Messages throughAges

Breathing, drinking and eating is not all that is necessary to live; weneed to know and tell as well. We need to tell people around when weare in danger or pain. When we hear somebody shouting or crying weknow she/he needs help. We talk to people around; see or show; reador write; hear or speak; send or receive letters, almost everyday. It isall to tell or to know. Without them we would be extremely lonely. Today, we have paper and pen; books, encyclopedias, magazines,newspapers and public libraries; post offices; transistor radio,television sets, portable sound or video recorders; telephones, cell-phones; Personal computers, Internet ….. the list can be very long. Butwe did not have them always. Some of them came only in the lastdecade, some during the last century, some several hundred orthousand years ago. Who made these facilities for the first time, whenand how, can be an interesting story to tell and know. This story ismade up of many stories about inventions and discoveries interwoveninto one another.Let us know this story.

The Language

We all know how to cry or smile from the moment of our birth. Anewborn child cries whenever it needs feed or is uncomfortable. Assoon as it feels the reassuring pat of its mother when placed closed to

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Messages through Ages

” a manuscript submitted to CBT-48as an entry for book writing competition.1

her breast it stops crying. Indeed, besides gesturing like smiling andnodding, it is easiest to tell or to know through sounds. To tell andknow is to communicate; through sounds it is oral/audiocommunication. It developed with the discovery of language, a sharedcode of sounds. A language is something spoken or written. It is anorganized set of a number of sounds. These sounds convey a meaningfrom the mind of the speaker to the mind of the hearer, and thusconnect them to each other.It must have taken the primitive man thousands of years to inventwriting. (Some languages have never been written; say some of theAfrican languages.) Civilizations across the globe developed their ownlanguages. The more efficient was the language, faster did thecivilization develop. This was the reason why the Egyptian civilization,the Sumerian civilization (ancestors of Iraqis), the Indus valleycivilization and the Chinese civilization are recognized to be the mostdeveloped ancient civilizations. They saw the dawn of graphiccommunication, which includes communication through drawings andletters, first of all. We can claim so because some samples from thesecivilizations, dating as far back as 5500 years ago have survived. Oneof the earliest mode of graphic communication we know is: Hieroglyphs—picture writing used by Ancient Egyptians. Hieroglyphs were littlepictures representing words. They would denote the word “bird” by alittle picture of a bird but clearly without further development thissystem of writing could not represent many words. The way round thisproblem adopted by the ancient Egyptians was to use the spokensounds of words. For example, the English sentence “I hear a barkingdog” might have been represented by the following sequence of pictures:“an eye”, “an ear”, “bark of tree” + “head with crown”, “a dog”.

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Messages through Ages

” a manuscript submitted to CBT-48as an entry for book writing competition.2

The Egyptians had a base 10 system of hieroglyphs for numerals, that is, they hadseparate symbols for one unit, one ten,one hundred, one thousand, one tenthousand, one hundred thousand, and onemillion.Similarly, in Mexico and Guatemala, Mayan Glyphs (drawingsrepresenting words) were used and Sumerians; Babylonians; Assyrians;Hittite and Persians used Cuneiform—wedge shaped characters.In ancient China a character denoted an ideaor complete word. The character had ameaningbut gave no clue to itspronunciation. A sample of somecharacters from a writing datedaround VII-III centuries BC is illustrated here. The first characterrepresents a chicken, the second a sheep, third a bat, followed by thetortoise and the fish.The oldest script that was adopted to write in ancient India is perhapsIndus script; it refers to short strings of symbols associated with theHarappan civilization that is still undeciphered. A later widely usedscript is known as Brahmi.Sanskrit is anotherlanguage developed bythe Indus Valleycivilization (Ancient India).Its oldest known form is

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Messages through Ages