humankind’s principal technology for collecting, manipulating, storing, retrieving, communicating and disseminating information. Writing may have been invented independently three times in different parts of the world: in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica. In what concerns this last script, it is still obscure how symbols and glyphs used by the Olmecs, whose culture flourished along the Gulf of Mexico ca 600 to 500 BC, reappeared in the classical Maya art and writing of 250-900 AD as well as in other Mesoamerican cultures (Marcus 1992). The earliest Chinese inscriptions, dated to the Shang Dynasty, c. 1400–1200 BC, consist of oracle texts engraved on animal bones and turtle shells (Bagley 2004). The highly abstract and standardized signs suggest prior developments, which are presently undocumented.

Of these three writing systems, therefore, only the earliest, the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, invented in Sumer, present-day Iraq, c. 3200 BC, can be traced without any discontinuity over a period of 10,000 years, from a prehistoric antecedent to the present-day alphabet. Its evolution is divided into four phases: (a) clay tokens representing units of goods were used for accounting (8000–3500 BC); (b) the three dimensional tokens were transformed into two-dimensional pictographic signs, and like the former tokens, the pictographic script served exclusively for accounting (3500–3000 BC); (c) phonetic signs, introduced to transcribe the name of individuals, marked the turning point when writing started emulating spoken language and, as a result, became applicable to all fields of human experience (3000–1500 BC); (d) with two dozen letters, each standing for a single sound of voice, the alphabet perfected the rendition of speech. After ideography, logography and syllabaries, the alphabet represents a further segmentation of meaning.

1. Tokens as Precursor of Writing

The direct antecedent of the Mesopotamian script was a recording device consisting of clay tokens of multiple shapes (Schmandt-Besserat 1996). The artifacts, mostly of geometric forms such as cones, spheres, disks, cylinders and ovoids, are recovered in archaeological sites dating 8000–3000 BC (Fig. 1). The tokens, used as counters to keep track of goods, were the earliest code—a system of signs for transmitting information. Each token shape was semantic, referring to a particular unit of merchandise. For example, a cone and a sphere stood respectively for a small and a large measure of grain, and ovoids represented jars of oil. The repertory of some three hundred types of counters made it feasible to manipulate and store information on multiple categories of goods (Schmandt-Besserat 1992).

(Fig. 1) Envelope, tokens and corresponding markings, from Susa, Iran (Courtesy Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités Orientales)

The token system had little in common with spoken language except that, like a word, a token stood for one concept. Unlike speech, tokens were restricted to one type of information only, namely, real goods. Unlike spoken language, the token system made no use of syntax. That is to say, their meaning was independent of their placement order. Three cones and three ovoids, scattered in any way, were to be translated ‘three baskets of grain, three jars of oil.’ Furthermore, the fact that the same token shapes were used in a large area of the Near East, where many dialects would have been spoken, shows that the counters were not based on phonetics. Therefore, the goods they represented were expressed in multiple languages. The token system showed the number of units of merchandize in one-to-one correspondence, in other words, the number of tokens matched the number of units counted: x jars of oil were represented by x ovoids. Repeating ‘jar of oil’ x times in order to express plurality is unlike spoken language.

2. Pictography: Writing as Accounting Device

After four millennia, the token system led to writing. The transition from counters to script took place simultaneously in Sumer and Elam, present-day western Iran when, around 3500 BC, Elam was under Sumerian domination. It occurred when tokens, probably representing a debt, were stored in envelopes until payment. These envelopes made of clay in the shape of a hollow ball had the disadvantage of hiding the tokens held inside. Some accountants, therefore, impressed the tokens on the surface of the envelope before enclosing them inside, so that the shape and number of counters held inside could be verified at all times (Fig. 1). These markings were the first signs of writing. The metamorphosis from three-dimensional artifacts to two-dimensional markings did not affect the semantic principle of the system. The significance of the markings on the outside of the envelopes was identical to that of the tokens held inside.

About 3200 BC, once the system of impressed signs was understood, clay tablets—solid cushion-shaped clay artifacts bearing the impressions of tokens—replaced the envelopes filled with tokens. The impression of a cone and a sphere token, representing measures of grain, resulted respectively in a wedge and a circular marking which bore the same meaning as the tokens they signified (Fig. 2). They were ideograms—signs representing one concept. The impressed tablets continued to be used exclusively to record quantities of goods received or disbursed. They still expressed plurality in one-to-one correspondence.

(Fig. 2) Impressed tablet featuring an account of grain, from Godin Tepe, Iran (Courtesy Dr. T. Cuyler Young, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto)

Pictographs—signs representing tokens traced with a stylus rather than impressed—appeared about 3100 BC. These pictographs referring to goods mark an important step in the evolution of writing because they were never repeated in one-to-one correspondence to express numerosity. Besides them, numerals—signs representing plurality—indicated the quantity of units recorded. For example, ‘33 jars of oil’ were shown by the incised pictographic sign ‘jar of oil’, preceded by three impressed circles and three wedges, the numerals standing respectively for ‘10’ and ‘1’ (Fig. 3). The symbols for numerals were not new. They were the impressions of cones and spheres formerly representing measures of grain, which then had acquired a second, abstract, numerical meaning. The invention of numerals meant a considerable economy of signs since 33 jars of oil could be written with 7 rather then 33 markings.

(Fig. 3) Pictographic tablet featuring an account of 33 measures of oil, from Godin Tepe, Iran (Courtesy Dr. T. Cuyler Young, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto)

In sum, in its first phase, writing remained mostly a mere extension of the former token system. Although the tokens underwent formal transformations from three- to two-dimensional and from impressed markings to signs traced with a stylus, the symbolism remained fundamentally the same. Like the archaic counters, the tablets were used exclusively for accounting (Nissen and Heine 2009). This was also the case when a stylus, made of a reed with a triangular end, gave to the signs the wedge-shaped ‘cuneiform’ appearance (Fig. 4). In all these instances, the medium changed in form but not in content. The only major departure from the token system consisted in the creation of two distinct types of signs: incised pictographs and impressed numerals. This combination of signs initiated the semantic division between the item counted and number.

(Fig. 4) Economic cuneiform tablet (Courtesy Texas Memorial Museum, The University of Texas at Austin)

3. Logography: Shift from Visual to Aural

About 3000 BC, the creation of phonetic signs—signs representing the sounds of speech—marks the second phase in the evolution of Mesopotamian writing, when, finally, the medium parted from its token antecedent in order to emulate spoken language. As a result, writing shifted from a conceptual framework of real goods to the world of speech sounds. It shifted from the visual to the aural world.

With state formation, new regulations required that the names of the individuals who generated or received registered merchandise were entered on the tablets. The personal names were transcribed by the mean of logograms—signs representing a word in a particular tongue. Logograms were easily drawn pictures of words with a sound close to that desired (for example in English the name Neil could be written with a sign showing bent knees ‘kneel’). Because Sumerian was mostly a monosyllabic language, the logograms had a syllabic value. A syllable is a unit of spoken language consisting of one or more vowel sounds, alone, or with one or more consonants. When a name required several phonetic units, they were assembled in a rebus fashion. A typical Sumerian name ‘An Gives Life’ combined a star, the logogram for An, god of heaven, and an arrow, because the words for ‘arrow’ and ‘life’ were homonyms. The verb was not transcribed, but inferred, which was easy because the name was common.

Phonetic signs allowed writing to break away from accounting. Inscriptions on stone seals or metal vessels deposited in tombs of the ‘Royal Cemetery’ of Ur, c. 2700–2600 BC, are among the first texts that did not deal with merchandise, did not include numerals and were entirely phonetic (Schmandt-Besserat 2007) The inscriptions consisted merely of a personal name: ‘Meskalamdug,’ or a name and a title: ‘Puabi, Queen’ (Fig. 5). Presumably, these funerary texts were meant to immortalize the name of the deceased, thereby, according to Sumerian creed, ensuring them of eternal life. Other funerary inscriptions further advanced the emancipation of writing. For example, statues depicting the features of an individual bore increasingly longer inscriptions. After the name and title of the deceased followed patronymics, the name of a temple or a god to whom the statue was dedicated, and in some cases, a plea for life after death, including a verb. These inscriptions introduced syntax, thus bringing writing yet one step closer to speech.

