Writing history

The first writings are not on paper, but on the cave walls inhabited by prehistoric people. They were ideological writings, hence simple and common figures of hunting scenes or magic rites. These figures are called ideograms.


People believed that these drawings had magical powers and would protect their caves from wild beasts.

Over time, two types of scripts were developed, the cuneiform and hieroglyphic.Hieroglyphs were used in ancient Egypt, where not everyone knew to write and read. Only rich people knew literacy. They hire people called scribes. The scribes knew to write perfectly and memorized all the hieroglyphics. This was not a simple job, since every item or idea had a particular hieroglyph. The scribes wrote on paper called Papirus or on the walls of temples or other important buildings.

Cuneiform writing was used by ancient Sumerians. They had a highly developed writing and even had their own literature. One of the texts that has come to fruition in today's cuneiform script is "Epi of Gilgamesh".

Ideographic writing still survives today in China, where ideographs are still used to write.The script we use today is that of a Latin alphabet. This writing was born in ancient Rome and adapted from the Greek and Phoenician alphabets. Do you guess how long it takes to write this alphabet? At first it was written as hieroglyphics, on stone plates, then began to be written in parchment. The books we have today began to be written only in the Middle Ages. Since then there were no printers, they were manually written by the monks.The printing was invented in China (like almost anything else). There was also the letter and the writing of the writing, and later, in the seventh century of our era, a writing machine was invented. It was brought to Europe in 1438 by German Johann Gutenberg. The first printed book was the "Bible" in 1454.