When was inscriptions invented

The scholars who have examined the short Wadi el-Hol inscriptions are having trouble deciphering the messages, though they think they are close to understanding some letters and words. The symbol for M in the inscriptions, for example, is a wavy line derived from the hieroglyphic sign for water and almost identical to the symbol for M in later Semitic writing.

The meaning of some signs is less certain. The figure of a stick man, with arms raised, appears to have developed into an H in the alphabet, for reasons unknown. Scholars said they could identify shapes of letters that eventually evolved from the image of an ox head into A and from a house, which looks more like a 9 here, into the Semitic B, or bayt.

The origins and transitions of A and B are particularly interesting because the Egyptian-influenced Semitic alphabet as further developed by the Phoenicians, latter-day Canaanites, was passed to the Greeks, probably as early as the 12th century B.

From the Greeks the simplified writing system entered Western culture by the name alphabet, a combination word for the Greek A and B, alpha and beta. The only words in the inscriptions the researchers think they understand are, reading right to left, the title for a chief in the beginning and a reference to a god at the end.

If the early date for the inscriptions is correct, this puts the origins of alphabetic writing well before the probable time of the biblical story of Joseph being delivered by his brothers into Egyptian bondage, the scholars said. The Semites involved in the alphabet invention would have been part of an earlier population of alien workers in Egypt.

Although it is still possible that the Semites took the alphabet idea with them to Egypt, Dr. McCarter of Johns Hopkins said that the considerable evidence of Egyptian symbols and the absence of any contemporary writing of a similar nature anywhere in the Syria-Palestine lands made this unlikely. The other earliest primitive writing, the cuneiform developed by Sumerians in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley of present-day Iraq, remained entirely pictographic until about B.

The Sumerians are generally credited with the first invention of writing, around B. The issue is still controversial.

For Dr. Semitic inscriptions, including those of the Phoenicians, read from right to left, as do the earliest Greek inscriptions. The left-to-right direction was not standardized by the Greeks until the 5th century BC; it was later adopted by the Romans and consequently by all the European languages.

The history of Western inscription began in Mesopotamia, where in about BC the Sumerians developed cuneiform. This writing system consists of characters made with wedge-shaped strokes impressed into clay, brick or stone.

By the 2d. Many thousand tablets and fragments inscribed in Sumerian from the first half of the 2d millennium BC exist, a number of them excavated at Nippur. Cuneiform was also the system used by the Hittites at Elam; Old Persian, the writing of the Achaemenids, was a revised form of the cuneiform writing.

The famous Behistun inscriptions of Darius I, dated c. Egyptian inscriptions in the form of Hieroglyphic writing date from the 1st dynasty 4th millennium BC.

The system of inscription established then continued in use with only minor modifications until the time of the Romans. A fine example of the Egyptian style is preserved in the form of rock inscriptions at Thebes.

Another renowned epigraphical monument is the Rosetta Stone, discovered in This basalt tablet, dated BC, was inscribed in three languages: ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, demotic an Egyptian cursive script and Greek. By studying the royal names enclosed in cartouches oval frames and comparing the inscriptions, J.

Champollion was able to assign phonetic values to some of the hieroglyphs and eventually to the entire system. On the Aegean island of Crete an independent hieroglyphic system existed, replaced in the beginning of the Middle Minoan period BC by a linear script, read from left to right, which developed into the script known as Linear A; this in turn was followed by another script, designated Linear B.

Thousands of examples of these scripts inscribed on tablets, ranging in date from c. Phoenician inscriptions date from c. The earliest Greek inscriptions date from the 7th century BC. At first each Greek state had its own alphabet, but in BC, under the archon Euclides, the Ionain alphabet -- still used for Greek capital letters -- was officially adopted by Athens and soon spread throughout Greece. Krishna , the Director of Archaeology of the princely State of Mysore present-day Karnataka region of India , in Halmidi, a village in the Hassan district.

English has developed over the course of more than 1, years. Classical Sanskrit has its origin in the end of the Vedic period when the Upanishads were the last sacred texts to be written down, after which Panini , a descendant of Pani and a grammar and linguistic researcher, introduced the refined version of the language.

Excavations begun by Sir Alexander Cunningham , the father of Indian archaeology, in —64 and — Chandra Gupta I, king of India reigned to c. He was the grandson of Sri Gupta, the first known ruler of the Gupta line. Language is the primary vehicle for communication. It is a tool for understanding. Mandarin As mentioned before, Mandarin is unanimously considered the toughest language to master in the world!

Spoken by over a billion people in the world, the language can be extremely difficult for people whose native languages use the Latin writing system. Kannada is the Language Spoken in Karnataka, India. It is the mother of many languages. When was inscriptions invented? Asked by: Susan Schultz. Which is the mother of all languages? Who is father of Indian inscriptions?