Classes on the origins and evolution of writing were conducted at the Book Professor’s Club, on November 17 and 18. Children and their parents arrived in the Book Museum to find out how people captured and transmitted their thoughts a thousand years ago.
For thousands of years people have studied different ways to capture and transmit their thoughts. Primitive people stored in memory their life and spiritual experiences, passing them orally or through personal example. However, it stopped being enough to communicate and preserve knowledge over time.
An objective was widely used in antiquity to transfer data. Different things symbolized certain concepts or ideas, for example, if one tribe declared war to another they sent an arrow or a sword. By the way, today we also use an objective, when we give the flowers and thus send a message to another person about our feelings: sympathy, respect or gratitude.
At classes the children tried to write using a talking knots: they conducted calculations and created a lesson calendar. Like in the old days, they used the threads of different colors and tied knots.
Then the children tried to convey their thoughts by drawing pictograms. Primitive people stamped or drew pictures on stone, wood, bone, skin, birch bark, not only for aesthetic needs, but also to convey information or reflect an event. Today, pictographic writing is very fashionable. Through tattoos, people tend to transmit their views or opinions.
However, primitive concreteness, simplicity, schematic representation of the primitive types of writing did not allow transferring complex contents or abstract concepts. Logogram was next significant stage of the development of writing, when one character replaces the whole word. The difficulty lies in the fact that the superficial resemblance to the object disappears, so you need to know the value of each character to read, and there are tens of thousands of them!
An important step was the phonetic writing, when a graphic symbol denotes the sound. Today, we need to remember only three dozen letters to convey all the richness of thoughts and feelings. The alphabet is a great invention! The attendees, becoming Egyptologists, attempted to record words using ancient Egyptian letters.
In the ancient world, the work of copyists was extremely important. Only the most intelligent and diligent children were selected to study the case. Students used wax tablets as notebooks and went to precious papyrus only when knew how to write well. The attendees tried to write on wax tablets.
Both children and adults got caught up with studying the history of writing.