(Fig. 5) Name and title of Puabi carved on a seal recovered in the Royal Cemetery of Ur (U10939) (Source: Pierre Amiet, La Glyptique Mésopotamienne Archaique, Editions du CNRS, Paris 1980, Pl. 90: 1182)

After 2600–2500 BC, the Sumerian script became a complex system of ideograms mixed more and more frequently with phonetic signs. The resulting syllabary—system of phonetic signs expressing syllables—further modeled writing on to spoken language (Rogers 2005). With a repertory of about 400 signs, the script could express any topic of human endeavor. Some of the earliest syllabic texts were royal inscriptions, and religious, magic and literary texts.

The second phase in the evolution of the Mesopotamian script, characterized by the creation of phonetic signs, not only resulted in the parting of writing from accounting, but also its spreading out of Sumer to neighboring regions. The first Egyptian inscriptions, dated to the late fourth millennium BC, belonged to royal tombs (Baines 2007). They consisted of ivory labels and ceremonial artifacts such as maces and palettes bearing personal names, written phonetically as a rebus, visibly imitating Sumer. For example, the Palette of Narmer bears hieroglyphs identifying the name and title of the Pharaoh, his attendants and the smitten enemies. Phonetic signs to transcribe personal names, therefore, created an avenue for writing to spread outside of Mesopotamia. This explains why the Egyptian script was instantaneously phonetic. It also explains why the Egyptians never borrowed Sumerian signs. Their repertory consisted of hieroglyphs representing items familiar in the Egyptian culture that evoked sounds in their own tongue.

The phonetic transcription of personal names also played an important role in the dissemination of writing to the Indus Valley where, during a period of increased contact with Mesopotamia, c. 2500 BC, writing appears on seals featuring individuals’ names and titles (Parpola 1994). In turn, the Sumerian cuneiform syllabic script was adopted by many Near Eastern cultures who adapted it to their different linguistic families and in particular, Semitic (Akkadians and Eblaites); Indo-European (Mitanni, Hittites, and Persians); Caucasian (Hurrians and Urartians); and finally, Elamite and Kassite. It is likely that Linear A and B, the phonetic scripts of Crete and mainland Greece, c. 1400–1200 BC, were also influenced by the Near East.

4. The Alphabet: The Segmentation of Sounds

The invention of the alphabet about 1500 BC ushered in the third phase in the evolution of writing in the ancient Near East (Sass 2005). The first, so-called Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite alphabet, which originated in the region of present-day Lebanon, took advantage of the fact that the sounds of any language are few. It consisted of a set of 22 letters, each standing for a single sound of voice, which, combined in countless ways, allowed for an unprecedented flexibility for transcribing speech (Powell 2009). This earliest alphabet was a complete departure from the previous syllabaries. First, the system was based on acrophony—signs to represent the first letter of the word they stood for—for example an ox head (alpu) was ‘a,’ a house (betu) was b (Fig. 6). Second, it was consonantal—it dealt only with speech sounds characterized by constriction or closure at one or more points in the breath channel, like b, d, l, m, n, p, etc. Third, it streamlined the system to 22 signs, instead of several hundred.

(Fig. 6) Proto-Sinaitic Alphabet (source: Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia, Equinox, Oxford1990, p. 150)

The transition from cuneiform writing to the alphabet in the ancient Near East took place over several centuries. In the seventh century BC the Assyrian kings still dictated their edicts to two scribes. The first wrote Akkadian in cuneiform on a clay tablet; the second Aramaic in a cursive alphabetic script traced on a papyrus scroll. The Phoenician merchants established on the coast of present day Syria and Lebanon, played an important role in the diffusion of the alphabet. In particular, they brought their consonantal alphabetic system to Greece, perhaps as early as, or even before 800 BC. The Greeks perfected the Semitic alphabet by adding letters for vowels—speech sounds in the articulation of which the breath channel is not blocked, like a, e, i, o, u. As a result the 27-letter Greek alphabet improved the transcription of the spoken word, since all sounds were indicated. For example, words sharing the same consonants like ‘bad,’ ‘bed,’ ‘bid,’ ‘bud,’ could be clearly distinguished. The alphabet did not subsequently undergo any fundamental change.

5. The Modern Alphabets

Because the alphabet was invented only once, all the many alphabets of the world, including Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Brahmani and Cyrillic, derive from Proto-Sinaitic. The Latin alphabet used in the western world is the direct descendant of the Etruscan alphabet (Bonfante 2002). The Etruscans, who occupied the present province of Tuscany in Italy, adopted the Greek alphabet, slightly modifying the shape of letters. In turn, the Etruscan alphabet became that of the Romans, when Rome conquered Etruria in the first century BC. The alphabet followed the Roman armies. All the nations that fell under the rule of the Roman Empire became literate in the first centuries of our era. This was the case for the Gauls, Angles, Saxons, Franks and Germans who inhabited present-day France, England and Germany.

Charlemagne (800 AD) had a profound influence on the development of the Latin script by establishing standards. In particular a clear and legible minuscule cursive script was devised, from which our modern day lower case derives. The printing press invented in 1450 dramatically multiplied the dissemination of texts, introducing a new regularity in lettering and layout. The Internet catapults the alphabet into cyberspace, while preserving its integrity

6. Writing: Handling Data in Abstraction

Beyond the formal and structural changes undergone by writing in the course of millennia, its evolution also involved strides in the ability to handle data in abstraction. At the first stage, the token system antecedent of writing, already abstracted information in several ways. First, it translated daily-life commodities into arbitrary, often geometric forms. Second, the counters abstracted the items counted from their context. For example, sheep could be accounted independently of their actual location. Third, the token system separated the data from the knower. That is to say, a group of tokens communicated directly specific information to anyone initiated in the system. This was a significant change for an oral society, where knowledge was transmitted by word of mouth from one individual to another, face to face. Otherwise, the token system represented plurality concretely, in one-to-one correspondence. Three jars of oil were shown by three tokens, as it is in reality. At the same time, the fact that the token system used specific counters to count different items was concrete—it did not abstract the notion of item counted from that of number. (Certain English numerical expressions referring to particular sets, such as twin, triplet, quadruplet and duo, trio or quartet, are comparable to concrete numbers.)

When tokens were impressed on the envelopes to indicate the counters enclosed inside, the resulting markings could no longer be manipulated by hand. In other words, the transmutation of three-dimensional counters into two-dimensional signs constituted a second step in abstraction. By doing away with tokens, the clay tablets marked a third level of abstraction since the impressed markings no longer replicated a set of actual counters. The invention of numerals, which separated the notion of numerosity from that of the item counted, was a crucial fourth step in abstraction. The signs expressing the concept of oneness, twoness, etc., allowed plurality to be dealt with in fully abstract terms. In turn, the phonetic units marked a fifth step of abstraction, since the signs no longer referred to the objects pictured, but rather the sound of the word they evoked.

Phonetics allowed writing to shift from a representational to a conceptual linguistic system. That is to say it enabled writing to leave the realm of real goods in order to enter the world of words and the ideas they stand for. Finally, the process that started with ideograms expressing concepts and phonetic signs referring to the sound of monosyllabic words reached the ultimate segmentation of meaning with letters. As Marshall McLuhan (1997) defined it, the alphabet consists of semantically meaningless letters corresponding to semantically meaningless sounds. The alphabet brought data handling to a final double-stepped abstraction.

7. Conclusion: The Stability of Writing Systems

The origin of the Chinese script and the development of Mesoamerican writing are still obscure. The Mesopotamian script, however, offers a well-documented evolution over a continuous period of 10,000 years. The system underwent drastic changes in form, gradually transcribed spoken language more accurately, and handled data in more abstract terms. The most striking universal feature of all writing systems, however, is their uncanny endurance, unmatched among human creations. The Chinese script never needed to be deciphered because the signs have changed little during the 3400 years of its recorded existence (Xigui 2000). It also always remained ideographic, merely inserting rebus-like phonetic complements in some characters. The Mesoamerican Maya phonetic glyphs preserved the symbolism initiated by the Olmecs in the previous millennium (Coe and Van Stone 2005). Finally, when the last clay tablet was written in the Near East, c. 300 AD, the cuneiform script had been in use for three millennia. It replaced an age-old token system that had preceded it for over 5000 years; it was replaced by the alphabet, which we have now used for 3500 years.

