A Brief History of Text
Today, I wanted to share one of my passions.
Texts.
More specifically, the history of text.
You know, people think the history of the book begins with Gutenberg's printing but it goes back a whole lot further.
The first texts were illustrations on cave walls. The reasons for these are debated - anywhere from religious depictions of gods to records of day-to-day life to supplications to ancestors and/or gods for luck in the communities' endeavors. Recently, a drawing was found in the Blombos Cave near Cape Town, South Africa that dates back approx. 73 000 years - the oldest known example of art currently in existence (though there have also been beads made from limestone and shell which are older [135 000-230 000+ years). The next oldest illustrations are in the La Pasiega cave in Spain (dating back around 65 000 years) and next after those are Indonesian Sulawesi cave paintings found to date back to about 40 000 years.
Next came textiles, tablets, seals and reliefs which told of anything from religious ceremonies and stories to historical records to records of business. These developed with early languages. Textiles developed out of practicality - a need for clothing and insulation for their homes. With this came a second use as documentation of various aspects of life. Symbols began to be used both as decoration and as records. Images of different plants and animals as well as icons representing the elements gained meaning.
Numbers developed and became uniform symbols used to keep record of dates (as calendars developed) and accounts of items - the yields of crops and other items such as pots, water and wine containers, livestock, etc. Some of the earliest examples of these came from the Middle East alongside the development of cuneiform - a basic system of wedge-shaped number symbols and lettering used by Ancient Sumerian merchants and scribes (approximately 3 500-3 000 BCE in Mesopotamia).
Clay tablets as well as harder, more durable stone tablets were used. Marks were made using a thin reed-stylus shaped at the end like a wedge. Marks were impressed into clay or carved into stone in combinations which formed early numbers and letters. Cuneiform is also sometimes called Sumero-Akkadian. Names of royalty, aristocracy and the wealthiest merchants were also carved into cylinder-shaped seals which acted as a form of identification.
Numbers were some of the earliest types of texts made, everything else being able to be represented by an icon resembling the object. Numbers were not able to be represented in this way as they are a more abstract concept than (for instance) a cow or a plant. Later, alphabets were developed while in other developing areas of the world symbols were created to represent objects and places.
Not allowing for pictograms, pictographs and hieroglyphs, early Chinese was the first culture to develop a recognisable alphabet/number/icon system. While only scribes were allowed to use this system in the beginning, this was then expanded to include nobility and Imperial classes. As the influence of the Chinese spread across Asia, the Japanese culture was the next to assimilate and then modify the Chinese sytem, expanding it and developing it further.
Next, early societies developed papyrus (made from the papyrus reeds around Egypt and surrounding countries) then parchment and vellum (made from calf-hide in Europe and Asia). These were rolled around wooden sticks and tied off into scrolls. The Library of Alexandria was considered the largest gathering of knowledge in the world at this time prior to the destruction of the Library and the flooding of parts of the city. These texts were plays, rituals, spellbooks, poems, speeches and other prose. It was around 1 000 CE, however, that the first full-length novel (The Tale of Genji) was written by a Japanese noblewoman - Lady Murasaki Shikibu.
About here is where I will leave off. It is around this time that handwritten and bound books and pamphlets began to emerge. Soon followed Gutenberg's printing press and the rise of texts and literature as something accessible to all rather than the noble and highly-educated few.
I hope you enjoyed this quick overview of the history of text! :)
