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*******Most people in the world don’t know exactly what History is, so this is a simple introduction!
First of all there is the Past, a very wide concept relating to everything that happened before the present. Of course, recent past, our own past, are things we can easily relate to, but we know that the past is so vast that we can’t possibly know it all.
We basically start remembering our own memories at around the age of 2 or 3. But we know of the world before us through what other people tell us: our parents, our grandparents etc., have all lived before us and can relate their experience to us. But even then things rarely go beyond a Century back and we lose track of things before that, so we then rely on information given by people from the past. This can be through objects, through various traces, but it’s mainly through writing (letters, newspapers etc.).
It is therefore possible to know what someone who lived two Centuries ago wrote and thought about a variety of subjects. This is where the sciences of the past come into play! There are two main sciences of the past: archaeology and history. Archaeology studies the material remains of the past, whereas history studies the written documents of the past.
History is therefore not the same as the past! History needs written documents to be able to understand the past. Documents are the main material by which a historian can access the past, these can be anything written: letters, deeds, shopping lists, books, maps, newspaper articles and even, more recently, photos (although not “written”, they relate the past in a descriptive way) or movies.
But as it is impossible to study history with photos further back than 1839, when photography was invented by a French inventor called NicéphoreNiepce (before then there are no photos!), it’s equally impossible to study written documents before the invention of writing!
It may seem amazing at first glance, but writing, something we use every day, is a rather recent invention! Of course, it’s not all that recent, because it was invented about 3500 years ago, in Mesopotamia (nowadays Irak and Iran). But still, it’s not that far back either!
The invention of writing started in Mesopotamia. To start with it was a way of keeping accounts of cattle and sheep. There were no letters oralphabets to start with, but simple symbols figuring numbers of animals and the value of them. Eventually this gave way to a more complex system in which stylised drawings were used to express more abstract notions (a symbol for different places, or for different ideas... such as white sheep and black sheep for instance!).
Then, around 3700 years ago the Sumerians (a people living in Mesopotamia) started using these pictures as a way of symbolising sounds. Each symbol would mean a sound that could be written and later read! This is the first form of alphabet ever used, and the earliest form of writing! This writing was cuneiform, traced on clay tablets with a rod, and it used over 600 different symbols.
Each symbol has a meaning, such as a symbolic foot could mean “foot” or “walking” or “standing” etc., and would need another to be more symbols to be more precise. Then, around 3500 years ago the system started being used to write down stories: relating to facts having occurred (many lists of kings for example) or relating stories belonging to mythology. This is where we find the first versions of the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian myth of creation which eventually made its way into the Bible, but that’s another story!
There is a typical clay tablet written in cuneiform (about 3500 years ago. It may help you understand how cuneiform writting evolved: There is a transition from a simple drawing to the abstact shapes used for writing, with the meaning on the left hand side. ( Refer context).
At around the same time (3200 years ago), other writing systems were invented in other places: in Egypt hieroglyphics start appearing, in China ideograms start being used. These systems are basically the same as Mesopotamian cuneiform: symbolic drawings are used to express ideas, concepts and words. But each system is unrelated and was invented in a totally separate way but around the same time!
Written and Edited by:
Janaki Mehta. ©®
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