Bagley, R. W. (2004). Anyang writing and the Origin of the Chinese writing system. In S.D. Houston (Ed.). The First Writing (pp. 190-249). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Baines, J. (2007). Visual and Written culture in Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Black, J. (2008) The Obsolescence and Demise of the Cuneiform Writing in Elam. In J. Baines, J. Bennet, S. Houston (eds). The Disappearance of Writing Systems (pp.45-72). London: Equinox.

Bonfante, G., Bonfante, L. (2002) The Etruscan Language (revised edition). Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Coe, M. D. and van Stone, M. (2005) Reading the Maya Glyphs, Thames and Hudson, London.

Malafouris L, (2010) Grasping the concept of number: How did the sapient mind move beyond approximation, in: I. Morley & C. Renfrew (eds.), The Archaeology of Measurement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (pp.35-42)

Marcus, J. (1992). Mesoamerican Writing Systems. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Moos, M. A. ed., (1997) Marshall McLuhan Essays, Media Research. Amsterdam:Overseas Publishers Association.

Nissen, H. J., & Heine, P. (2009). From Mesopotamia to Iraq. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Parpola, A. (1994) Deciphering the Indus Script. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Powell, B. B. (2009). Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization. London: Wiley Blackwell.

Rogers, H. (2005). Writing Systems, A Linguistic Approach. London: Blackwell.

Salomon, R. (2012). Some Principles and Patterns of Script Change. In S.D. Houston (ed). The Shape of Script. (pp. 119-133) Santa Fe: Sar Press.

Sass, B. (2005) The Alphabet at the Turn of the Millennium, The West Semitic Alphabet ca. 1150-850 BC – The Antiquity of the Arabian, Greek and Phrygian Alphabets, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University.

Schmandt-Besserat, D. (2007) When Writing Met Art. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.

Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1996). How Writing Came About. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.

Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1992). Before Writing. (2 vols). Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.

Xigui, Q. (2000) Chinese Writing, The Institute of East Asian Studies, The University of California, Berkeley.

Abstraction: Consider the property of an item dissociated from any specific instance.

Abstract counting: When numbers are considered separately from the items counted.

Alphabet: A writing system based on a set of letters, each standing for a single spoken sound.

Concrete counting: the use of different sets of numbers to count different set of items.

Cuneiform: The writing system developed in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC. The script was written with a triangular stylus, which gave the stroke their characteristic angular shape.

Logography: a sign refers to one word.

Numeral: a sign to write a number.

Pictograph: A character in the form of a picture representing either the sound of the word it evokes or the object represented.

Syllabary: A writing system based on characters each representing a syllable, or unit of spoken language consisting of at least a vowel with, sometimes, additional vowels or consonants. Tablet a lump of clay prepared in a cushion shape to support a written document.

Writing : A system of human communication by the mean of arbitrary visual signs.

Page last updated: 2/6/21

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

The origins of writing.

Proto-Cuneiform tablet with seal impressions: administrative account of barley distribution with cylinder seal impression of a male figure, hunting dogs, and boars

Proto-Cuneiform tablet with seal impressions: administrative account of barley distribution with cylinder seal impression of a male figure, hunting dogs, and boars

Cuneiform tablet: administrative account with entries concerning malt and barley groats

Cuneiform tablet: administrative account with entries concerning malt and barley groats

Cylinder seal and modern impression: three

Cylinder seal and modern impression: three "pigtailed ladies" with double-handled vessels

Ira Spar Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

The alluvial plains of southern Mesopotamia in the later half of the fourth millennium B.C. witnessed a immense expansion in the number of populated sites. Scholars still debate the reasons for this population increase, which seems too large to be explained simply by normal growth. One site, the city of Uruk , surpassed all others as an urban center surrounded by a group of secondary settlements. It covered approximately 250 hectares, or .96 square miles, and has been called “the first city in world history.” The site was dominated by large temple estates whose need for accounting and disbursing of revenues led to the recording of economic data on clay tablets. The city was ruled by a man depicted in art with many religious functions. He is often called a “ priest-king .” Underneath this office was a stratified society in which certain professions were held in high esteem. One of the earliest written texts from Uruk provides a list of 120 officials including the leader of the city, leader of the law, leader of the plow, and leader of the lambs, as well as specialist terms for priests, metalworkers, potters, and others.

Many other urban sites existed in southern Mesopotamia in close proximity to Uruk. To the east of southern Mesopotamia lay a region located below the Zagros Mountains called by modern scholars Susiana. The name reflects the civilization centered around the site of Susa. There temples were built and clay tablets, dating to about 100 years after the earliest tablets from Uruk, were inscribed with numerals and word-signs. Examples of Uruk-type pottery are found in Susiana as well as in other sites in the Zagros mountain region and in northern and central Iran, attesting to the important influence of Uruk upon writing and material culture. Uruk culture also spread into Syria and southern Turkey, where Uruk-style buildings were constructed in urban settlements.

Recent archaeological research indicates that the origin and spread of writing may be more complex than previously thought. Complex state systems with proto-cuneiform writing on clay and wood may have existed in Syria and Turkey as early as the mid-fourth millennium B.C. If further excavations in these areas confirm this assumption, then writing on clay tablets found at Uruk would constitute only a single phase of the early development of writing. The Uruk archives may reflect a later period when writing “took off” as the need for more permanent accounting practices became evident with the rapid growth of large cities with mixed populations at the end of the fourth millennium B.C. Clay became the preferred medium for recording bureaucratic items as it was abundant, cheap, and durable in comparison to other mediums. Initially, a reed or stick was used to draw pictographs and abstract signs into moistened clay. Some of the earliest pictographs are easily recognizable and decipherable, but most are of an abstract nature and cannot be identified with any known object. Over time, pictographic representation was replaced with wedge-shaped signs, formed by impressing the tip of a reed or wood stylus into the surface of a clay tablet. Modern (nineteenth-century) scholars called this type of writing cuneiform after the Latin term for wedge, cuneus .

Today, about 6,000 proto-cuneiform tablets, with more than 38,000 lines of text, are now known from areas associated with the Uruk culture, while only a few earlier examples are extant. The most popular but not universally accepted theory identifies the Uruk tablets with the Sumerians, a population group that spoke an agglutinative language related to no known linguistic group.

Some of the earliest signs inscribed on the tablets picture rations that needed to be counted, such as grain, fish, and various types of animals. These pictographs could be read in any number of languages much as international road signs can easily be interpreted by drivers from many nations. Personal names, titles of officials, verbal elements, and abstract ideas were difficult to interpret when written with pictorial or abstract signs. A major advance was made when a sign no longer just represented its intended meaning, but also a sound or group of sounds. To use a modern example, a picture of an “eye” could represent both an “eye” and the pronoun “I.” An image of a tin can indicates both an object and the concept “can,” that is, the ability to accomplish a goal. A drawing of a reed can represent both a plant and the verbal element “read.” When taken together, the statement “I can read” can be indicated by picture writing in which each picture represents a sound or another word different from an object with the same or similar sound.

This new way of interpreting signs is called the rebus principle. Only a few examples of its use exist in the earliest stages of cuneiform from between 3200 and 3000 B.C. The consistent use of this type of phonetic writing only becomes apparent after 2600 B.C. It constitutes the beginning of a true writing system characterized by a complex combination of word-signs and phonograms—signs for vowels and syllables—that allowed the scribe to express ideas. By the middle of the third millennium B.C. , cuneiform primarily written on clay tablets was used for a vast array of economic, religious, political, literary, and scholarly documents.

Spar, Ira. “The Origins of Writing.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wrtg/hd_wrtg.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Glassner, Jean-Jacques. The Invention of Cuneiform Writing in Sumer . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Houston, Stephen D. The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Nissen, Hans J. "The Archaic Texts from Uruk." World Archaeology 17 (1986), pp. 317–34. n/a: n/a, n/a.

Nissen, Hans J., Peter Damerow, and Robert K. Englund. Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Walker, C. B. F. Cuneiform . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Additional Essays by Ira Spar

  • Spar, Ira. “ Mesopotamian Creation Myths .” (April 2009)
  • Spar, Ira. “ Flood Stories .” (April 2009)
  • Spar, Ira. “ Gilgamesh .” (April 2009)
  • Spar, Ira. “ Mesopotamian Deities .” (April 2009)
  • Spar, Ira. “ The Gods and Goddesses of Canaan .” (April 2009)

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Howe Writing Center

Writing in history.

