Hello everyone!
Greetings!
In our last post, we have learnt about how our ancestors began to communicate with their paintings. After or somewhere at the end of their period, due to some major natural calamities they migrated to various landmasses across our ancient world. They started living near every major river banks by cultivating their own food, trading, painting and writing in their caves and clay tablets gave rise to major five civilizations namely,
Sumerian Civilization - 5000 B.C.E. to 4000 B.C.E.
Egyptian Civilization - 3100 B.C.E. to 332 B.C.E.
Indus Valley Civilization - 3300 B.C.E. to 1300 B.C.E.
Mayan Civilization - 1800 B.C. to 250 A.D.
Chinese Civilization - 1600 B.C. to 1912 A.D.
Now, Let's explore on how language and writing advanced through these centuries one by one.
Sumerian Civilization: The first known river valley civilization of mankind. The whereabouts of the original settlers of Sumerian civilization are still unknown. The civilization started during the period of 5000 B.C.E. to 4000 B.C.E., along the banks of river Nile in the present day Iraq and its peripheral regions. Also, they were the first civilization to have their own language.
The Sumerian language is a logogram consisting of meaningful thousands of cuneiform signs. They did not had a verbal construction in their language. rather, it was just an agglutinative language with each sign or the word picture indicating each object in its noun form. They used to write in clay tablets measured about 5 cm wide and 2 cm thick.
Cuneiform was the language of politics until the fifth century B.C. It died out and was replaced by the 22 letter Aramaic in about 900 B.C. Their language was closely followed by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Elamites, Hittites, Hurrians and the Urartu from Anatolia.
Fig. 1: Sumerian clay tablet (Source : History.com)
FYI: B.C.E. - Before Common Era or Before Current Era
B.C. - Before Christ
A.D. - Anno Domini
Let's discuss about other civilizations in the forthcoming days.
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Read part-02
