There are many archaeologists and scholars who claim that the ancient world was illiterate. This is a very dubious claim as you will see due to the fact that almost every ancient civilization left a hoard of written material.
Some are written in languages we have not deciphered yet. But if the ancient world, for the most part, was illiterate, who were the kings, the elite, and scribes writing to?
There is just too many written records from every ancient society for the scribes to have written them all. We will quote several passages from K. A. Kitchen who has detailed these massive amounts of written material.
But first, we will quote the definition of writing he used in his book. The title of the book will follow after the quote:
Writing—the expression of connected ideas and language by visible signs—was first invented in Mesopotamia, sometime before about 3100 BC, followed soon after by its appearance in Egypt.
Kitchen, K. A. (2004). The Bible in Its World: The Bible & Archaeology Today (p. 15). Wipf & Stock Publishers.
#1. From both of these great ancient civilisations, Egypt and Mesopotamia, we have a vast but fragmentary mass of written documents. In Egypt, on stone temples and in formal inscriptions, the pharaohs set out their high deeds before the gods—rituals, annual festivals, and historical matters for religious purposes. Their subjects sometimes included biographical details of their own careers in inscriptions in their tomb-chapels or on their statues. (pgs. 16 & 17)
#2. In Mesopotamia, the Sumerians and their Akkadian contemporaries and successors were equally prolific (pg. 17)
#3. In the far north-west beyond Mesopotamia and Syria, the Hittite kingdom in Anatolia or Asia Minor (modern Turkey) took over the use of the cuneiform script. The Hittite kings employed it to write their annals and for religious hymns and rituals, literature, legal and administrative documents—largely in their own Indo-European language (cuneiform Hittite, Nesite), partly in related dialects (Luvian, Palaic), partly in Semitic Akkadian for international diplomacy, partly in Hurrian (Horite) for religious purposes, and Hattian likewise. (The last two languages are related neither to each other nor to any of the rest.) From about 1300 BC onwards, they began also to write Luvian in a special hieroglyphic script (‘Hittite hieroglyphs’) on stone monuments—a script used also on state seals. (pg. 17)
#4. In Syria, the spectacular finds at Ebla (cf. Chapter 3) show that, as early as 2300 BC, major city-states could use cuneiform script and the Sumerian language for a wide variety of documents, administrative, religious and literary. And at Ebla, the local West-Semitic language was also written in that script. Later, during the 2nd millennium, Syrian states normally used the Akkadian language and cuneiform script. The seaport of Ugarit also wrote its own local West-Semitic language in a cuneiform alphabet. (pg. 17 & 18)
#5. From the ‘Proto-Sinaitic’ inscriptions and other fragments (c. 1500 BC and perhaps even earlier) down through early Canaanite (to 1200/1100 BC), it is possible to chart the history and progress of the alphabet in Phoenicia (from where it reached the Greeks), in Hebrew, Aramaic, and the Transjordanian dialects of Moab, Edom and Ammon, contemporary with the Hebrew kingdoms, exile and return, to Graeco-Roman times (pg. 18)
#6. In this group of West-Semitic languages and dialects, the alphabetic inscriptions vary greatly in content. We have royal inscriptions (Byblos, Moab, Ammon; Cilicia), administrative documents and private letters (ostraca, Hebrew and Aramaic), some papyri (mainly Aramaic), and innumerable personal stamp-seals bearing the names of their owners (practically all dialects), use of which presupposes that many people could read enough to distinguish between them. There are inscribed arrow-heads, notations of person, place, or capacity on jar-handles—the list of everyday uses is quite varied. (pg. 18)
Much of this information has support from the following sources. While we do not know when writing started or who was the first writer, writing has been going on for a very long time, was very widespread and the ancients probably were not illiterate.
Further reading
Full writing-systems appear to have been invented independently at least four times in human history: first in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) where cuneiform was used between 3400 and 3300 BC, and shortly afterwards in Egypt at around 3200 BC. By 1300 BC we have evidence of a fully operational writing system in late Shang-dynasty China. Sometime between 900 and 600 BC writing also appears in the cultures of Mesoamerica.
There are also several places such as the Indus River valley and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) where writing may have been invented but it remains undeciphered.
