Feb 8 History of GD Chapter 2

While the alphabet inventors are unknown, they sought to believe the source to be the Canaanites, Hebrews, and Phoenicians. This early alphabet was referred to as the North Semitic writing. Looking throughout history, it is assumed that the development of the alphabet was an act of geography and the mixture of visual symbols throughout villages. As time went on, different cultures and villages created their own alphabet. For example, Ras Shamra did not contain any vowels, while Aramaic used dots and dashes added to characters to indicate vowels. It was not until the Greek civilization that the alphabet was turned into beauty. Throughout the Greek culture, vowels were made, and changes like boustrophedon came into play. They eventually adopted the reading style of moving left-to-right. This alphabet played a role in democracy. When the Romans eventually captured Greece literature and art, they developed their own alphabet using serifs. Their cities were decorated with beautiful characters and other styles of writing that were shown in monuments and statues.

One thing that I find interesting when looking throughout Rome is how the characters on statues and monuments are created with perfection. There are very subtle differences within a repeated character on these statues. The perfection that these artists use is amazing when you consider the tools they had in that time period. They took a lot of pride in their beauty and worked on always improving it throughout the city.

One question that I pose is how do we know that alphabets and writing did not evolve at an earlier date in history? They stated in the reading that only 30,000 scrolls survive. How do we know that the earliest forms of writing did not occur on a medium that did not survive throughout the years?