Reflection # 6

There are many reasons why the inventins of writing was so crucial to the foundation to the worl's greatest ancient civilizations. Pictures and symbols were used for sounds not just the meaning. When the Sumerians made their symbols they were not that essential to them However, scholars are now able read many of the thousands of the cuneiforms inscriptions that made it this far. The Sumerians also used this cuneiforms as help for memory for their economic data. They used it as a way of record keeping and inventory of their merchandise by drawing pictures of them. They used everything to denote sound. Their pictograms were used to denote their sounds. They used their pictograms a if they were sound symbols. Then there was Homonymy which was abstract symbols for sound. All of these inventions for writing was used for sound this helped them a lot. That way they would know how how much merchandise they had and how to pronounce certain words. Writing helps out memory for them. Some scientist argue taht writing makes the brain lazy. I disagree with this. It's used for inventory. They could use it to count how many products and agriculture they had. Imagine a world where there is no writing and you had to remember everything. In class when a teacher teaches we take notes there is no way we can remember everything that the teacher says. That is the same way the ancient civilizations felt. They needed something to help them remember everything and how much of everything they had. They also used the invention of writing as a calendar for the crops. That way they would know when the crops were suppose to arrive. They also used writing for religious reasons. They used it as a way to talk to the spiritual world. Whatever it is they felt they needed to say to their spiritual world they would write in the wall and wait for a response. It is said that writing is essential to civilization. It was used to keep the civilization under control. For example, they used ot for socio-political reasons. It's how they wrote their rules. Here we have the constitution to keep us in line. They needed something like that too. If it wasn't for the invention of writing the world woudn't be able to function. Imagine having no books. What would we read? Most learning comes from reading. We need every symbol and word that we can get. Words is what keeps the world to go around. We use words fro communication, rules, learning, internet, inventory, notes and so much more.