Picture Languages are difficult to team because the symbol for each word has to be memorized. Although many of the people of the Ancient World needed to use written languages. very few learned to write themselves. Instead, they paid scribes to write for them. The scribes probably began learning to write when quite young and would go on learning until they were sixteen or eighteen years old. They were often the sons and daughters of scribes who passed down their skill. If not. they went to school much as we do now. Writing seemed mysterious and strange to people who could not do it. and the scribes became important and respected.

A scribe needed a tool and a surface to write on. Various materials were used and this affected the appearance of the writing. In Sumeria the signs were pressed into soft clay with a stick tor stylus) which made wedge-shaped marks. The writing came to be known as cuneiform. meaning wedge-shaped.

In China the oldest writing that has been found was cut into metal or shell. and the pictographs were made of straight lines. Rut later the Chinese scribes used ink and brushes, and wrote on silk. The straight lines were turned into curves by the brush and the characters appear soft and flowing.

The Egyptians invented a set of pictographs in about 3000BC These were often used in carvings on their tombs and temples. and they are called hieroglyphics. which means 'holy carvings'. You can see from the picture that the shapes are stiff and like stone. The Egyptian scribes needed another writing material which could be carded around. They used squares of wood, but their most important ic invention was paper. They made it from a type of rush plant called papyrus that grew in the swamps around the Nile River. The stems of the plant were beaten into thin strips. They were laid edge toedge and a second layer of strips was pasted across them. Then the whole sheets were beaten flat and rubbed smooth with a stone before being joined together into a long roll of paper. The scribes wrote with a reed dipped in paint. They chewed the tip of the reed so that it worked like a tiny brush.

To make writing really useful for everyone. This was the alphabet. Seven alphabets are used in the world today. but they are all based on the same idea of a set of signs. each standing for a single sound. These can be used in any order to make any word. They are not quite perfect, and one sign sometimes has to stand for more than one sound (for instance. 'c' in 'court' and 'palace'). This depends on how the letters are placed. But if you see a word written for the first time you can usually tell how it sounds if you know the rules.

The Phoenicians were a group of people who lived on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Their land was poor and so. instead of farming, they became traders. They sailed all round the Mediterranean, and met people from every other Middle Eastern city. As a result. they learned many different languages and new ideas. Cuneiform and hieroglyphics had been used for more than a thousand years. andthough they were still used for important documents. the scribes no longer had time to use them for everything.

By 1000BC the Phoenicians had an alphabet of great practical value. which spread East and West. It was adopted by languages as various as Arabic. Hebrew. Persian and Hindi. In the West the Phoenicians taught their alphabet to the Greeks.
At this time the alphabet had twenty-two characters. all consonants. The Greeks added five vowels. These sounds you make with little or no use of your tongue or lips. The Latin alphabet is adapted from Greek and is the one used for western European languages, such as English. Cyrillic. the Russian alphabet. comes from Greek too. The alphabet made writing much easier and meant that many more people could learn to do it. Reading and writing at last became useful tools for all kinds of communication.