Ancient Languages

In the ancient world many civilisations grew and flourished while others faltered and failed or were conquered and absorbed into other cultures. Whilst some grew into great civilisations others merely turned to dust, these failed groups were either forgotten and will never to be heard of again or remain only a footnote in the writings of ancient conquerors and scholars.

The actual spoken languages of these ancient people have been lost with the passing of time, the phonetics and pronunciations no longer apart of modern language causing many debates and speculations amongst modern day scholars as to the actual sounds of these old tongues.

Although these languages and their dialects are now mainly forgotten the civilisations they belonged to have survived the test of time through the form of written language. With help of hundreds of thousands of parchments, papyrus, inscriptions and carvings from tombs, temples, cities and monuments all around the world we can began begin to understand these languages that give testimony to the great achievements of these long lost people. Some of the writings have taken hundreds and even thousands of years to be translated. Even toady there are languages we will never know even existed but most ancient writings have been translated giving us a glimpse into every day life of our ancient brothers and sisters.

These old written languages are as diverse as the spoken ones and come in many forms. As languages differ in all parts of the world so does the form and execution of writing. From the first early forms of symbols being drawn humans have used this language to record events in their daily lives.

The evolution of written language started with symbols or pictures that began as representing what they actually were or seen to be these pictographs eventually evolved from actual visual representations to certain pictures representing an idea or concept known as ideographs. Finally in the process they began to represent the sounds of actual vocal language. Although we cannot be totally accurate to when the written forms actually came into being as a form of language it seem to be by popular thought around 4000 BC.

The Early pictographs quickly evolved and were stylised rotated and sometimes simplified into new forms that were impressed into clay tablets to form the script known as Cuneiform. All around the world different civilisations developed different forms of writing systems, some never evolved past the symbols and signs of the pictograph stage while others flourished and began to form the basis of alphabets and complex sound structures. The development in trade brought about cross-cultural relationships between civilisations. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia had developed a writing system that used pictograms, as had the Egyptians of the ancient world. The Semitic peoples of Mesopotamia and Akkadian adopted the Sumerians signs.

The dialects of Akkadian are believed to be one of if not the earliest known Semitic language. This Semitic language would be eventually be used by the Babylonians and the Assyrians. The Akkadian characters evolved and continued to represent syllables with defined vowels. In Egypt the pictograms later named hieroglyphs by the Greeks (sacred carving) evolved. Simpler versions of the writings appeared then more rapid forms of writing with eventually a Greek and Egyptian form appeared (hieratic, demotic and Coptic). Unlike Akkadian the early Egyptian syllabic system had only consonants and no definitive vowels. The hieroglyphs could be bilateral signs and even trilateral signs. Others were determinatives that at the end of the word gave a sense of the word as a lot of them could have the same sound or spelling and others were idiographs. When a pictograph stands for sound in a word it is called an acrophony. These were the first steps of the Egyptian alphabet. Consonantal systems were used with the syllabic and idiographic systems. Texts in a cuneiform script have been found that are also consonantal.