Although these dates suggest that writing could have spread out from one central point of origin, there is little evidence of any links between these systems, with each possessing unique qualities.
In 1952 University of Chicago Assyriologist Ignace Jay Gelb, considered the first scholar to scientifically analyze writing systems, published his seminal work A Study of Writing. At the Oriental Institute, Gelb developed his theory that writing was invented in Mesopotamia, spread to Egypt, and then spread to China. He discounted Mesoamerican script; at the time, it wasn’t well understood.
For 30 years Gelb’s view of writing’s origins reigned. Since the 1980s, however, scholars have found evidence suggesting that the four earliest writing systems were born independently of each other. Egyptian and Mesopotamian scripts appeared almost simultaneously (between 3500 and 3200 BC). The Chinese and Mesoamerican systems emerged later (about 1200 BC and 1200–600 BC, respectively) but are so structurally different (in the Chinese case) and geographically distant from the ancient Middle East systems that their inventors likely had not seen them.
Evidence such as the bone and ivory tags found in the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos in the late 1980s, dating to around the same time as Mesopotamian cuneiform, marks these four instances in human history when writing was invented from scratch by a single person or by a group of people. For example, in Mesopotamia, says associate professor of Sumerology Christopher Woods, “it was probably a small group of priest officials.”
Writing is the physical manifestation of a spoken language. It is thought that human beings developed language c. 35,000 BCE as evidenced by cave paintings from the period of the Cro-Magnon Man (c. 50,000-30,000 BCE) which appear to express concepts concerning daily life. These images suggest a language because, in some instances, they seem to tell a story (say, of a hunting expedition in which specific events occurred) rather than being simply pictures of animals and people.
Written language, however, does not emerge until its invention in Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, c. 3500 -3000 BCE. This early writing was called cuneiform and consisted of making specific marks in wet clay with a reed implement. The writing system of the Egyptians was already in use before the rise of the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3150 BCE) and is thought to have developed from Mesopotamian cuneiform (though this theory is disputed) and came to be known as heiroglyphics.
{we will disagree with their time frame for human life}
Writing has its origins in the strip of fertile land stretching from the Nile up into the area often referred to as the Fertile Crescent. This name was given, in the early 20th century, to the inverted U-shape of territory that stretches up the east Mediterranean coast and then curves east through northern Syria and down the Euphrates and the Tigris to the Persian Gulf.
The first known writing derives from the lower reaches of the two greatest rivers in this extended region, the Nile and the Tigris. So the two civilizations separately responsible for this totally transforming human development are the Egyptian and the Sumerian (in what is now Iraq). It has been conventional to give priority, by a short margin, to Sumer – dating the Sumerian script to about 3100 BC and the Egyptian version a century or so later.
However, in 1988 a German archaeologist, Günter Dreyer, unearths at Abydos, on the Nile in central Egypt, small bone and ivory tablets recording in early hieroglyphic form the items delivered to a temple – mainly linen and oil.
These fragments have been carbon-dated to between 3300 and 3200 BC. Meanwhile the dating of the earliest cuneiform tablets from Sumeria has been pushed further back, also to around 3200 BC. So any claim to priority by either side is at present too speculative to carry conviction.
There will be varied opinions on this topic as there is so much that is unknown about writing’s history and origin. Keep in mind that the oldest writing discovered is not usually the original. it could be but we have no way of verifying that it was.
We do not like the use of the term proto as it means ” first in time” (Merriam-Webster Dict). Simply because we cannot be sure what was first and what came after when talking about original languages.
We are not even sure when the Philistine language originated because so much is unknown about the Philistines. Since they were supposed to come from Crete, their language may have a Minoan influence.
Or it came before the Minoan language as we do not know the origin of the Philistines completely nor do we know the complete origins of the Minoans. The same applies to the Palestinians, the Phoenicians, the Persians, and so on.
Instead of worrying about where writing originated and who was or wasn’t literate, we should be deciphering languages we do not know and translating more written material from the ones who do know.
Museums are full of inscriptions that can’t be published simply because there are far too few people who are fluent in ancient languages to translate and study what is being said.
theoarch 