This resource provides a brief introduction to writing in the field of History through the lens of threshold concepts. It includes:

  • An overview of what writing characteristics are valued in History
  • Examples of disciplinary vocabulary common in History
  • A brief overview of primary source analysis

What does History value in writing?

The field of History values sensitivity to context and historical perspective :

Writers are considered credible when they develop original, clear, succinct, well-supported arguments that engage in larger scholarly debate .

History’s citation practices embody these values, and you can see that in examples of how the field deeply engages and interrogates primary and secondary sources .

Effective writing in History: Uses signposting , explicates relevance/context , and balances larger argument with fine-grained analysis and pithiness .

Concerning their writing, History majors should expect to: get feedback, pay attention to writing, treat writing as a process and appreciate it, and recognize their own place in the larger conversation .

What vocabulary and approaches are common in History?

Writing in History often draws on common disciplinary vocabulary and approaches to analysis :

As you write as a History major, some common disciplinary vocabulary you might see and use include:

  • periodization
  • change over time (contingency v. teleology, process, revolution)
  • presentism, anachronism
  • nation & empire
  • top-down v. bottom-up

These are some of the common analytical approaches to History you will use and encounter:

  • environmental
  • women/gender
  • race/ethnicity
  • micro- vs. macrohistory
  • digital (mapping)
  • information/technology
  • emotions/senses

What does primary source analysis look like in History?

Primary source analysis refers to analyzing firsthand historical evidence. History places a high value on working with primary sources. As you progress in your education, the complexity of the primary source analysis you will be asked to complete will increase. For instance, you can expect to learn progressively how to:

  • complete close-readings of short passages and read for basic content
  • analyze the genre/value of a primary source
  • analyze an author’s perspective/value of a primary source
  • compare multiple sources
  • ask historical questions of primary sources

This guide was co-created by HCWE graduate assistant Angela Glotfelter and History faculty Wietse de Boer, Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Erik Jensen, and Daniel Prior.

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writing in history

The History of Writing is the History of Humanity

Walter stephens on lost books, rediscovery, and ancient wisdom.

Imagine our world without writing. No pencils, no pens, no paper, no grocery lists. No chalkboards, typewriters or printing-presses, no letters or books. No computers or word-processors, no e-mail or Internet, no “social media”; and without binary code—strings of ones and zeroes that create computer programs—no viewable archives of film or television, either. Writing evolved to perform tasks that were difficult or impossible to accomplish without it; at some level, it is now essential for anything that human societies do, except in certain increasingly threatened cultures of hunter-gatherers. Without writing, modern civilization has amnesia; complex tasks need stable, reliable, long-term memory.

My new book, How Writing Made Us Human: 3000 BCE to Now , is about Homo scribens , Man the Writer, because whatever else they said about “man,” most writers in the Western tradition have assumed that writing made Homo fully human. Am I suggesting that writing is the only skill that makes “us” human? Of course not. Yet historically the idea was often implied and occasionally explicit. According to a late sixteenth-century treatise on penmanship, “Plato says that the difference which divides us humans from the animals is that we have the power of speech and they do not. I, however, say that the difference is that we know how to write but they do not.”

Throughout Western history, there have been other shorthand definitions of humanity in terms of some single, overarching, inherent trait. The most laudatory definition was devised by a botantist of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, who dubbed us Homo sapiens , Man the Wise; later we were promoted to Homo sapiens sapiens . This flattering label has stuck, peremptorily declaring our superiority to all the hominins that went extinct. By enshrining the epithet in anthropology and other sciences, we continue to imply that some definition of wisdom is entwined with our species’ evolution.

Whether Neanderthals or others of our relatives laughed or played is unprovable (precisely because they did not write). But it seems likely; archaeology tells us they made things, as hominins had done since Paleolithic times. Yet writing is the one accomplishment we do not share with Neanderthals and our other ancestors.

Every age had its own ideas of how writing came about, what it was for, and what human life would be without it. For thousands of years, Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Latins, Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared two projects, the creation and refinement of writing, and the attempt to understand its history and meaning. Other cultures, notably in China and Central America, have long traditions of writing, to be sure, and scholars have studied them for centuries. But to do them justice here would risk tangling the emotional thread that connects the history of Homo scribens from Babylon to our own time. That affective evolution is coherent and compelling, from myth to method, from fireside legends of gods and heroes to scientific excavation and decryption.

Throughout recorded history, humans have regarded the art of writing with awe and even reverence. To imagine humanity without writing was not impossible, but it was in many ways difficult. Prehistory , defined by the absence of written records, only entered the English language in 1836. A few years previously, in 1828, a North American schoolgirl praised writing as miraculous, “the wondrous, mystic art of painting speech, and speaking to the eyes.” This synesthetic quality, the capacity to translate information from one sense to another, had been a source of enthusiasm since the most ancient times, yet its appeal remained undiminished. Then, within twenty years, the electromagnetic telegraph expanded the definition of writing, by retranslating “painted speech” into a binary system of audible pulses capable of spanning continents and oceans.

Two centuries after the marveling schoolgirl, we can hardly imagine her degree of enthusiasm. Throughout five millennia, the art of writing has always been paradoxical, as mundane and practical as a pencil, yet miraculous, more stupefying in its way than end products like Paradise Lost , the Divine Comedy , the Iliad , or, ultimately, the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh .

As if echoing the nineteenth-century schoolgirl, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has remarked that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and from its beginnings writing seemed indeed magical, even god-given. Praise for letters as the foundation of civilized life developed in ancient societies as soon as records progressed beyond bare lists and inventories. On clay, papyrus and parchment, paper, stone, and metals, men—and a very few women until the Renaissance—marveled at the art of writing and celebrated its awesome magnification of memory and imagination.

For most of history, the epithet scribens would have been grossly inappropriate to describe the genus Homo ; writing was a skill limited to a tiny elite of scribes and scholars. As the specialized technology of a guild, the art acquired a prestige, an aura, a mystique that made it seem magical, sometimes in the fullest sense of the word. Until nineteenth-century archaeology, anyone interested in the history of writing had scarcely better evidence than the Sumerians. Lacking historical perspective, but immensely proud of their craft, early scribes imagined its origin and development as superhuman, the gift of gods and heroes. Would-be historians inherited, transmitted, and embellished mythical tales about heroic or divine individuals who single-handedly invented an art imbued with a power that was sometimes tangible—that is, magical—as well as political, religious, or symbolic. Although these stories became steadily less mythical, their leitmotifs remained remarkably stable.

Writing as “The Wondrous, Mystic Art” The conviction that writing was worthy of the highest admiration, a marvel so astonishing that only a god or godlike human could have invented it, permeated countless stories about it before 1800. Writing enabled memory to outlast the human voice and transcend the individual person; written thoughts could remain stable over generations or centuries. By bridging space as well as time, writing abolished isolation and created community. It could even enable interaction between the ephemeral human world and the invisible society of gods, demons, and spirits. Writing was so central to definitions of humanity that, as I note above, the concept of prehistory only emerged around 1800, while the notion that Adam, Moses, or another biblical patriarch had invented writing lingered among the religious.

Inscription and Erasure Writing was a facsimile of immortality for individuals and whole societies; thus, a medieval Latin translator of Plato referred to memoria literarum . The phrase suggested that writing is a kind of receptacle, which contains memory as if it were a tangible physical object. Still, it was no secret that literary memory is not “literally” eternal because even the most durable media are overshadowed by the threat of erasure. The tension between inscription and obliteration (literally de-lettering) was and remains an omnipresent theme.

Lost Books and Libraries Lost writings are a powerful leitmotif in the emotional history of writing. The erasure of a single work seems tragic even now, but in the long manuscript age before Gutenberg, the destruction of a book could symbolize the loss of the whole world. If nothing but fragments of a text survive, the biblioclasm inevitably stimulates writers to imagine the complete whole that was destroyed. Like the armless Venus de Milo, mutilated writings have inspired nostalgic dreams of reconstitution, ranging from scholarly treatises to fantasy and kitsch. The immense Library of Alexandria was already the archetype of mass erasure during antiquity and the Middle Ages, and it still excites both scholars and nonspecialists.

