![]() The ancient Egyptians made ink by grinding brightly coloured minerals into powder, then mixing the powder with liquid so that it was easier to apply. Scribes usually wrote on papyrus with reed brushes dipped in ink. It could take four to five years for a person to go through scribe school. Although some craftsmen were able to get their sons into the school for scribes, it was very rare. Most often it was the children of scribes who became scribes. Limestone flake used for practising hieroglyphic signs. ![]() Students spent a lot of time practising the signs by copying them onto sheets of papyrus, old pieces of pottery or flakes of limestone. These scripts are complicated, and there were many signs to learn. At this school you would learn how to read and write hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts. To become a scribe, you had to attend a special school for scribes. These women would have been trained as scribes so that they could read medical texts. Scribes were people in ancient Egypt (usually men) who learned to read and write.Īlthough experts believe that most scribes were men, there is evidence of some female doctors. Only one group of people called scribes was allowed to have this knowledge. The system of writing became known as cuneiform, and as Kramer noted, it was borrowed by subsequent civilizations and used across the Middle East for 2,000 years.Not everyone learned to read and write in ancient Egypt. Scribes used sharpened reeds to scratch the symbols into wet clay, which dried to form tablets. The pictographs evolved into symbols that stood for words and sounds. Eventually, they began to combine pictographs to express ideas and actions. They did that with a system of pictographs, which essentially were drawings of various objects. “Their very first texts are just numbers and commodities,” Jones explains. But they didn’t set out to write great literature or record their history, but rather to keep track of the goods that they were making and selling. Either way, it’s clear that they were using written communication by 2800 B.C. Jones says that it’s likely, though not 100 percent certain, that the Sumerians were the first to develop a writing system. Here are some of the areas where the Sumerians left their mark.Īn early writing sample from Mesopotamia using pictographs to create a record of food supplies. The Sumerians’ innovations gradually spread and led to the development of the modern technologically advanced world that we live in today. “Spiritually and psychologically, they laid great stress on ambition and success, preeminence and prestige, honor and recognition,” he explains. This way they could mass-produce goods such as textiles and pottery that they could then trade with other people.Īs Kramer writes, there was something in the Sumerian identity that drove them to dream big and think ingeniously. ![]() They had the ability to take inventions that had been developed elsewhere and apply them on a much bigger scale. They used it to make everything from bricks to pottery to tablets for writing.īut the Sumerians’ real genius may have been organizational. That forced them to make ingenious use of materials such as clay-the plastic of the ancient world. “They had few trees, almost no stone or metal,” he explains. The Sumerians’ creativity was driven to an extent by their land’s lack of natural resources, according to Philip Jones, associate curator and keeper of the Babylonian section at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. In the process, they transformed how humans cultivated food, built dwellings, communicated and kept track of information and time. an ancient document, manuscript, or scroll written on this material. In what the Greeks later called Mesopotamia, Sumerians invented new technologies and perfected the large-scale use of existing ones. a material on which to write, prepared from thin strips of the pith of this plant laid together, soaked, pressed, and dried, used by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. As the late historian Samuel Noah Kramer wrote, “The people of Sumer had an unusual flair for technological invention.” The ancient Sumerians, who flourished thousands of years ago between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what today is southern Iraq, built a civilization that in some ways was the ancient equivalent of Silicon Valley. ![]()
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