THE DEVELOPMENT OF LETTERS AND BOOKS

Letters

Why was a writing system introduced?

The primary cause for inventing writing was to record official matters such as taxes, payments for trading goods or details of ownerships. It took nearly three thousand years after the invention until people began to use writing in more imaginative ways such as for poetry or literary works.

First beginnings

In Mesopotamia

About 5,500 years ago, the Sumerians in Mesopotamia were the first who invented writing. In the beginning, they scratched marks on limestone tablets but later they began to use soft clay tablets as their main writing material.

At first the writing system looked like pictures where each picture represented an object. The scribes had to know more than 2,000 symbols to write. This way of writing was very difficult because you had to know so many symbols and their meanings and it was not possible to add any descriptive information.

Later the Mesopotamians began to develop a more abstract system of wedge-shaped symbols - known as "Cuneiform" writing. The Cuneiform was invented because scribes started to write with a stylus and you were not able to make recognizable drawings with it. The stylus was made of reed or wood and had a wedge-shaped tip. The main advantage was that scribes now had to learn "only" 600 symbols.

The big breakthrough

These early forms of writing could only be read or written by very few people because it was difficult for people to master so many symbols. The big breakthrough in the history of writing came when people realized that all the syllables were made of only a few sounds. Each sound could be represented by a symbol (= letter). This discovery took place in 1600 BC and this was the beginning of the alphabet. Through this simplification, writing was from this time within the grasp of everyone.

The alphabet

The Greeks were the first that introduced vowels and consonants in their script and so the alphabet contained 26 letters. They began to write in horizontal lines from left to right. The word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. The alphabet evolved as time went by and so you will be able to see many similarites between the Greek alphabet and the one we use today. The reason for some changes was that the letters of the alphabet were suited to the material they used to write on. If letters were carved in stone, it was easier to use straight. For writing on papyrus or parchment however, a more rounded style flowed better.

The exception of today´s writing systems

One script has developed in a way separate from the rest - the Chinese script. It doesn´t have an alphabet - it only consists of thousands of symbols, like the ancient form of writing. Over the years the script has become more complicated. At the beginning it contained 2,500 symbols. Today there are about 50,000 different symbols. This form of writing using pictures is difficult to learn for writing, but it has an advantage when you read it. In our scripts you have to know the language to understand the words. But the Chinese writing represents a word with a symbol instead of spelling it out, so that people do not have to speak the same language to understand it, and that is the reason why it has spread over the Far East.

The Book

The development of the book was closely related to the development of the letters. In the beginning, about 2,000 BC, people used clay tablets as writing material. The first books were made of these clay tablets but this was not a very practical material for producing books.

Materials

Papyrus

People began to search for better writing materials with a more useful surface to write on. About 3,500 BC, the ancient Egyptians discovered that the papyrus reed which grew by the River Nile could be made into a form of paper. The papyrus reed grows up to three metres and has a thick stem filled with a white spongy pith that could be made to a thin sheet of writing material. This writing material was named after the reed and gave us the English word "paper". For writing, scribes used a reed pen that was dipped into ink.

Papyrus became quickly known as a new writing material and was exported all over the world. It became the most important writing material and was used for thousands of years. But papyrus had a big disadvantage: The papyrus reed grew only wild in Egypt and because of this fact, all other countries had to import the reed from Egypt. So they were dependent on the supply of the Egyptians. If Egypt stopped supplying papyrus, then scribes in the rest of the world would not have something to write on.

Parchment

A legend claims that this happened to the King of Pergamun about 160 BC because the Pharaoh of Egypt was jealous of the library at Pergamun. So the King of Pergamun ordered his people to find a new writing material for his scribes.

The result was that they used the skin of sheeps, goats or calves to make a type of paper called parchment. The scribes used a quill pen, which was made from a goose feather, to write. The sheets of parchment were sewn together into a book, protected by a cover made of wood or leather. And so, the book as we know began to appear.

Paper

The next important invention was from the Chinese. The Chinese were responsible for one of the most important developments in the history of the book: the invention of the paper as we know it today.

The first paper was made in China about 50 AC. Old fishing nets, hemp and rags were beaten in water until they were a pulp of fibres. This pulp was spread on to a bamboo screen. The water drained through the screen and left a mat of fibres. Under high pressure, the rest of the water was pressed out of the fibres and then the paper dried in the sun. It happened some hundreds of years before the secret of paper-making reached the West and even then, it was by lucky chance. During the Siege of Samarkand in 768 AC, Arabs conquered the city and captured many Chinese prisoners. Among these prisoners there were some paper-makers who passed on the secret of paper-making. Up to the twelfth century, there were paper-making factories all over the world.

Effects of the books

Through books, it was suddenly possible to spread information to a wider audience. People began to use writing in more imaginative ways such as for poetry or literary works.

But people also became hungry for more knowledge and began to question the ideas of the past. For example, they began to question the behaviour of the powerful Roman Catholic Church. Influential thinkers published pamphlets attacking the Church for taking too much money from followers into its own pockets. These pamphlets helped to wake up the people and brought the end of the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church.

The development of books marks a milestone in our evolution. Before that, you had to believe what the oldest people told you about the time before. So you could only learn as much as they were able to remember about the past. In books you could restore knowledge for yourself and succeeding generations. So further inventions could be made because scientists could continue the work of someone else without knowing him. Another advantage was that knowledge was available to all people who were interested in it. Because of these and a lot of other facts, we could not imagine a world nowadays without letters and books.

Vocabulary