Rediscovery Not all lost writings are gone for good; some are merely misplaced, and startling rediscoveries have been made over the centuries. Famous recovered works that crowd scholarly daydreams include the dramatic example of an entire library belonging to Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian emperor who died in 627 BCE. Discovered in 1849–1852, it contained thousands of cuneiform tablets, many broken into tiny fragments. The trove included the epic of Gilgamesh , the oldest major work of world literature, containing what its first reader in two millennia christened “the original version of Noah’s Flood.” More recently, space-age technologies have permitted unprecedented collaboration between manuscript scholars and cutting-edge scientists, who miraculously salvaged lost texts by that archetypal mathematician Archimedes.

Bookhunters Many recoveries of lost works have been owed to random good fortune, but just as frequently they were the result of deliberate searches. The figure of the Bookhunter, an Indiana Jones who traces clues and braves danger to recover priceless written treasure, was already present in ancient Egyptian myth. During the Renaissance, scholarly bookhunters transformed the ancient fables into an exciting reality; as they rediscovered landmarks of Greek and Roman culture, they laid bare centuries of dramatic stories about the history and powers of writing. Even today, the search and recovery operation is still going strong, including in cultures far older than Greece and Rome.

Ancient Wisdom Biblioclasms—lost libraries and damaged manuscripts—inspire a romantic nostalgia so intense that writers have often imagined whole utopias of extinct wisdom. Sometimes hard evidence of destruction inspired these bookish fantasies, but paradoxically, daydreams of loss were often provoked by exciting rediscoveries. Until the eighteenth century, sapientia veterum , the wisdom of the ancients, was the scholar’s imagined paradise, his (or increasingly her) Garden of Eden. Democratized literacy since 1800 has made reveries about the stupendous achievements of Egypt and Atlantis into perennial favorites of popular culture. Plato imagined Atlantis 2400 years ago, yet modern daydreams about lost utopias, from Jules Verne and H. G. Wells to the 1985 film Back to the Future , differ from their ancient counterparts mainly through their anachronistic or pseudoscientific assumptions about technology and science.

Forgeries and Fakes Forged texts were common in ancient Greece, and even earlier in Egypt. During the Renaissance, when genuine Greek and Roman texts and epigraphic inscriptions were being rediscovered in droves, forgery and falsification ran rife. Scholars developed techniques for detecting them, but forgers stayed a step ahead of their critics. Moreover, by the eighteenth century, novelists were employing narrative techniques—some of them dating back to ancient Greece—that blurred the boundaries between fact, forgery, and fiction in suggestive and often disturbing ways. In 1719, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe , subtitled “the life and strange surprising adventures” of an Englishman from York, “written by Himself,” was told so realistically that a century later many readers, including a notorious forger of Shakespeare manuscripts, still mistook it for a factual account.

Books of the Damned Not all enthusiasm is positive. Whether genuine or forged, physically real or only imagined, books have at times incarnated an ideal of evil. Early Christians destroyed numbers of books they considered theologically, morally, or intellectually dangerous, including the Book of Enoch , which claimed to be the memoirs of Noah’s great-grandfather. Other scandalous books were nonexistent or unlocatable to begin with: the mere title of a book could ignite passionate controversy, even—or especially—when no one could find copies of it. Beginning in the thirteenth century, scholars gossiped and daydreamed apprehensively about a Book of the Three Great Impostors , which supposedly argued that Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were charlatans and tricksters, and their religions nothing but tissues of lies. In the skeptical eighteenth century, a book was finally forged to fit the title, to widespread disappointment.

Holy Books The opposite of damned books were sacred books, which were off limits ( sacer in Latin) in a different way, “untouchable” because religious leaders declared them immune to all criticism. These holy books—or scriptures—are the most radically explicit example of creating authority —religious and political credibility—through writing. Their defenders claim that scriptures descend vertically from a god to humans, whereas modern scholars call them mere texts and explain their trajectories horizontally, across human history. From the Book of Enoch onward, legends about God and the Hebrew alphabet, including the origins of the Torah itself, were based on passages in the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament, the Qur’an, and the Book of Mormon, as well as numbers of would-be scriptures now forgotten, went further and described in “autobiographical” detail how they came to be written by gods or their human amanuenses.

Imaginary Books As the previous two categories suggest, a letter, an inscription, or even an entire book can be wholly imaginary, as thoroughly nonexistent as cloud-cuckoo-land. Paradoxically, a brief title makes the hypothetical existence of a book easier to imagine than the narrated life of a Robinson Crusoe or an Elizabeth Bennet. Conversely, it is more difficult to establish the unreality of an imaginary book than that of a unicorn or a utopia. The metahistory of writing is entwined with the history of imaginary books, and examples of full-on mythical bibliography are far from rare. Whether as earnest scholarly quests for literary chimeras or as satirical send-ups of learned pretense, mythical bibliography remains a major expression of the social and emotional importance of writing.

Writing, Books, and Libraries as Metaphors and Symbols Various myths about the history of writing are strongly symbolic or metaphorical. At the end of Dante’s Paradiso , his famous description of God as the ultimate book symbolized the overwhelming consequence of writing and books for Christian culture in 1320. Six centuries later, Jorge Luis Borges came to international fame through his tale “The Library of Babel” (1941). Borges describes the cosmos as an infinite library whose only inhabitants are despondent librarians searching vainly for the ultimate book that will make sense of their bibliocosm. Borges’s tales and essays frequently couch the deepest philosophical truths in enigmatic narratives, glorifying language, writing, and books as convincingly as genuine primitive myths ever did, sometimes naming uncanny or savage gods as their authors.

Conclusions The history of writing is ready for its emotional close-up: what people have done with writing is now well known, but how they felt about it over time remains uncharted. The celebrities of bookish myths were not only gods and humans, but also writings, and ultimately the art of writing itself. Discarded documents, when they survive, have told us much about the way people used writing, in every kind of activity from accounting to religious contemplation, poetic meditation, philosophical inquiry, and scientific research. But discarded attitudes to writing still await the same kind of systematic spadework that archaeologists perform on material remains of the past.

The attitudes buried in myths and legends of writing reflect times when digging in the ground was for farmers, not archaeologists. Later, scholars researched the history of writing by reading books, but they had to construct that history for themselves from scattered, sometimes enigmatic anecdotes. Like the texts of Sappho’s poems or the Dead Sea Scrolls, emotional evidence about the history of writing survived in mutilated, fragmentary form. Nevertheless, that lore is as vital to the history of literature as Shakespeare’s sonnets or Dickens’s novels.

Generations of scholars have told us how a single author or a vaguely defined period (“the Middle Ages” or “the Enlightenment”) thought about books or libraries. But aside from writing as a profession (monk, scrivener, poet, historian, journalist, novelist, etc.), little has been collected of what earlier ages thought and felt about writing as an art , that is, as a whole phenomenon , in its organic relationship to humanity and civilization. Essential evidence for the emotional history of writing is only infrequently found in revered masterworks by Homer, Dante, or Jane Austen. The best sources are often lurking in outmoded scholarship: their technical obsolescence actually makes their defunct erudition more compelling as emotional history. Hiding under the dunes of dusty bygone scholarship are stories as captivating as Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” —a familiar poem inspired by an ancient, now-forgotten anecdote about writing.

 __________________________________

Walter Stephens' How Writing Made Us Human

Adapted from  How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now  by Walter Stephens. Copyright 2023. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

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19 Standards of Historical Writing

In this chapter, you will learn the basic expectations for writing an undergrad history research paper. At this point in your college career, you’ve likely had a great deal of instruction about writing and you may be wondering why this chapter is here. There are at least three reasons:

  • For some of you, those lessons about writing came before you were ready to appreciate or implement them. If you know your writing skills are weak, you should not only pay close attention to this chapter, but also submit early drafts of your work to the History Tutoring Center (at UTA) or another writing coach. Only practice and multiple drafts will improve those skills.
  • Those of you who were paying attention in composition courses know the basics, but may lack a good understanding of the format and approach of scholarly writing in history. Other disciplines permit more generalities and relaxed associations than history, which is oriented toward specific contexts and (often, but not always) linear narratives. Moreover, because historians work in a subject often read by non-academics, they place a greater emphasis on clearing up jargon and avoiding convoluted sentence structure. In other words, the standards of historical writing are high and the guidelines that follow will help you reach them.
  • Every writer, no matter how confident or experienced, faces writing blocks. Going back to the fundamental structures and explanations may help you get past the blank screen by supplying prompts to help you get started.

