West Asian Literature for Kids - when and how did writing get started ? What is cuneiform? When did the alphabet get started?

West Asian Literature

Gilgamesh cuneiform tablet
West Asia is probably the first place where people figured out how to write, though Egyptian people began writing very soon afterwards. People seem to have begun to write in Mesopotamia about 3000 BC, during the time of the Sumerians. The Sumerians, and their successors down to about 1000 BC, wrote in a kind of signs called cuneiform (pronounced koo-NEIGH-uh-form), and each sign stands for a syllable of a word (consonant plus vowel). Of course with a different sign for every syllable, you have to have a whole lot of signs, many more than we have letters in the Roman alphabet. Having so many signs made it very hard to learn to write, and so very few people did learn. Men who learned to write were called scribes, and they had important jobs, not just writing but generally being organizers and administrators for the government, and were often very powerful men. Most women did not ever learn to write, though some certainly did.
People did not know how to make paper yet, but they had plenty of clay, so most of the time they wrote on tablets made of clay. They used a sharp river reed like a pen, to make the marks. The reeds made triangular marks in the clay, so cuneiform is collections of these little triangular marks in the clay.

The earliest writing we have from West Asia is mostly accounts and lists of things donated to temples. But not long after that people began to write poems and stories. One of the earliest stories is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which also includes a story about the Flood. It may have been written as early as about 2500 BC. During the Akkadian Empire, about 2000 BC, we have hymns to the gods written by one of the priestesses, Enheduanna, who was the daughter of Sargon.

By 1700 BC the first written law code, the Code of Hammurabi, was written in Babylon, also in cuneiform writing.

Around 1500 BC, however, a new kind of writing was invented, called the alphabet. The alphabet has only a few signs, which are combined in different ways to make different sounds, and so it is much easier to learn to read and write than in cuneiform or hieroglyphs. The alphabet seems to have been invented in two stages. First, the scribes of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra) in Syria invented an alphabet using a few of the old cuneiform signs, which was written on clay tablets in the old way. Then (only a little later), the Phoenicians developed another alphabet designed to be written with a pen and ink on papyrus. The modern Hebrew and Arabic alphabets are both descended from this original Semitic alphabet. It didn't take long for people all over West Asia to see that the alphabet was easier to use than cuneiform, and by about 1000 BC many Semitic people were starting to use the alphabet. Not long after that, Phoenician traders taught the alphabet to the Greeks, who began to use it themselves by around 750 BC. Under the Assyrian Empire, however, down to the 600's BC, important stone monuments all over West Asia continued to be written in cuneiform, and government correspondence also was still in cuneiform.

More about West Asian Literature (page two)

Indian Literature
Greek Literature
Egyptian Literature
Chinese Literature

Main West Asian page
Main literature page





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