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Free Topic. yay.

Right, our generous teacher decides to give us another free topic. Awesome !

Today, I'll be talking about one of the fundamental thing that results in... well... our society today. One thing that always gets underestimated and taken for granted.

The invention of the written language.

We don't seem to care about the origin of writings, and or how it developed into the sophisticated thing we use on a daily basis today.

As me and most of the Form 4 students have already learnt that written language is born from different civilizations, each with different styles of writing and obviously language.

Greeks write Latin, Chinese writes Chinese characters, so on and so forth.

Our story starts in the Bronze Age, where civilizations such as Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt were on the rise. With groups of people, you form a community, with community we form a society. Society requires resources, like food, metal, clay and other materials to function. When you don't have certain material, you get it from other civilizations through trade. And with trade, you need to keep track on what goes in and what comes out of the city. Thus, the idea of writing was born. Not the one we see today, but in the most basic form.

Scribes from Mesopotamia uses clay tabs to keep track of the influx of resources. So, based on whatever that is imported in, for example, wheat, a wheat-like symbol will be drawn on the clay tab. This looks insignificant doesn't it ? But slowly, as time goes by, this symbol will be changed into a word based on the Egyptian language. I can't really explain the entire thing here as it's really complicated.

So here's a youtube video explaining the entire thing -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyjLt_RGEww

The thing about the idea of writing, is that after the Bronze Age Collapse, the idea of it almost disappear, dying out with the Bronze Age. A fair few were able to keep it afloat, struggling to pass on the idea of writing onto future generations. Think about it, writing is everywhere. It's in this blog post, it's how we communicate indirectly with each other.

With the invention of writing, we are able to write down our ideas, our thoughts, our feelings and much more. This way, people from the future are able to sit down, and read what has been inscribed from the past, and learned that during that period of time, certain things happened. Ideas helped us established our technological footing, and this became a common way to share ideas with others, simply by writing it down and passing it on to another trader or caravan and they'll bring it back to their civilization. See how amazing that is ?

Anyway, that's all for now.

Cheers,
Chua.

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