As you read the following guide, keep in mind that it represents only our perspective on the basic standards. In all writing, even history research papers, there is room for stylistic variation and elements of a personal style. But one of the standards of historical writing is that only those who fully understand the rules can break them successfully. If you regularly violate the rule against passive voice verb construction or the need for full subject-predicate sentences, you cannot claim the use of sentence fragments or passive voice verbs is “just your style.” Those who normally observe those grammatical rules, in contrast, might on occasion violate them for effect. The best approach is first to demonstrate to your instructor that you can follow rules of grammar and essay structure before you experiment or stray too far from the advice below.

Introductions

Introductions are nearly impossible to get right the first time. Thus, one of the best strategies for writing an introduction to your history essay is to keep it “bare bones” in the first draft, initially working only toward a version that covers the basic requirements. After you’ve written the full paper (and realized what you’re really trying to say, which usually differs from your initial outline), you can come back to the intro and re-draft it accordingly. However, don’t use the likelihood of re-writing your first draft to avoid writing one. Introductions provide templates not only for your readers, but also for you, the writer. A decent “bare bones” introduction can minimize writer’s block as a well-written thesis statement provides a road map for each section of the paper.

So what are the basic requirements? In an introduction, you must:

  • Pose a worthwhile question or problem that engages your reader
  • Establish that your sources are appropriate for answering the question, and thus that you are a trustworthy guide without unfair biases
  • Convince your reader that they will be able to follow your explanation by laying out a clear thesis statement.

Engaging readers in an introduction

When you initiated your research, you asked questions as a part of the process of narrowing your topic (see the “Choosing and Narrowing a Topic” chapter for more info). If all went according to plan, the information you found as you evaluated your primary sources allowed you to narrow your question further, as well as arrive at a plausible answer, or explanation for the problem you posed. (If it didn’t, you’ll need to repeat the process, and either vary your questions or expand your sources. Consult your instructor, who can help identify what contribution your research into a set of primary sources can achieve.) The key task for your introduction is to frame your narrowed research question—or, in the words of some composition instructors, the previously assumed truth that your inquiries have destabilized—in a way that captures the attention of your readers. Common approaches to engaging readers include:

  • Telling a short story (or vignette) from your research that illustrates the tension between what readers might have assumed before reading your paper and what you have found to be plausible instead.
  • Stating directly what others believe to be true about your topic—perhaps using a quote from a scholar of the subject—and then pointing immediately to an aspect of your research that puts that earlier explanation into doubt.
  • Revealing your most unexpected finding, before moving to explain the source that leads you to make the claim, then turning to the ways in which this finding expands our understanding of your topic.

What you do NOT want to do is begin with a far-reaching transhistorical claim about human nature or an open-ended rhetorical question about the nature of history. Grand and thus unprovable claims about “what history tells us” do not inspire confidence in readers. Moreover, such broadly focused beginnings require too much “drilling down” to get to your specific area of inquiry, words that risk losing readers’ interest. Last, beginning with generic ideas is not common to the discipline. Typical essay structures in history do not start broadly and steadily narrow over the course of the essay, like a giant inverted triangle. If thinking in terms of a geometric shape helps you to conceptualize what a good introduction does, think of your introduction as the top tip of a diamond instead. In analytical essays based on research, many history scholars begin with the specific circumstances that need explaining, then broaden out into the larger implications of their findings, before returning to the specifics in their conclusions—following the shape of a diamond.

Clear Thesis Statements

Under the standards of good scholarly writing in the United States—and thus those that should guide your paper—your introduction contains the main argument you will make in your essay. Elsewhere—most commonly in European texts—scholars sometimes build to their argument and reveal it fully only in the conclusion. Do not follow this custom in your essay. Include a well-written thesis statement somewhere in your introduction; it can be the first sentence of your essay, toward the end of the first paragraph, or even a page or so in, should you begin by setting the stage with a vignette. Wherever you place it, make sure your thesis statement meets the following standards:

A good thesis statement :

  • Could be debated by informed scholars : Your claim should not be so obvious as to be logically impossible to argue against. Avoid the history equivalent of “the sky was blue.”
  • Can be proven with the evidence at hand : In the allotted number of pages, you will need to introduce and explain at least three ways in which you can support your claim, each built on its own pieces of evidence. Making an argument about the role of weather on the outcome of the Civil War might be intriguing, given that such a claim questions conventional explanations for the Union’s victory. But a great deal of weather occurred in four years and Civil War scholars have established many other arguments you would need to counter, making such an argument impossible to establish in the length of even a long research paper. But narrowing the claim—to a specific battle or from a single viewpoint—could make such an argument tenable. Often in student history papers, the thesis incorporates the main primary source into the argument. For example, “As his journal and published correspondence between 1861 and 1864 reveal, Colonel Mustard believed that a few timely shifts in Tennessee’s weather could have altered the outcome of the war.”
  • Is specific without being insignificant : Along with avoiding the obvious, stay away from the arcane. “Between 1861 and 1864, January proved to be the worst month for weather in Central Tennessee.” Though this statement about the past is debatable and possible to support with evidence about horrible weather in January and milder-by-comparison weather in other months, it lacks import because it’s not connected to knowledge that concerns historians. Thesis statements should either explicitly or implicitly speak to current historical knowledge—which they can do by refining, reinforcing, nuancing, or expanding what (an)other scholar(s) wrote about a critical event or person.
  • P rovide s a “roadmap” to readers : Rather than just state your main argument, considering outlining the key aspects of it, each of which will form a main section of the body of the paper. When you echo these points in transitions between sections, readers will realize they’ve completed one aspect of your argument and are beginning a new part of it. To demonstrate this practice by continuing the fictional Colonel Mustard example above: “As his journal and published correspondence between 1861 and 1864 reveals, Colonel Mustard believed that Tennessee’s weather was critical to the outcome of the Civil War. He linked both winter storms and spring floods in Tennessee to the outcome of key battles and highlighted the weather’s role in tardy supply transport in the critical year of 1863.” Such a thesis cues the reader that evidence and explanations about 1) winter storms; 2) spring floods; and 3) weather-slowed supply transport that will form the main elements of the essay.

Thesis Statement Practice

More Thesis Statement Practice

The Body of the Paper

What makes a good paragraph.

While an engaging introduction and solid conclusion are important, the key to drafting a good essay is to write good paragraphs. That probably seems obvious, but too many students treat paragraphs as just a collection of a few sentences without considering the logic and rules that make a good paragraph. In essence, in a research paper such as the type required in a history course, for each paragraph you should follow the same rules as the paper itself. That is, a good paragraph has a topic sentence, evidence that builds to make a point, and a conclusion that ties the point to the larger argument of the paper. On one hand, given that it has so much work to do, paragraphs are three sentences , at a minimum . On the other hand, because paragraphs should be focused to making a single point, they are seldom more than six to seven sentences . Though rules about number of sentences are not hard and fast, keeping the guidelines in mind can help you construct tightly focused paragraphs in which your evidence is fully explained.

Topic sentences

The first sentence of every paragraph in a research paper (or very occasionally the second) should state a claim that you will defend in the paragraph . Every sentence in the paragraph should contribute to that topic. If you read back over your paragraph and find that you have included several different ideas, the paragraph lacks focus. Go back, figure out the job that this paragraph needs to do—showing why an individual is important, establishing that many accept an argument that you plan on countering, explaining why a particular primary source can help answer your research question, etc. Then rework your topic sentence until it correctly frames the point you need to make. Next, cut out (and likely move) the sentences that don’t contribute to that outcome. The sentences you removed may well help you construct the next paragraph, as they could be important ideas, just not ones that fit with the topic of the current paragraph. Every sentence needs to be located in a paragraph with a topic sentence that alerts the reader about what’s to come.

Transitions/Bridges/Conclusion sentences in paragraphs

All good writers help their readers by including transition sentences or phrases in their paragraphs, often either at the paragraph’s end or as an initial phrase in the topic sentence. A transition sentence can either connect two sections of the paper or provide a bridge from one paragraph to the next. These sentences clarify how the evidence discussed in the paragraph ties into the thesis of the paper and help readers follow the argument. Such a sentence is characterized by a clause that summarizes the info above, and points toward the agenda of the next paragraph. For example, if the current section of your paper focused on the negative aspects of your subject’s early career, but your thesis maintains he was a late-developing military genius, a transition between part one (on the negative early career) and part two (discussing your first piece of evidence revealing genius) might note that “These initial disastrous strategies were not a good predictor of General Smith’s mature years, however, as his 1841 experience reveals.” Such a sentence underscores for the reader what has just been argued (General Smith had a rough start) and sets up what’s to come (1841 was a critical turning point).

Explaining Evidence

Just as transitional sentences re-state points already made for clarity’s sake, “stitching” phrases or sentences that set-up and/or follow quotations from sources provide a certain amount of repetition. Re-stating significant points of analysis using different terms is one way you explain your evidence. Another way is by never allowing a quote from a source to stand on its own, as though its meaning was self-evident. It isn’t and indeed, what you, the writer, believes to be obvious seldom is. When in doubt, explain more.

For more about when to use a quotation and how to set it up see “How to quote” in the next section on Notes and Quotation.”

Conclusio ns

There exists one basic rule for conclusions: Summarize the paper you have written . Do not introduce new ideas, launch briefly into a second essay based on a different thesis, or claim a larger implication based on research not yet completed. This final paragraph is NOT a chance to comment on “what history tells us” or other lessons for humankind. Your conclusion should rest, more or less, on your thesis, albeit using different language from the introduction and evolved, or enriched, by examples discussed throughout the paper. Keep your conclusion relevant and short, and you’ll be fine.

For a checklist of things you need before you write or a rubric to evaluate your writing click here

How History is Made: A Student’s Guide to Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Discipline Copyright © 2022 by Stephanie Cole; Kimberly Breuer; Scott W. Palmer; and Brandon Blakeslee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Disciplinary Approaches to Composing Texts

Writing in History

by Dr. Anita Gaul

In history, like in most other fields of study, writing is the primary form of communication. Historical writing takes many different forms: an essay, a book, a journal article, an informational poster in a museum exhibit, an encyclopedia article, or the script of a documentary film, among others. Yet all these forms share some common characteristics: a clear thesis supported by evidence, accuracy, and clarity. Additionally, historical writing at its best tells a good story. Skillful historical writing can inspire and challenge its readers, and, as historian Peter N. Stearns writes, convey “a sense of beauty and excitement, and ultimately another perspective on human life and society.”

Types of writing in History

It is important to keep one’s audience in mind when writing in the field of history. In general, there are two types of writing: academic history and popular history.

Academic history is written for an audience of scholars and professional historians, many of whom work in the “academy,” meaning colleges and universities. Academic writing tends to be more complex, applies specific historical methods or theories, and includes lengthy recitations of previous research done on a particular topic (called a literature review).

As in the field of philosophy, most academic writing in the field of history takes the form of a journal article or book. Books can be a single-authored historical monograph or an anthology in which many authors contribute an essay or chapter. Academic journal articles are much shorter than an historical monograph and are the most prevalent mode of publication for scholars and professional historians.

Digital publications are becoming increasingly accepted and common in the field. This includes online encyclopedias, textbooks, and scholarly journals. Journals are increasingly available online, and some are now exclusively available in an online format.

Historical writing can also take the form of popular history. Works of popular history are geared towards a general audience – people who are not professionally-trained historians, academics, or scholars. These are people who are simply interested in history and like to read about it. Popular history tends to be written in a simpler, more engaging style, avoids the use of academic jargon or complex historical methods and theories, and spends less time reviewing previous research done on a particular topic.

Popular history works can also take different forms. There are many popular history books. Examples include David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard or Alison Weir’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII . There are also popular history magazines and journals intended for a general audience. Many state and local history organizations produce magazines of this type, such as the Minnesota History Magazine , published by the Minnesota Historical Society.

Digital publications are a particularly common venue for popular history. This includes encyclopedias, magazines, and historical websites. One good example of an online encyclopedia is MNopedia , produced and published by the Minnesota Historical Society.

Historical writing takes other forms as well, forms that might not be immediately apparent. Informational posters in any exhibit in an history museum are a form of historical writing. Roadside markers indicating sites of historical importance are another example. Information conveyed in an historical documentary film (such as Ken Burns’ documentaries) usually begins as a script written and/or reviewed by historians.

In short, there are many ways for historians to convey historical information and tell a story. The key to deciding which form to use is to determine who your audience is and how or where they will be receiving or viewing the information: Online? In a museum? In a documentary film? In a book? Once you determine the answers to these questions, you can determine the best method of writing for your project.

Writing in the classroom

Students in history courses usually write argumentative essays. Students in higher-level history courses are often required to produce a research paper. A Bachelor’s degree in history usually requires a student to write a final research paper, usually as part of a history capstone course in the final year of their studies.

An argumentative essay is a type of writing that identifies an issue, articulates the writer’s position on the issue, then uses evidence to support that position. In other words, this type of essay presents an argument and carefully defends that argument with evidence.

The standard format for this type of essay includes an introduction, body, and conclusion. In the introduction, the student explains the topic and provides context. It is essential for the introduction to include a thesis statement that clearly articulates the argument being made in the paper. The body of the essay contains the evidence and support for the student’s position. The conclusion briefly summarizes the evidence and revisits the thesis.

The historical research paper is also an argumentative essay, but is longer and includes more evidential support. A research paper generally addresses a more complex topic than a short argumentative essay; therefore, it requires more evidence (and therefore more research). A student will need to investigate both primary and secondary sources in order to find evidence to support their position. It is also necessary to review the work already published on the topic and connect one’s paper to this existing scholarship (called a literature review).

Learning how to write a clear and concise argumentative essay is a useful skill for all areas of life, but is particularly useful in the workplace. Employers value employees who can write well, summarize information, evaluate evidence, and make reasoned arguments. In one’s everyday life, the ability to assess evidence, consider conflicting arguments, and clearly articulate one’s own positions enables us to be critical thinkers, informed citizens, and rational human beings.

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The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 5: Historical Writing Since 1945

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The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 5: Historical Writing Since 1945

1 History and Theory

  • Published: May 2011
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This introductory chapter assesses the role of theory in history and traces the developments in the discipline of history. Theoretical reflection about the ‘true nature’ of history fulfils three interrelated practical functions. First, theory legitimizes a specific historical practice—a specific way of ‘doing history’—as the best one from an epistemological and a methodological point of view. Second, theory sketches a specific programme of doing history. Third, theoretical reflections demarcate a specific way of ‘doing history’ from other ways of ‘doing history’, which are excluded or degraded. The chapter then considers three phases of theoretical changes from analytical to narrative philosophy of history, and then on to ‘history from below’ and the ‘presence’ of history, ultimately leading to the current return of fundamental ontological and normative questions concerning the status of history and history-writing.

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California History-Social Science Project | Resources & professional learning for K-12 history-social science

California History-Social Science Project

Writing in history, resources for teachers and students.

Good writing in history is different from good writing in English classes. There are particular ways of thinking in history that should be reinforced and made explicit to students in History classes. These resources are designed to provide support for teachers who want to develop history-specific writing skills among their students.

Writing Guide

Print-Ready Materials

About Writing in History 

lady writing image

Smithsonian Magazine

Did the People of Easter Island Invent a Writing System From Scratch?

N ew research has revealed that a wooden tablet from Rapa Nui—also known as Easter Island —inscribed with mysterious glyphs was likely created before the Europeans’ arrival, meaning the script may be one of history’s rare independently invented writing systems.

Rapa Nui is best known for its moai , the large-scale stone statues that mystified the Europeans who arrived in the 18th century. But it wasn’t until the 19th century that Europeans took note of another significant invention: a system of writing known as “rongorongo” script. In 1864, the missionary Eugene Eyraud described the island’s many “wooden tablets or staffs covered with sorts of hieroglyphic characters.”

The rongorongo script is shrouded in mystery. Only some two dozen artifacts featuring it survive today, and they’re held by institutions all over the world (including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History ).

Recently, researchers performed radiocarbon testing on four artifacts held by a Catholic convent in Rome. They found that three date to the 18th or 19th centuries, but the fourth dates to between 1493 and 1509—over 200 years before Europeans arrived on Rapa Nui, according to a study published this month in the journal Scientific Reports .

Lead author Silvia Ferrara , a philologist at the University of Bologna in Italy, tells Live Science ’s Tom Metcalfe that her team’s research suggests that Rapa Nui islanders invented rongorongo independently, without influence or inspiration from European writing systems. This notion is bolstered by the fact that rongorongo glyphs bear no resemblance to European letters. “Historically speaking,” says Ferrara, “if you borrow a writing system, then you keep it as close to the original as possible.”

The 15th-century tablet appears to come from a species of tree that isn’t native to Rapa Nui. The team thinks it was probably a piece of driftwood, which “raises questions about the island’s ecological past,” as Arkeonews ’ Leman Altuntaş writes.

There is a chance that the tablet was already “old wood” when islanders inscribed it with rongorongo, Ferrara tells Live Science . Still, she thinks that possibility is unlikely, as it would mean the wood had been stored for over 200 years before being used.

While researchers have been examining rongorongo for a century and a half, the script has never been deciphered. “What makes rongorongo so difficult is that we do not know what sort of script it is,” wrote Alexander Lee for History Today last year. “No one is quite sure whether it is a form of proto-writing, or a fully-fledged writing system. If the former, are the glyphs pictograms (designed to be read like panels in a comic strip) or mnemonic ‘cues,’ each triggering a different memory?”

As Atlas Obscura ’s Shafik Meghji wrote in 2021, the rongorongo script was likely only used by elites. By the 19th century, as the population sharply declined, knowledge of the script vanished entirely.

Though the new research doesn’t aid translating efforts, it does shed new light on the script’s age and origins. Previously, only two rongorongo artifacts from the 19th century had been dated.

Rafal Wieczorek , a chemist at the University of Warsaw who has studied rongorongo tablets but was not involved in the recent study, tells Live Science that the results are “a great development.”

“I actually believe that rongorongo is one of the very few independent inventions of writing in human history, like the writing of the Sumerians, the Egyptians and the Chinese,” he says. “But belief is a different thing than hard data … so ideally, we would like to test all the tablets.”

Today, the rongorongo script survives on less than 30 objects.

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  1. History of writing

    Six major historical writing systems (left to right, top to bottom): Sumerian pictographs, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, Old Persian cuneiform, Latin alphabet, Devanagari Part of a series on Human history Human Era ↑ Prehistory ( Pleistocene epoch) Holocene Ancient Postclassical Modern ↓ Future v t e

  2. Guide for Writing in History

    This guide contains the following sections: • About Writing in History • Evidence in Historical Writing • Common Types of Writing in History • Conventions of Writing in History • Citations & Formatting • Common Errors in Writing in History As you set out to craft your argument, keep a few things in mind: What are you being asked to do?

  3. Writing

    Writing - Scripts, Alphabets, Cuneiform: While spoken or signed language is a more or less universal human competence that has been characteristic of the species from the beginning and that is commonly acquired by human beings without systematic instruction, writing is a technology of relatively recent history that must be taught to each generation of children.

  4. Historiography

    historiography, the writing of history, especially the writing of history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particular details from the authentic materials in those sources, and the synthesis of those details into a narrative that stands the test of critical examination.

  5. Writing

    Why was writing invented? How does the human brain process language? Learn how the brain processes language. See all videos for this article writing, form of human communication by means of a set of visible marks that are related, by convention, to some particular structural level of language.

  6. PDF Books on History Writing

    Fischer, David Hackett, Historiansʼ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (Harper Perennial, 1970) Marius, Richard A., A Short Guide to Writing about History (Longman, 2006) "Writersʼ Checklists" at the end of each chapter help translate theory into practice, and extended excerpts from published works of history help make his ...

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    The early Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, and Hebrews used papyrus and parchment papers began using parchment paper around 2000 BCE, when the earliest piece of writing on Papyrus known to us today, the Egyptian "Prisse Papyrus" was created.

  8. PDF A Guide to Writing in History & Literature

    History & Literature emphasizes primary source texts such as novels, films, songs, monuments, speeches, poems, archival documents, and other first-hand or original works. Most writing assignments in History & Literature will encourage you to anchor your writing in a primary source base and engage with the context in which it was produced ...

  9. PDF Writing in History

    History writing involves answering a "historical question." This question may ask why an event occurred, who or what caused it, why it happened when it did, or what impact it had. It may also address how a situation or institution changed over time.

  10. A Pocket Guide to Writing in History

    An essential writing, reading, and research tool for all history students, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History offers a best-selling combination of concise yet comprehensive advice in a portable and accessible format. This quick-reference guide provides a practical introduction to typical history assignments, exercising critical reading skills, evaluating and documenting sources, writing ...

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    The earliest form of writing was pictographs - symbols which represented objects - and served to aid in remembering such things as which parcels of grain had gone to which destination or how many sheep were needed for events like sacrifices in the temples.

  12. Writing History: An Introductory Guide to How History Is Produced

    Writing History: An Introductory Guide to How History Is Produced What Is History? Most people believe that history is a "collection of facts about the past." This is reinforced through the use of textbooks used in teaching history. They are written as though they are collections of information.

  13. A Pocket Guide to Writing in History

    A Pocket Guide to Writing in History Request a sample or learn about ordering options for A Pocket Guide to Writing in History, 10th Edition by Mary Rampolla from the Macmillan Learning Instructor Catalog.

  14. The Evolution of Writing

    Abstract Writing - a system of graphic marks representing the units of a specific language - has been invented independently in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica. The cuneiform script, created in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, ca. 3200 BC, was first. It is also the only writing system which can be traced to its earliest prehistoric origin.

  15. The Origins of Writing

    The Origins of Writing Ira Spar Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art October 2004 The alluvial plains of southern Mesopotamia in the later half of the fourth millennium B.C. witnessed a immense expansion in the number of populated sites.

  16. Writing in History

    Howe Writing Center. Writing Resources. Disciplinary Writing Guides. History. This resource provides a brief introduction to writing in the field of History through the lens of threshold concepts. It includes: An overview of what writing characteristics are valued in History. Examples of disciplinary vocabulary common in History.

  17. The History of Writing is the History of Humanity ‹ Literary Hub

    The History of Writing is the History of Humanity Walter Stephens on Lost Books, Rediscovery, and Ancient Wisdom By Walter Stephens November 10, 2023 Imagine our world without writing. No pencils, no pens, no paper, no grocery lists. No chalkboards, typewriters or printing-presses, no letters or books.

  18. Standards of Historical Writing

    In all writing, even history research papers, there is room for stylistic variation and elements of a personal style. But one of the standards of historical writing is that only those who fully understand the rules can break them successfully. If you regularly violate the rule against passive voice verb construction or the need for full subject ...

  19. Writing in History

    Writing in History. In history, like in most other fields of study, writing is the primary form of communication. Historical writing takes many different forms: an essay, a book, a journal article, an informational poster in a museum exhibit, an encyclopedia article, or the script of a documentary film, among others.

  20. PDF A Brief Guide to Writing the History Paper

    A Brief Guide to Writing the History Paper The Challenges of Writing About (a.k.a., Making) History At first glance, writing about history can seem like an overwhelming task. History's subject matter is immense, encompassing all of human affairs in the recorded past — up until the moment, that is, that you started reading this guide.

  21. History and Theory

    Theoretical reflection about the 'true nature' of history fulfils three interrelated practical functions. First, theory legitimizes a specific historical practice—a specific way of 'doing history'—as the best one from an epistemological and a methodological point of view. Second, theory sketches a specific programme of doing history.

  22. Reading and Writing in History

    Chauncey Monte-Sano is an associate professor at the School of Education at the University of Michigan, where she teaches teacher education. Her research focuses on the teaching and learning of historical writing, including how adolescents learn to write historical arguments. She also develops history curriculum that supports students' writing.

  23. Writing in History

    Good writing in history is different from good writing in English classes. There are particular ways of thinking in history that should be reinforced and made explicit to students in History classes. These resources are designed to provide support for teachers who want to develop history-specific writing skills among their students. Writing Guide.

  24. In History: Toni Morrison on why 'writing for black people is tough'

    One of the great 20th-Century novelists, Morrison consciously aimed her work at black American readers. In a 2003 interview, she told the BBC about why that made her writing sing.

  25. Literature of Mesopotamia

    The literature of Mesopotamia dates from c. 2600 BCE when scribes began composing original works in the region of Sumer.The Sumerians invented writing c. 3500 BCE, but it was then mostly used for record-keeping. The literature of ancient Mesopotamia influenced the works of other civilizations including Egypt, Greece, and Rome.. The pieces in this collection represent only a very small fraction ...

  26. Did the People of Easter Island Invent a Writing System From Scratch?

    "Historically speaking," says Ferrara, "if you borrow a writing system, then you keep it as close to the original as possible." The 15th-century tablet appears to come from a species of ...